Needed: A professional Parliament

The agreement between the political parties to allow members of Parliament who are also public service employees has caused a bit of a stir. On the one hand, there are those who, like a certain Joseph Bonnici (July 14) have criticised MPs on the grounds that they are already overpaid. This brought about the reaction of party whips Mario Galea and Joe Mizzi (July 21) who argued that since in Malta MPs are considered as part-timers and nearly all members of Parliament have another full-time job either in the private sector or by practising their profession, it is only fair that MPs employed in the public sector will be allowed to retain their full-time job like their colleagues.

In fact this is what has caused the issue to come to the fore. My good friend and Labour MP Joseph Abela appealed against this discrimination earlier on in this legislature by writing to the Ombudsman claiming that this aspect of the civil service regulation was hindering him from practising his paramedical profession after he had even been denied the opportunity to practise for no remuneration. In reality, this issue has been in existence for quite a long time. I wrote about the need to rectify the situation in the aftermath of the October 1996 elections when a number of MPs from both sides of the House had had to leave their job in the public sector.

However, I sincerely believe that now that a solution to the problem of discrimination has been found it is outdated because it has been surpassed by events.

Let me make myself clear. It is only a notion that Malta's Parliament is a part-time job. Not only does the House meet on practically all days in the evening now but it also regularly meets in the morning. Apart from this, anyone who knows what parliamentary work involves is aware of the fact that MPs have to carry out a huge amount of research and preparation if they want to carry out their parliamentary duties seriously and meticulously and they also need to do a great deal of constituency work if they want to be re-elected. What's more, they have to do all this practically single-handed. MPs, and I can write this without accusations of conflict of interest because I am not one, are thus in a catch 22 situation for which they are being, by any reasoning, underpaid.

The real challenge is, therefore, in my view to treat Malta's MPs as full-timers as long as they are ready to forgo retaining their other job or practising their profession. It is as simple as that. Choices have to be made and MPs have, like the rest of us, to choose what they want to be. That way we will also do away with the devaluation of the professions which has seen doctors standing for Parliament make their medical visits practically for free and lawyers, notaries and architects practically waiving their fees in order to get votes.

In this day and age, politics, especially parliamentary politics, is a, or should be, a profession in its own right. Thus, people should be educated to vote for the best candidate not for the candidate who gives them a free service. Being an agony aunt or a charitable institution should no longer be the route to Parliament as it has been in a large number of cases so far.

Of course, at the end of the day, it rests with our MPs to decide if they want to make this quantum leap. This is not, however, just a matter of money. Now that we are EU members and can compare our House of Representatives to the European Parliament we can see what needs to be done, especially since our Parliament will need more MPs who can scrutinise the ever mushrooming amount of legislation and directives coming out of Brussels. We cannot, however, keep on muddling through expecting that our "part-time" MPs can keep up-to-date with no back-up whatsoever.

So we should stop beating about the bush and stop tinkering at the edges, which is what the agreement on MPs coming from the civil service really is, and go for what is really needed. A truly professional, full-time Maltese Parliament.