The Social Dialogue, Consumer Affairs and Civil Liberties Ministry demonstrates excellent skills in fairy-tale writing as it takes me to task for exposing the “Rights” Minister’s incompetence in addressing consumer and competition matters.
In so doing it also unsuccessfully attempts to cover its tracks of inefficiency by endeavouring to divert public attention from the main issue. However, no propaganda exercise can conceal the fact that the Minister for Citizens’ Rights was willing to take a legal shortcut at the expense of those rights after sleeping on consumer issues for no less than two years. Helena Dalli’s dangerous proposal was, in fact, criticised not only by the Opposition but also by Professor Kevin Aquilina, the Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Malta, and former Minister and now independent opinion-writer Michael Falzon, amongst others.
Dalli’s dangerous shortcut
It is important to remind the Minister that the real issue concerns providing a legislative framework that allows the proper functioning of the national Competition Office and consequently having an effective regulatory institution defending fair competition and consumer rights. It is likewise important to highlight the role that this office has in the wider EU jigsaw when addressing EU internal market issues.
Parts of our current framework have been declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court. This is the result of an issue that cropped up in late 2013 and which remains unaddressed until this day unaddressed. Up until now the ‘rights’ Minister has come up with just one proposal to resolve this. The ‘rights’ Minister proposed a constitutional amendment, now known to everyone, that would diminish the consumer’s broader fundamental rights as a citizen.
I had asked the Minister whether there were other options. Indeed, the ‘rights’ Minister replied in the affirmative.
One would have expected the government to have presented all the options simultaneously. One therefore naturally asks: why did the ‘rights’ Minister not also propose the other options contemporaneously? Why did the ‘rights’ Minister not come up with readily available legislative amendments?
The ‘rights’ Minister argued that other options would require the amendment of various laws and, furthermore, that such a move would mean that “the alternative approach is time-consuming and would thus take a substantial amount of time to implement.”
The reality is that the ‘alternative approach’ was not prepared and an easy way out was proposed.
Playing the blame game
The ‘rights’ Minister attempts to shift the buck elsewhere. She claims to have sought the advice of the Office of the Attorney-General. However, where has the Minister been these last three years and where do her responsibilities lie? She was duty-bound to demand an explanation of the repercussions that the proposed Constitutional amendment she eventually championed, brought about. She was duty-bound to direct her advisors in competition matters to propose suitable alternative routes and come up with a comprehensive proposal. She was duty-bound to refer to the various government-appointed entities to provide counsel – namely the Board of Governors of the Malta Competition and Consumer Affairs Authority, the Consumer Affairs Council and the Competition Office itself.
The ‘rights’ Minister wanted to take a legal short cut at the expense of the citizen to camouflage her incompetence and inertia in the area. And she expected the PN parliamentary group to become an accomplice to this. To the contrary, the Opposition blocked this move.
In its reply, the Ministry states that now it “will be proceeding with the necessary amendments.” And about time too! When will it be doing this? Are there any timeframes? By now, these amendments should have already been published, a public consultation should have been carried out and they should have been presented before Parliament. These options should have been readily available since at least 3 May 2016 – the day the Constitutional Court confirmed that the procedures of the Competition Office were contrary to the Constitution. The Ministry is already nine months late and in the meantime consumers, bona fide companies and the self-employed are left exposed to potential abuse in the market. The ‘rights’ Ministry, thanks to its incompetence, has left a toothless national competition authority incapable of addressing issues of abuse in the market.
I reiterate that this issue did not begin yesterday but that signs first emerged late in 2013. The first decision by the Constitutional Court was in April 2015, confirmed in May 2016. Up till the end of August 2016 the Ministry’s officials were continuously repeating that there were no problems and several options were being considered. The rest is history.
Napping then and now
Minister Dalli instructed her Communications Officer, writing in last week’s The Malta Independent on Sunday, to remind one and all that the fault is in the law adopted by the previous Nationalist administration in 2011. She conveniently forgot to also inform him that, at the time, she was already a serving Member of Parliament, albeit in Opposition. The law in question was then passed with a unanimous vote. So it seems that the Minister was napping then as she has been for the last three years. Now, one can be forgiven for some oversight but to obstinately persevere in error is altogether another matter.
It is unfortunate that Malta’s name in this area has been tarnished precisely during the year Malta holds the EU Presidency because of incompetence and carelessness. Thanks to the government, most probably Malta holds the unique record for being the only member state not to have had a functioning national competition authority during its presidency.