Politics

I.M. Jack – Monday’s Highlights

Factitious parties and reconstruction

The nationalist party has as yet not imploded but we still hear of calls for its reconstruction. Back in May 2008 we were penning a little post about the Labour party and the dangers of Clique & Factions and we are today still witnessing the problems that our parties face when factions within them (even one-man-factions) decide to stir the proverbial faeces. Democratically speaking we are now witnessing the obvious corollary of all that J’accuse was warning about last election.

Voting for our political parties in this day and age involves making specific choices about the persons you are voting into parliament. When the political parties, operating under the blessing of an electoral system doctored in favour of the Diceyan bipartite mantra, fail to put into place the necessary safeguards to ensure that all candidates are party kosher (because they prefer votes to value) then it is only a matter of time before the merde hits the ventilateur.

We spoke of this in Wasted a bit more than a year ago. Then it was the manner that party representatives purported to represent the great unwashed in the divorce affair that jarred. Nowadays we have the Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando witch hunt. We can never tire of pointing out how right this blog was in 2008 to emphasise the blatant anomaly in the PN manner of doing politics. Backing anyone and anything to the hilt simply because it helps bring votes in the massive showdown of GonziPN vs Sant only gets you into government. Once you are in government you will have to face the consequences of getting “anyone” elected on your side.

We were told at the time that we were irresponsible idiots who never grew up and who were setting ourselves up as objects of hate simply because we advocated a position that people  vote for quality and content and not simply on the lines of party backing and pretty faces (though some would beg to differ on the latter count).

Great brains like Richard Cachia Caruana were busy transforming Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando into a vote grabbing machine – converting the unpalatable cosmetic dentist into a sugar-free sweetener who had become a “victim” of “nasty Alfred Sant”. The gullible ones swallowed it all – hook, line and sinker – and rushed to the ballot box to vote JPO #1 – thus shafting this unpleasant, inconsistent and hopelessly garishly naive politician upon us. Us of the wasted votes. We who had screamed and shouted irresponsibly for the PN to get its act together and to build a foundation of candidates centred around the basic values that had got it through a decade of reform.

Well. You reap what you sow I guess and Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando has been one hell of a harvest for the PN to handle. (picture: J’accuse Personality of the Year Award as depicted by Bertu in Bertoons). The reconstruction must perforce start from the realisation that some very very wrong choices were made.

sevenorlandos

 

Tennis worth watching

Watching Andy Murray collapse into tears after being defied at the last hurdle at SW19 by the greatest player tennis has seen must have been the most moving moment this weekend. Second best at Wimbledon earns you £560 k not to mention the added branding income that Murray will see flowing his way given his immediate boost in the “world recognition” stakes. Tennis stars earn more money off the pitch once they become a recognisable icon and yesterday’s match meant just that for the Scot from Dunblane. Roger Federer’s net worth, to give an alien example, is around $200 million but we are talking here about a man who has broken all sorts of records in the gentlemen’s sport.

Back to Murray – all this talk about money meant nothing to him yesterday afternoon. His name was not being engraved in the Olympus of Wimbledon greats and he has still not won a grand slam. Sure, he will not be having any cash flow problems for a while but that is beside the point. His is a battle to achieve, one that is ultimately not measured in pounds, shillings and pence but in victories and performance. Values that are fast being lost in today’s world – and not necessarily the sporting one.

Democracy’s value added

Libya has gone off and done the democratic thing – electing its own government and leaders. This may not be the time for the Western world to shout success: the real proof of a democracy lies not in the electing but in the democratic governance. Saturday night saw fireworks in the Libyan sky as the end of voting was celebrated. A 60% turnout seems to be the agreed figure and a liberal alliance is expected to trump the Islamist party this time round. Government will in all probability be by coalition given that over 100 parties were formed to contest these first open elections. Democracy battles to outwit any possibility of civil unrest that would favour the more unstable sides of society. Meanwhile Assad is holding on to power in Syria – claiming that he has the backing of the people.

Seems like yesterday when a bespectacled Colonel speaking to the BBC  yelled “The people… they love me all“.

