Robert Abela keeps popping up online to tell me that his Labour government is the future. The polls suggest that’s true. But what kind of future?
The long-term future is unforeseeable. In the short term, it’s an unfolding of what has been planted today and yesterday. Alas, what Abela has sheltered and planted in the last two years is bad news for anyone who wants a country that’s based on a social market, democratic rule and free persuasion.
Abela has adopted Joseph Muscat’s pale blue necktie but dropped Muscat’s talk about being “business friendly”. The new buzzword is “pro-market”.
If “pro-market” means anything it means opening up public contracts to a transparent, competitive tendering process. Instead, we have a record number of direct orders by ministers – a record both in the number of orders and in the amounts.
Pro-market means hiring personnel at market rates, not above-market rates. Abela’s Cabinet is full of ministers – beginning with his deputy, Chris Fearne – who have hired aides and cronies in a non-selective process at sky-high salaries that the private sector wouldn’t pay.
Cronies have been hired for full-time jobs when there’s evidence they hold down jobs elsewhere. Some have been hired for non-existent jobs. Their immediate superior can’t describe what they do; their nominal colleagues have never seen them around. Some cronies were hired at a generous salary and promptly given leave to be seconded elsewhere.
Abela boasts of the lowest levels of unemployment ever. That has coincided with a significant rise in public-sector employment. Employers and industry have protested that the government is distorting the labour market and cramping the chances of market-driven economic expansion.
None of that is pro-market. It’s textbook anti-market. It’s cronyism. There’s no level playing field; it slants sharply towards the ministers’ friends. Instead of letting regulated competition decide the winners, the ministers pick.
The economic record from around the world is clear. It’s economic mismanagement and it will end badly. Whether it’s sooner or later depends on the industry.
Cronyism is killing the film industry – leading insiders say – as we speak. Our financial services have been greylisted. The chair of the financial services authority says that he, himself, wouldn’t want to invest in a greylisted country.
Getting off the grey list entails convincing important governments, like the US, that Malta is serious about investigating money launderers. Since Malta was greylisted, however, the US has expressed further displeasure.
The US took the extraordinary step of declaring what the Maltese authorities continue to be silent about: that Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri were involved in “significant corruption”. And no, the US was not referring to the hospitals deal, where the current concessionaire, Steward Health Care, agrees with the Auditor General that the original deal, worth €4 billion, was corrupt.
The US was referring to the power station deal with the Electrogas consortium. What has Labour done? Its MPs on the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) shielded one of the Electrogas investors from serious questioning.
He either doesn’t know what good governance is. Or he was lying blatantly to our faces- Ranier Fsadni
Six years after Mizzi’s Panama company was discovered, the police have yet to take action against him. Abela hasn’t even kicked Mizzi out of the Labour Party. Mizzi was kicked only out of the parliamentary group – an action rendered almost meaningless given that, once more, Labour MPs on the PAC continued to shield Mizzi from uncomfortable questions. They still treat him as one of their own.
You don’t have to believe that Malta is a Mafia state to believe that Abela has presided over a government that made it more difficult to investigate reasonable suspicions of criminality.
We have yet to see action against the Panama gang and their accountant enablers. Abela’s first term ended with the new Attorney General striking a plea bargain with a bank robber – a deal that has reasonable people wondering if the aim was to prevent the criminal from giving evidence, instead of getting him to provide it.
All this has happened on Abela’s watch. It’s not just a legacy inherited from the disgraced Muscat. It’s the present. It’s a portent of the political as much as the economic future. Abela’s government has continued to interpret democracy to mean simply majority rule. It isn’t, of course. Democratic rule is also transparency, accountability and dispersal of power.
Abela has presided over a government that has repeatedly challenged and refused to comply with freedom of information requests. Like Muscat’s government, it has reinterpreted rights intended to protect individuals against the state (say, privacy and freedom of speech) into rights that the state can deploy to protect itself from scrutiny and harass critics. State broadcasting is, effectively, Labour propaganda.
Abela boasts of undertaking institutional reforms to grant more autonomy. The actual pattern has been one of foot-dragging and then a half-baked reform with no real consultation, which leaves the backdoor open to future abuses.
Some of Abela’s apologists say that he’s been fettered by Muscat’s legacy. It’s the subliminal message spread by Abela himself to soothe disturbed social democrats: give him a term with his own strong majority and he will do what needs to be done, clean up the government and undertake necessary “progressive” reforms.
Why should we believe that? He has denied that there has been a single instance of bad governance in his two years – despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary.
He either doesn’t know what good governance is – in which case, how can he deliver it? Or he was lying blatantly lying to our faces. It wasn’t a forced lie, such as politicians are sometimes pressed to make. He could have massaged the truth in less outrageous ways.
Instead, he chose to lie blatantly. Just as he has blatantly presided over a crony government, blatantly protected corrupt ministers and ex-ministers and scorned some of the pillars of liberal democracy.
If, or when, he wins on March 26, he will have no reason to change the formula. His current modus operandi will be our future.