Young couples struggle to buy two-bedroom apartments, most without a view, at a price of approximately €200,000, which works out at € 2,000 per square metre. They both have to work a lifetime to repay a bank loan that puts a roof over their heads.

Meanwhile, a Jordanian businessman just ‘buys’ public sea front freehold property at 47 cents a square metre. He fixes things under Prime Minister Robert Abela’s smiles of good governance.

TVM recently started the 8 pm news with an amazing lead story about how we are using satellite data on the weather and the way it directly affects the daily intake of patients at Mater Dei Hospital. Yes, I myself heard it! And, yet, despite all that outer space data, the health ministry is still unable to supply the normal requirement of free medicines on the ground to those needing them.

The finance minister talks about watching our pennies and says it’s time to stop government overspending. Meanwhile, Abela takes 16 of his staff to New York for a warm speech on the world stage about everything cosmetic. It cost us €150,000.

How much are those repetitive “what we save today, we enjoy tomorrow” advertisements costing the public purse? It seems close to nothing when compared to the same energy minister spending some €400,000 to put her canvassers on the government payroll. She should pay for “make hay while you can” adverts instead.

Then there’s Qatargate. The Qatari regime allegedly bought itself a socialist MEP or two while hosting the World Cup. The TVM news ran the story quoting the distorted Super One line that European Parliament president Roberta Metsola is somehow herself to blame. Yet, Metsola is the one who not only took immediate steps to tackle the corruption but she was also the one to refuse the grease of the Qatari invite to the games.

Meanwhile, in true bumpkin style, our foreign minister fell for the freebie, paid his two-minute respects to his Qatari counterpart and then taxied to the stadium to sit down to enjoy the games. He must sorely miss the days when he was in charge of flyovers and million-euro direct orders.

Roberta Metsola is the one who not only took immediate steps to tackle the corruption but she was also the one to refuse the grease of the Qatari invite to the games- Eddie Aquilina

It’s interesting how popular Panama, Baku and Dubai became with Labour since they came to power in 2013. Originally, the first prime minister, his chief of staff and his five-star minister preferred Azeri company but that changed once they discovered the secret charms of the Middle East financial network.

Thank Jupiter that we live in a democracy where we vote for a party on a mandate. In 2022, the Labour Party’s general conference and then the electorate voted for an electoral manifesto of no fewer than 1,000 ground-breaking, sometimes recycled, pledges. Oddly enough it made no reference to any reform of the criminal code sections on abortion.

And, yet, in the midst of the Christmas festivities, we have an amendment which pro-choice activists celebrate as legalising abortion and, at the same time, the prime minister claiming that the same proposal as nothing to do with abortion.

Yes, we are the best represented citizens in the EU and no one in the world comes close. We have an MP for every 4,500 voters. The equivalent quota in the UK is 75,000 votes per MP. The Robert Abela cabinet of 27 members is nearly double the size of the UK executive.

Twelve of our parliamentarians did not manage to get elected. That’s 12 out of 79 sitting members! They got in with the help of the female gender quota. And if they can do it again in 2027, at the next election, they will qualify for a lifetime non-contributory additional pension. These are the same people who stand up in the house and talk about equality of opportunity.

There can be no doubt in anybody’s mind that at the moment we are a country that is full of… let’s say, contradictions.