 That uncanny conviction that ego-maniacs seem to have that everybody loves them. It seems to be so bloody contagious.

 

The Auditor General’s Report and KSU

On the 3rd July 2012, the Auditor General presented the Report ‘University of Malta – Concession of parts of University House to the Kunsill Studenti Universitarji’ to the Speaker of the House. The report had been commissioned by the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee. You can access the report here. Here is a summary of the report as may be found on the website of the National Audit Office:

The Auditor General presented to Hon. Speaker the Report ‘University of Malta – Concession of parts of University House to the Kunsill Studenti Universitarji’ which was commissioned by the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee. The investigation addressed the concern from two separate, but inter-related, perspectives:

a) a legal/conceptual deliberation of the concession and the eventual use made of the conceded property; and

b) an analysis dealing with the leasing and related operations as run by the Kunsill Studenti Universitarji (KSU), coupled with the University of Malta’s (UoM) involvement in this regard.

The Report concludes that as KSU was never granted any title over the conceded property, it was not in a position to lease out parts of same. Shortcomings on the part of UoM, especially the failure to regularise the position over years, are also discussed.

The Investigation also revealed deficiencies in the manner with which KSU manages the leasing function, with processes deployed not being best practice and not being conducive to accountability and transparency. UoM’s reluctance to deploy a control and monitoring function to ensure its property, as conceded to KSU, is being made good use of, is also reported upon.

National Audit Office (NAO) recommends that steps be immediately taken to ensure the status quo does not prevail, and that a regularisation process be embarked upon. Apart from the definition of a legal framework, an administrative supporting framework and a set of documented procedures should be designed and deployed.

On a wider scale, the Report voices NAO’s concern that the Disposal of Government Land Act does not preclude autonomous (public) bodies from disposing of immovable assets without the monitoring of competent authorities.

I read the report and was immediately inspired to prepare a counter-report that would consist of my observations and comments on the Auditor General’s operation and finding. The main inspiration for my writing the report lies in the fact that I see this kind of review as a misuse of the institutional structures of our nation. This misuse is symptomatic of a deeper malaise that has come about with the abuse of the higher institutions of our country that is in turn based on a misconstruction of such principles as are intrinsic to a system functioning on the basis of the rule of law.

J’accuse has already documented why the recent happenings in Parliament proved to the public that the principles and traditions of our hybrid legal system were being flaunted and sacrificed for political expediency. The request for the investigation into the matters existent between KSU and the University by Owen Bonnici was misguided because it took the matters of an autonomous public body and made them the business of government. This request came from the same corner of the progressives who were scandalised when somebody went running to the police for the latter to censor publications on campus. They are also the same corner of progressives who periodically call upon “the powers” to censor or even shut up bloggers and opinion writers.

This is the kind of Malta that believes that just because you have “freedom of expression” then that means that when exercising that expression you must be automatically right. It is the Malta of rash proposals to restructure a judicial system and attempt to sound like some modern day Hammurabi when the very same “reformers” seem unable to decipher the basic tenets of constitutional politics.

But back to Owen’s request for investigation. The Auditor General had a job to do once the Public Accounts Committee requested him to do it. He gave them a report that we found to be scantily based on (a) the reply to an earlier parliamentary question and (b) the legal advice of a party that had a direct interest in the outcome of the investigation. In the end J’accuse finds that the whole investigation is ultra vires and goes beyond any of the powers that the National Audit Office has.

Incidentally this is not a defence of the practices of the KSU executive whenever they are procuring services for Students’ house. I am fully aware that they have to operate in a minefield of legal uncertainty and that they also have to watch their back from a University Council that might be hungry to reclaim its rights on Dar l-iStudent. Which is why the executive is duty bound to be more transparent in its economic operation and this transparency must always show a student union that is working for the greater good of the student body.

The purpose of the J’accuse report is not only to point out the anomalies of the Auditor General’s findings but also an attempt to highlight the dangers of confusing the roles of our institutions of review. I hope that that purpose will be achieved.

Click here to read J’accuse’s report in reply to the Auditor General’s Investigation.

