Why changing the rules out of fear or arrogance is wrong

The 1986 song by Billy Ocean, When The Going Gets Tough, has an iconic refrain that has been adopted for various circumstances. The refrain goes: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” 

Allow us poetic licence to adapt this refrain to reflect the forma mentis Prime Minister Robert Abela has been displaying of late: “When the going gets tough, change the rules.” 

This is exactly what Abela did with the magisterial inquiry reform that cleared all stages of parliament last week.  

The reform was put forward after lawyer and former Nationalist MP Jason Azzopardi filed a flurry of inquiry requests over the Christmas period requesting investigations into ministers Clint Camilleri and Silvio Schembri, among others. 

Abela accused Azzopardi of abusing the law to target public and elected officials in a bid to undermine the government and instructed his justice minister to draft changes to the law. 

Lo and behold, within just three months and with no public consultation, Abela changed the rules to make it next to impossible for an ordinary citizen to request a magisterial inquiry by directly petitioning the magistrate. 

A right enjoyed by ordinary citizens until Wednesday morning of last week was effectively struck down on Wednesday evening on the strength of government’s parliamentary majority. The game got tough and Abela opted to change the rules. 

But this was not the only instance in which Abela decided to take a leaf out of an autocrat’s handbook. He is doing it with the declaration of assets of his ministers – the Prime Minister has consistently refused to publish them, claiming that a more comprehensive system that applies to all MPs and not just ministers is required. In the meantime, his ministers’ declarations remain hidden from the public. 

Furthermore, a decision published by the Standards Commissioner last week on a 2023 complaint filed by Momentum Chairperson Arnold Cassola over comments Abela had made when the driving licence scandal was exposed, revealed yet another instance in which the Prime Minister threatened to change the rules of the game. 

The complaint concerned Abela’s then defence of his ministers and government customer care officials, who were revealed as having put pressure on Transport Malta officials to allow select individuals pass their driving tests. Cassola had argued the comments constituted a defence of clientelism. 

But while the Standards Commissioner cleared Abela of an ethics breach, a letter attached to the report revealed the Prime Minister’s allergy towards his critics. 

In a letter to the Standards Commissioner, Abela warned that he would change the Standards in Public Life Act because of what he claimed were “frivolous complaints” filed to the office by people like Cassola. 

In the letter, Abela said he was concerned that the Standards Act was being abused by Cassola. “It is abundantly clear that a plurality of frivolous complaints are being submitted because, at present, the law does not impose sanctions,” he said. 

Abela’s solution to this claimed ‘abuse’ was to change the law: “I understand that if such abuse continues, the remedy must be legislative.” 

It was the same argument Abela used more than a year later to justify reforming the law on magisterial inquiries because of Jason Azzopardi’s overzealousness. 

The 2023 letter indicates that Abela felt similarly towards Cassola, who frequently files requests to the standards commissioner on potential ethics breaches by ministers and MPs. 

And the contempt could not be clearer: “It is very clear that, for the complainant [Cassola] – who has consistently received a clear verdict from the people – what they cannot achieve through democratic means, they are trying to obtain through other avenues.” 

The warning did not go unnoticed by the Standards Commissioner Joseph Azzopardi, who underlined his disagreement with the Prime Minister.  

“Despite these considerations, the undersigned does not agree with the Prime Minister that the complaint represents some form of abuse by the complainant. The complainant exercised a right given to him at law, and in the undersigned’s opinion it would constitute a regression for government institutions in Malta if the law is changed to limit that right,” Azzopardi warned. 

In Cassola’s words: “Robert Abela is rewriting democracy into autocracy, clause by clause.” 

It is worrying that the Prime Minister should choose to go down this dangerous path in front of the accountability test. The very logical deduction any right-thinking individual will reach in these circumstances is that the government has something to hide, or else it has grown so arrogant that it has become allergic to criticism and calls for scrutiny.