Justice is not just for political parties

There is a surreal dimension to the Nationalist Party’s ongoing insistence for ‘financial compensation’ over an imbalance of properties rented or requisitioned by the Labour governments in years gone by.

Opposition MP Chris Said will be proposing an amendment to the Party Financing Bill to address what he terms as ‘discrimination by the State’. According to Dr Said, the PN is ‘at a serious disadvantage’ because the Labour Party benefits from the use of numerous properties which had either been requisitioned from private owners, or tied to favourable long-term rents. The resulting situation, he argues, creates a non-level playing field.

So far, there is little to dispute in that claim. But the conclusions that the PN draws from the above premise are nonetheless both absurd and startling.

For one thing, the Opposition party seems to have cast itself in the role of prime victim of the above injustice… to the extent that it now feels entitled to ‘financial compensation by the State’.

Exactly how it came to this conclusion is unclear, for two reasons. One, the real victim of the above injustice is very evidently not the PN at all, but the owners of the properties that were unfairly requisitioned, or which were tied to pitiful annual rents for the benefit of their tenants, the Labour Party. If anyone is entitled to financial compensation, it should be these property owners… and not a rival political party which has no title to any of the properties at all.

The second reason is that – a mantra we have heard before, and will no doubt hear again endlessly until the next election – the PN had ample opportunity to address this issue in the 25 years it spent in government. Its own MP, Jason Azzopardi, was the parliamentary secretary responsible for the Lands Department in the 2008-2013 legislature. There was nothing stopping the Gonzi administration from passing laws which would have forced the Labour Party to relinquish those properties and return them to their rightful owners.

Not only did the Nationalist government do nothing of the kind, but it also resisted passing any legislation to regulate the financing of political parties, of the kind that is being discussed in parliament right now.

It did, however, under John Dalli, address the issue of archaic rent laws, which touches very closely upon the abovementioned injustice. And yet, for all its cries of ‘injustice’ today, the PN’s Rent Law reform actually exempted political parties from having to pay the full market rental rates on the same properties.

From this perspective, the Labour Party is simply benefitting from an unfair advantage which was actually given to it by the former Nationalist government in the first place.

It is therefore surprising that the PN would now point fingers at the government over its omission to tackle this problem… when the same PN not only passed up numerous opportunities to rectify the situation itself, but even passed laws that perpetuated the status quo. But surprise turns to befuddlement, when one realises that the Nationalist Party’s proposed ‘solution’ is to compensate itself for an injustice it never suffered.

At a time when the PN is foundering under an ocean of debt, this initiative will no doubt be interpreted as a rather desperate attempt to latch onto a life-raft in the form of a taxpayer-financed subsidy. Coming at a time when at least 70% responded with a resounding ‘No’ to the question of whether taxpayers’ money should be used to fund political parties, it is unclear what advantage, if any, the PN will reap from its demand.

But the issue goes beyond party financing concerns. Underpinning Dr Said’s entire argument is a very dangerous pattern of behaviour we have grown used to from the two parties. It is increasingly clear from the way the argument is being presented that the ‘injustice’, as perceived by the PN, is actually an imbalance in political power between the two parties currently in parliament.

Now that the Opposition party is outgunned by an unprecedented government majority, and faces financial problems of a severe nature, its primary concern is not to redress injustices – it is merely to lessen the financial and political gap between the two parties, for its own benefit.

The implications are painfully clear. Had the PN not been facing these problems today, it would not be complaining about the issue at all: as indeed it never did, throughout a quarter of a century when it could very easily have done something about it as the party in government.

This in turn suggests that the issue would not be considered a problem, had the two parties been in the political and financial equilibrium desired by the PN. But where does this leave the rest of the country? What about the owners of the properties in question? How does the restoration of this political balance in any way redress the injustice these people suffered?

The simple truth of the matter is that… it doesn’t. The PN’s only concern is to ensure that the Labour Party does not reap more benefit from that injustice than it does itself. If necessary, at the expense of the taxpayer.