The vote abroad

The Bill to amend the General Elections Act gets its first reading on Monday. Among the most “innovative” of measures is the introduction of a “rolling register” allowing persons who turn 18 on the eve of an election to vote. What is conspicuous in its absence is any improvement with regard to the status of voters based abroad. This, my friends, is 2012. Malta is a member of the European Union and a huge proportion of its nationals have opted to make use of the rights of workers to free movement. A large number of Maltese are now gainfully employed as fonctionnaires within the European institutions.

I will not even entertain for one second any objection that goes in the way of “you cannot vote for Malta’s government if you do not live there”. It is rubbish, xenophobic and populist in so many ways. Take French voters for example. In the last elections France had a new constituency for Northern Europe. French expats were entitled to vote in places such as London. The Number of registered voters in the UK were around 75,000 with approximately 23,000 turning out for an evenly split vote between Sarkozy and Hollande (about 11,900 vs 11,500 votes). The United Kingdom allows its citizens to register for voting abroad with a sort of 15-year expiry date (to register to vote as an overseas voter you have to have registered to vote in the previous 15 years).

Our neighbours Italy also famously have an expat constituency- remember Cassola? Now I am prepared to accept the argument (grudgingly) that Malta is not yet ready to dedicate a seat in parliament to its expat constituency but it is downright impractical to persist with the current situation of rent-a-planeload voting instead of having the rational solution of voting in embassies.

What counts for Mater Dei and old people’s homes with more than 30 residents should surely count for BeNeLux, London and maybe Paris. No?

Ordinary Salaries & Extraordinary People

Labour’s latest rant about Richard Cachia Caruana and his salarial status within the government structures has provided the world with proof, if any was needed, that the PL still sits uncomfortably with its usurpation of parliamentary power for a very private lynching affair. Following a statement by the Labour communications office we read the following comment by the unnecessarily anonymous “Labour Party Spokesman” (best not be able to identify who is behind the latest excuse for politicking):

“Can the Prime Minister explain which civil servant takes a terminal benefit and transitional facility,” a Labour party spokesperson told MaltaToday. “This is proof that Cachia Caruana was not just any civil servant but is the equivalent of a minister. Labour is right when saying Cachia Caruana is accountable to the scrutiny of parliament, because he is not a civil servant like the others.”

The telling bit is the last sentence. Labour (or in any case its anonymous spokesperson) is painfully trying to square the circle of “accountability of civil servants”. The motion presented in parliament by Luciano Busuttil et al flew in the face of all parliamentary convention and practice. Labour would love to seem to be partisans of the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty and have gone to great lengths to sing to the tune of “strengthening democracy’s greatest institution”. When push comes to shove though, political expediency easily trumps parliamentary convention.

On the law

Our constitutional system is a hybrid one. We do not have the “historic” unwritten constitution in Diceyan terms and questions of supremacy are (currently) controversially divided between the written constitution and parliament. What we definitely have inherited from UK jurisprudence is the system of parliamentary conventions. In Dicey’s words:

“(A) set of rules (that) consists of conventions, understandings, habits or practices which, though they may regulate the conduct of… officials, are not in reality laws at all since they are not enforced by the courts”. (The Law of the Constitution)

Among those conventions is that of “ministerial responsibility” that can be both “individual” or “collective”. The modern form of ministerial responsibility is based on two ports – (1) a minister’s political or administrative competence, (2) a minister’s personal morality. The original application of the competence rule held ministers answerable to Parliament for every action undertaken by their department’s civil servants. Ministers took credit for civil servants’ achievements and were expected to resign for any grave errors committed by their staff. The corollary to this is that individual civil servants would not face parliamentary scrutiny or public criticism for their own failures.

In time the expanding nature of government administration led to an adaptation of this conventional rule. The effect of this adaptation was not however that of bringing civil servants within the ambit of parliamentary scrutiny but rather the additional requirement of proof: that a Minister was aware of the or personally involved in a particular decision before being forced to resign.

