Equality junior minister Rebecca Buttigieg has slammed PN education spokesperson Justin Schembri for a Facebook comment where he claimed that Malta was "full of filth, shabbiness and Indians".

Commenting under a Facebook post from ONE News showing Prime Minister Robert Abela meeting with staff from the cleansing department and Project Green, Schembri said "the government has turned Malta into a dump."

The Opposition MP said the country was "full of filth, shabbiness and Indians. Whoever thinks otherwise, should take a good look around them."

Responding to Schembri's post, Buttigieg accused the PN and his MP of resorting to populism.

"For the PN spokesperson for education, Indian people are considered a dump and rubbish," she said.

"This is the vision of the PN for foreign workers; it doesn't even consider them as people let alone how they are prepared to draw up policies that can protect them from exploitation."

Contacted on Monday evening, Schembri stood by his comments and said he would not consider retracting them. 

Asked if he considered his comments racist, the PN spokesperson replied "Definitely not," instead stressing his words reflected "what people are talking about at the moment."

He described his words as a "generic comment".

Pressed as to whether the comment could be considered "generic" while singling out Indian nationals, the PN spokesperson repeated, "definitely not," adding he had no further comments on the matter. 

This is not the first time Schembri has hit the headlines for his right-wing views.

In 2019, Schembri, then a PN councillor, praised Italian far-right leader Matteo Salvini’s hard line against immigration, writing that “maybe many brand Salvini ‘racist’, but he is probably a sensible person because he wants to stop this trafficking and at the same time not let his country be accomplices in this wave of organised crime”.

And last June, he questioned whether it was appropriate for children to be involved in the Dancing with Pride event in Valletta held in the run-up to EuroPride.

"I have always argued: let children be children," he said.