Aaron Farrugia wasn’t sacked because of incompetence, Robert Abela tells us.
Thanks for nothing, prime minister. We had figured by ourselves that a cabinet that retains Julia “Mechanisms” Farrugia Portelli, with a portfolio that’s barely enough for a parliamentary secretary, isn’t too worried about executive competence or productivity.
Farrugia put on a brave face about becoming a backbencher. In a way, he should feel special. The Labour backbencher club is now a far more select club than those with executive portfolios. Almost two-thirds of Labour MPs are ministers.
They now are bound by collective responsibility for whatever government does. That can mean collective pride – but also collective guilt. All the signs say that the government isn’t going to be diverted from the route that has brought us to the point where the security of our environment and economy are in question.
Abela says that it’s all about renewing the government. It isn’t. Almost every minister remains in place. The exaggerated size of the executive has inflated further. The prime minister has made a show of hailing his disgraced predecessor, Joseph Muscat, as his friend.
That’s not renewal. It’s doubling down on your political business model. Let anyone try backing out of that now.
The reshuffle had everything to do with renewing Labour’s grip on power. It has little to do with addressing the multiple fronts of governance where Labour is failing. From education to healthcare, environment to security, transport policy to economic vision and transformation, the government is failing to prepare adequately for the looming future.
What the reshuffle did was enrol more MPs, giving them more state resources, to oil Labour’s electoral machine and take care of patronage. The new executive will cost over €21 million in salaries alone. But the real cost will be borne by the frenzy of patronage that results. Will ambitious politicians hold back if their district rivals outbid them when courting voters for their favour?
No, they will play a game whose rules they have accepted. They will seek to maintain Labour’s monopoly on power by using public funds as though they’re Monopoly money. Cottonera becomes Old Kent Road and Paola is Regent Street. The only difference is nobody ever goes directly to jail or fails to collect £200.
After this reshuffle, all the analysis about who’s up and who’s down misses the main point. The real story is that it hardly matters who’s minister and who’s leader any more. After all, look at who’s been picked.
Just as no minister can refuse to participate in the auctions of patronage, no Labour leader, at this stage, can change tack. Whether Abela has strengthened his grip or displayed weakness, no leader can afford to shrink the size of the executive without risking a revolt from MPs and from that segment of the Labour base that is demanding, as they say, better customer care.
Saturday’s reshuffle is a sure sign that no truly difficult decision will be taken – unless by force majeure and at the last possible moment- Ranier Fsadni
The partisan business model therefore remains in place. On present performance, the public debt will continue to rise. Irresponsible public sector employment will go on distorting the labour market and make the private sector pay the price. Substantive policy will continue to be replaced by empty rhetoric about fighting inflation, when it’s largely caused by forces we can’t control. And we’ll have silence about problems whose causes we can address.
The government doesn’t need to be told, again, that its practice of trading jobs for votes is behind the need to import so much foreign labour. Nor does it need telling that this is leading to pressure on schools, health services and law and order.
We must presume that the transport and environment ministers have an adviser spelling out the obvious: that electric cars won’t “save” the environment unless the number of cars on the road is drastically reduced. Otherwise, we’d need to cut down all the remaining trees just to accommodate the much-larger charging stations that electric cars currently need.
And we know that ministers have been told they need to cut down on expenditure and waste. Given our public debt and the uncertain future of our financial services, not bringing expenditure under control is reckless.
But Saturday’s reshuffle is a sure sign that no truly difficult decision will be taken – unless by force majeure and at the last possible moment.
The government will continue to talk about attracting five-star tourists to a country with three-star roads and standards of cleanliness. It will wax poetic about green new deals while ruining what’s left of the environment.
It will continue to spend money following a political business model devised for a rentier’s boom when our future income from rents (like taxing foreign companies or selling passports) is uncertain.
And we’ve said nothing about how we might be affected if Europe’s economy – beginning with Germany’s – continues to struggle. Abela boasts about our numbers comparing well with much of Europe. But there’s a flip side to that. Europe is our major market. If Europeans struggle too hard, they will buy less from us.
Against this background, renewal of government should mean facing up to the challenges, not doubling down on political practices that caused many of our current problems. But, faced with the choice of renewing government or its clientelistic practices, Labour chose the latter.
Evidently, government renewal is too high a price to pay.