Life in Malta has turned into something of a black comedy. The government and its cronies are finding ever more creative ways to be corrupt and abusive, to freeload off the system, and at times it verges on the darkly funny. Take Mrs Luciano Busuttil, her skyscraper heels and her disabled-parking badge, for example. She actually told us on Facebook that she’s considered to be disabled because she can’t wear flat shoes, has got to wear “very high heels” every day, and because she’s wearing those high heels, she can’t walk the distance. She has had that disabled parking badge for four years, and the entire family uses it. When they go on family outings, the badge gets transferred to her husband the Labour MP’s car, and mummy, daddy, two children and any sundry passengers slot themselves comfortably into a disabled parking bay and saunter out of the car before the eyes of dumbfounded onlookers, some of whom take pictures and send them to me.
When I spoke to Luciano Busuttil about this, he couldn’t understand what I meant, or pretended not to, when I said to him that the normal, civilised practice in a situation like that is for the husband to drop off his disabled wife in her high heels, on the doorstep of their destination, and then drive off, park in a normal parking space, and walk back to meet her. His attitude was one of ‘Why on earth should I do that when I can use Dorothy’s blue badge and we can all park ourselves together comfortably in a disabled parking spot?’
Luciano and Dorothy Busuttil are very keen to make themselves middle class. They buy various material goods, go to restaurants, have a membership at the Marsa Sports Club where they go every weekend and swim in the pool in summer, and have their children taught how to play tennis. But they clearly don’t know that the middle-class in all societies throughout the world is defined not by its material goods but by its values and attitudes, one of which is consideration for others.
Acquiring a disabled-parking sticker in dubious circumstances and using it to allow the whole family to park comfortably on the doorstep of wherever it is they are going to, blocking the disabled-parking bay so that people who use wheelchairs and walking-aids are denied that space, is a white-trash value, a bogan attitude. It is anything but middle-class.
Dorothy and Luciano Busuttil would do far better by their children if instead of teaching them tennis they teach them consideration for others and why viewing a disabled-parking badge as a perk is wrong. Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive, but if you can have only one of those things, the child who learns consideration for others, good manners and the values of the civilised class will go further in life, outside Maltese society, than the child who thinks mummy and daddy are fantastic because they both freeload off the Taghna Lkoll system in a variety of ways. Daddy (or is it il-pa?) has a chauffeur and car paid for by the State, mummy has a disabled-parking badge despite not being disabled, and both have state-funded salaries which they acquired post-2013. Children raised by those two are never going to make it outside the Maltese Labour fishbowl unless they make a clean break for it.
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The mix of scandals big and small has been exhausting. It is difficult to believe that four years have gone by already and that another electoral year looms ahead. It is as though we haven’t yet got past the last election campaign because it’s been non-stop ever since. Has there been a moment of a peace and calm? No, there has not. Another day, another story. Another week, another scandal. Another month, another resignation. What a nightmare it has all been.
You go places and people say that the economy is doing well, that “they’re going to win again”. But that’s only on the surface, the stuff people feel they are allowed to say. Beneath the surface, the people who work in reputational-damage-sensitive fields are shocked, dismayed and mortified. The corruption has left them reeling. People in certain areas of business and financial services are uniquely placed to see a great deal of what is going on under cover of the darkness of corruption. “It’s all just talk,” supporters of the government have said so far. But they had to keep quiet when Transparency International published its latest Corruption Perception rankings a couple of days ago, and Malta had sunk by 10 places in just a year. Talk about reputational risk and reputational damage – it appears our government can’t even define them.