Chris Bonett went on holiday to Sicily with his official car, fully-funded by the taxpayer. Many wouldn’t begrudge Bonett using his car for his personal needs in Malta. Most might even close an eye to Bonett using it for his own entertainment - going out to eat, attending concerts - in Malta. The vast majority, however, draw the line at Bonett using his taxpayer-funded vehicle for his family holiday abroad.
Many can’t even afford a holiday abroad. Those who can, work hard to save enough for it. Watching the Minister abuse his privileges and then refuse to answer basic questions about his abuse, leaves the public feel wronged. But when the Standards Commissioner ruled “it is evident that Hon Bonett broke no specific rule when he used his official car to go to Sicily”, he elicited the burning rage of injustice.
The commissioner even found excuses for Bonett: “It is a known fact that there were other officials who occasionally used their (official) vehicle to go abroad….. If there should be any limitations in this sense, this should be addressed through appropriate regulations and not left to the discretion of the person involved”.
The Commissioner unwittingly condemned Bonett. He declared the man cannot be trusted, that Bonett’s discretion is faulty. The Commissioner conceded that, left to his own judgment, Bonett gets it wrong - as he has. In order to exculpate himself and justify his pathetic decision, the Commissioner recommended more regulations, more rules, more laws to guard against Ministers’ and Parliamentary Secretaries’ indiscretions. Azzopardi doesn’t need more rules. He’s got the code of ethics which he conveniently ignores.
Benjamin D’Israeli wrote “When men are pure, laws are useless. When men are corrupt, laws are broken”.
Laws set minimal standards of behaviour. Ethics set higher norms of behaviour. Ethical people go beyond the laws. No law will prevent unethical behaviour. The law does not and cannot prohibit many acts considered unethical. It doesn’t prohibit betraying the confidence of constituents, withholding the whole truth. That is unethical - it breaches the code. That’s what Bonett did. And it should have been an easy decision for Commissioner Azzopardi. But that would involve doing what’s right. That requires an ethical person to make that judgment.
Commissioner Azzopardi refuses to distinguish between the law and ethics. He hasn’t yet twigged he’s no longer in court. His role is no longer to decide whether the accused committed a crime. It’s to determine whether he’s adhered to the Ministerial code of ethics.
Robert Abela’s pick for Standards Commissioner conveniently ignores his duty to maintain standards in order to please Abela. He doesn’t behave like a Standards Commissioner who seeks to uphold the highest of ethical standards but like a dodgy defence lawyer for Abela’s cabinet members.
And like dodgy defence lawyers, he desperately identifies the appropriate loopholes in the law to pervert the spirit of the law and exonerate the most crooked of crooks. Azzopardi goes further - he even sets aside the Code of Ethics, which he should be enforcing.
Ethical people don’t need rules and laws to guide their actions. They look beyond their own self-interest. They will often do less than what the law permits and much more than is required. Unethical people, on the other hand, will break whatever rules are in place, especially when they know there’ll be no repercussions. The current Standards Commissioner and the Speaker have shown they’ll stop at nothing to exonerate even those guilty of the most flagrant of breaches.
When George Hyzler was Commissioner, several of Labour’s cabinet members were found guilty of breaching the code - Carmelo Abela, Silvio Schembri, Rosianne Cutajar, Justyne Caruana, Joseph Muscat. But most were exonerated by Speaker Anglu Farrugia’s devious decisions - by failing to ratify reports, requesting further investigation, abstaining, insisting he should decide the sanction, only to write a polite letter as he did to Rosianne Cutajar. Now we’ve slid deeper down into the cesspit. The current Commissioner simply decides not to investigate at all, even when faced with shocking details of gross breaches of fundamental ethical standards. Clint Camilleri and Chris Bonett are the two latest additions to the list of Azzopardi’s reprieved.
It’s difficult for Commissioner Azzopardi to maintain ethical standards when his own behaviour fell so miserably short. Ethical persons evaluate the interests of all stakeholders affected by their decisions before their own. When it was manifestly clear that Azzopardi didn’t enjoy cross-party support to become Standards Commissioner, the ethical decision would have been to withdraw. He didn’t. And Robert Abela bulldozed Azzopardi’s appointment through parliament. Azzopardi repays Abela the favour with his defilement of ethics and the trampling of virtue.
The philosopher Edmund Burke wrote “It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do, but what humanity, reason and justice tell me I ought to do”. The fact that Azzopardi concluded Bonett broke no rules doesn’t make his abuse right. Reason should have told him what he ought to have done.
Bonett is no Burke. Burke was an MP too, but he was a proponent of virtue. When he spoke of an MP’s duty towards constituents, Burke stated “It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions to theirs and above all, ever and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own”. Burke would not be swayed on matters of ethics. He was a vociferous opponent of slavery despite the fact that his Bristol constituents were lucratively involved in the slave trade. Slavery was perfectly legal then, but Burke fought it, even proposing a bill to ban slaveholders from serving in the House of Commons.
When Warren Hastings, the Governor-General of Bengal, inflicted “needless suffering” on the Bengalis, Burke presented an impeachment motion against Hastings. He accused Hastings of “never dining without creating a famine” and resembling “a ravenous vulture devouring the carcasses of the dead”. The House of Commons impeached Hastings. The House of Lords acquitted him.
Chris Bonett too has been acquitted - through Azzopardi’s defilement of the Ethics code.