With the divorce Bill becoming law within two weeks, the courts still lacked the resources to handle mediation cases, Labour leader Joseph Muscat said yesterday.
The Bill, which becomes law in October, requires lawyers to offer mediation to their clients as part of divorce proceedings. But according to Dr Muscat, the courts are not yet equipped to handle such cases.
The Justice and Home Affairs Ministry said in reply that the Family Court already provided mediation services to couples undergoing separation procedures.
It said Family Court mediators were already aware of the legal provisions and would be providing the mediation services proposed in the new law.
The ministry said the government last week published three legal notices making the necessary changes to administrative court procedures, adding that the Civil Courts Department was adjusting its IT systems and work practices in view of the divorce Bill coming into force.
Speaking during a party activity in Qormi, Dr Muscat referred to what the European Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, László Andor (a socialist) said that retirement ages across the EU had to be raised to ensure the sustainability of pensions and the stability of the labour market. He said, this time, the party could say what its solution was: “We have an enormous resource for pensions. In other countries everyone works, so there is no one else to pay national insurance,” Dr Muscat said, adding that the majority of Maltese did not. He was referring to Labour force statistics, which show that a large slice of women in Malta do not work.
He said the country needed to make life easier for working women with job flexibility and more accessible and affordable child care. He argued that many people were discouraged from joining the labour marked when faced with the prospect of pouring all the extra earnings from a second parent joining the workforce into child care services. On top of this problem, he complained that many people were only finding jobs paying €900 a month, nowhere near enough to cope with the cost of living.
“Often, families are worrying, maybe for the first time in generations since the war, that their children might be worse off than them,” Dr Muscat said.
He said that, contrary to what the government claimed, it was not state intervention that helped the economy remain afloat but entrepreneurs who chose to keep their workers on during tough times.
“Let no Prime Minister or dilettante Finance Minister tell you what the economy really is. Back when Labour was in power, with all the global problems, oil crisis after other geo-political problems, the government had surplus budgeting and had left a national debt equivalent to 12 per cent of the gross domestic product... Now we have a deficit level which, as our friend, (MEP) Edward Scicluna told us, if you take government companies into account, almost reaches 90 per cent of the GDP,” Dr Muscat said.
The Nationalist Party reacted with tough criticism to Dr Muscat’s comments saying he was “shamelessly painting a very dark picture of Malta, its people and our economy”.
It harped on his comment that most Maltese people did not work, deeming it an insult to thousands of Maltese who worked hard to help secure a better future for their children.
The PN said that, despite the worst financial meltdown in decades and a ravaging economic storm, Malta had one of the lowest unemployment rates in the EU and the fastest growing economy in the eurozone.