On the person

In the Cachia Caruana case (can we call it parliamentary impeachment or would that risk opening another can of legal worms?) we clearly have a bypass of the convention of Ministerial responsibility. Parliament dragged a civil servant (ordinary or extraordinary is irrelevant) before it and proceeded to vote. Even if we set aside the fact that the actual accusation was never proved (the Wikileaks accusation did not, if you pardon the pun, hold water) and that the vote was carried merely in Sicilian vendetta style we are still left with an even more important consideration. The Labour party motion blatantly ignored all forms of parliamentary convention for the sake of political expediency.

We now have the baying hounds drawing attention to Richard Cachia Caruana’s remuneration. Forget the return of Maltese relativism for a moment. The issue is much more serious constitutionally speaking. The current trend among the Labour party is to highlight their dedication to the real constitution – the real parliament they say, not the multi-million building in Valletta. They have shot tirade upon tirade at the party in government for supposedly diminishing the role of parliament. When it came to turning the parliament into a vehicle of political expedience the very same Labour party had no qualms but to ride roughshod over any semblance of parliamentary convention. It did not even bother to pretend.

The afterthought has led to a sort of backtracking. It is now crucial for Labour to try to prove that RCC was a kind of Minister – not a civil servant. It is crucial because that way they think that they would save their face. What they are actually doing is providing further proof that their knee-jerk activity acting as a second-fiddle to Franco and JPO.

Then again what do you expect from a party that seems to be determined to introduce the very progressive system of government by facebook?

 

The Evils of a Party System

Albert Venn Dicey Vinerian Professor of English Law at the University of Oxford in the 1880s authored one of the classics on the British constitutional system entitled “Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution”. Dicey’s groundwork on English constitutional history and principles may be described as legendary. In this post I would like to summarise/list part of an unpublished lecture by Dicey that was prepared in July 1898 – in the hope of provoking a discussion on the merits and demerits of the UK party system as inherited by us in Malta.

The lecture was called “Memorandum on Party Government” and he deals with the pros and cons of the party political system as developed within the British constitutional structure.

In section C of this lecture he outlines the “Inherent Demerits of Party System” as follows:

1. It makes impossible consideration of measures on merits.

2. An Opposition which cannot carry out its own policy maims & renders abortive the policy of the Government.

3. The Party system involves a waste of capacity.

4. The Party system leads to an exaggeration of the points on which the whole of one party, e.g. the Tories, are supposed to agree & to be opposed to the whole of their opponents, e.g. the Whigs.

“(…) it is still true that the party system intensifies the tendency of politicians & their followers to look upon their own side as the party of the good, & upon the opposite side as the faction of bad men, whence, among other evils, results the sort of political hypocrisy which leads men of sense & merit to overlook or palliate the decline in moral principle of a party which they have at one time held, perhaps rightly, to represent public virtue.

The patent evils, in short, of the Party system, even at its best, are that it presents men from considering measure on their own merits, that it produces the kind of vicious compromise by which an opposition maims a policy which it cannot resist, that it involves a waste of political capacity, that it exaggerates the differences which divide one party from another & promotes the idea which is often false, & at best only partially true, that one party in the State has a monopoly of public virtue.”

In the next section (D) Dicey expounds “The Conditions Necessary for the Beneficial Action of the Party System” and he divides them into four broad conditions, namely:

1. All parties in the State must be loyal to the Constitution.

2. The distinction between the two parties in the State must depend upon real differences of principle.

3. Parties must not be kept together mainly by personal interest.

4. There must if possible exist only two important parties.

5. The nation must take a real interest in Politics.

And what happens when these conditions fail? Well here is Dicey’s answer:

“(…) all these evils may be summed up under one head whenever they exist they mean that parties are degenerating into factions, that is to say that they have become or are becoming, bodies of men not bound together by community of principles but either by self interest or by the feelings of partisanship“.

Finally Dicey also suggests two obvious ways of mitigating the negative effects of the party system:

1. The judicial & administrative bodies of the country should be kept as far as possible from the sphere of the Party.

2. Large questions of general policy should whenever possible be so determined that they may be placed outside the realm of the party.