Last Updated on Friday, 13 December, 2024 at 6:21 pm by Andre Camilleri
Malta has so much to learn in terms of standards.
Or, perhaps we should rephrase it and say that the Labour government has so much to learn about how to behave in certain circumstances.
The way it dealt with the Clayton Bartolo-Amanda Muscat-Clint Camilleri issue is one perfect example that, for Labour, the bar is set very low. For Prime Minister Robert Abela to allow them to stay on in spite of sharing responsibility for giving the partner (now wife) of one of them a job for which she was not qualified says a lot about Abela’s (low) standards. It took a second scandal for him to seek Bartolo’s resignation.
The way Labour also reacted to the news that Edward Zammit Lewis’s nomination to be Malta’s representative on the General Court of the European Union was rejected is also another perfect example. The PL was surprised that Zammit Lewis did not make it; the rest of us who believe that competence should be accompanied by high ethical standards were not.
This takes us to another point which has been discussed at length for years but about which nothing has been done. We’re talking about the way the parliamentary standards committee is set up. We have a situation when four MPs, with the Speaker as chairman, are acting as judges about their peers’ behaviour. It is clear that, when one of them is brought before the committee for misbehaving, the respective MPs are not objective enough to deal with such situations.
Very often, the Standards Commissioner’s work goes down the drain. The Standard Commissioner is an investigator, and not a judge, and therefore his powers are limited. It is up to the Standards Committee to mete out the punishment required. Very often, too often, the decision taken is weak. It cannot even be described as a slap on the wrist.
In the past legislature, the Nationalist Party had presented a bill seeking to modify the composition of the Standards Committee. It suggested one MP from each side, and three other non-MPs chosen by a two-thirds majority of the House of Representatives, with one of them then serving as the committee chairman.
Now we are told that the PN is planning to submit an “improved proposal”, again in the form of a private member’s bill. This proposal is set to be presented next year. We reserve our judgment on the proposal until it is made.
What is sure is that the committee cannot function as it should because of the way it is composed. It is simply not correct to have MPs sitting on a committee whose task is to consider reports of misbehaviour by their colleagues. It is natural for them to defend their turf, and as such any decision they take is biased.
The committee should be truly independent with a majority of members who are not MPs, and who are therefore capable of deciding cases on their merit, and not with partiality.
