The norms of parliamentary democracy promote trustworthy governance. When those norms are twisted or cast aside, when parliamentarians can no longer be trusted to represent the people’s interests but, rather, their own or their party’s, power is inevitably abused and ordinary people suffer injustice. Incompetence, corruption, waste of taxpayers’ money, lack of accountability and impunity are just some of the consequences of a dysfunctional parliamentary system.
Following a request for an investigation by Partit Demokratiku MP Godfrey Farrugia, the Commissioner for Standards in Public Life, George Hyzler, issued a scathing report on one practice that, as he put it so pointedly, emasculates Parliament: the granting of jobs to MPs in the public sector.
Dr Hyzler mentioned several reasons why this decades-old practice is “fundamentally wrong”.
Backbenchers both on the government and Opposition side have a sacred duty to scrutinise the work of the Executive. To carry out this function effectively, MPs must have the independence of mind to criticise and serve as a check on the government whenever they feel it is not acting in the people’s best interests. One sure way to destroy that independence is through the creation of a conflict of interest by giving government backbenchers and Opposition MPs paid assignments in the public sector.
The government’s reaction to this damning report, for which the plain-speaking Commissioner is to be commended, was the usual “other administrations had done the same thing in the past”.
Hardly a credible response for a political party that came to power with the promise of doing things differently. In fact, the drastic increase in the dose of more-of-the-same – cronyism, lack of respect for the rule of law, political patronage and poor governance – just goes to show how Parliament is simply a rubber stamp of the will of the party in power.
The government finds comfort in the advice given to the Commissioner that the practice of appointing MPs as consultants to the government does not run counter to the Constitution. The government is expected to do what is morally and ethically right and not limit itself to the letter of the law.
The government is in a fix.
How will it resolve this issue when, pre-2013, it conducted a highly effective campaign against the Nationalist administration’s increased remuneration for MPs? Dr Hyzler is right when he argues it is not acceptable for this administration to circumvent the issue of raising MPs’ salaries by giving them public sector assignments.
Buying the silence of backbenchers smothers the voice of democracy.
The government has so far not given any indication of how it intends to tackle this existential threat to our parliamentary democracy, except to say it will “study” the issue. Dr Hyzler, to his credit, has indicated he will not let it lie. And Dr Farrugia is absolutely right to call on the Prime Minister to take “immediate action”.
It is not, after all, as if this problem has only now been flagged up. The Hyzler findings come on the back of similar ones in the Greco and Venice Commission reports.
The government, the Opposition and the Speaker now have a duty towards the nation to eradicate the MPs’ manifest conflict of interest.
The Commissioner’s oversight of this process must continue to be intrusive to safeguard the principles and spirit of our Constitution.