Why Malta needs the Fourth Estate

There is increasing evidence that Parliament, in its present composition, can no longer fulfil some of its basic functions.

Part of the reason for this is historical. The party currently in Opposition has spent some 25 years in government, where it was responsible for all the issues for which it now tries to hold government to account. On paper, it has every right to do this job. A democracy is as strong as its Opposition, for it is only the opposition party that can exercise some form of scrutiny and control over the government of the day.

Yet, as evidenced by the recent power station debate, its own longevity in power has hamstrung the Nationalist opposition’s ability to carry out this task effectively. When faced with legitimate questions over its energy policy, the present government responded by simply reminding the Nationalist opposition of the questionable decisions it had taken when in government up to only two years ago.

Instead of answering questions over the as-yet unclear contractual obligations the Maltese government is currently incurring on behalf of the taxpayer, energy minister Konrad Mizzi called for a police investigation into an earlier, unrelated energy contract issued by the Nationalist government on the eve of the last election.

This is hardly a satisfactory response. The electoral result we saw in March 2013 was itself confirmation that the electorate had rejected that government over those issues. But this doesn’t give the incoming administration a licence to repeat the same mistakes.

For much the same reason, today’s Opposition can hardly even voice concern with government policy without it coming across as being distinctly hypocritical. It cannot, for instance, insist on Labour securing a ‘responsibility sharing’ agreement with the EU over immigration, when its own past efforts in that direction were fruitless. Even on the energy issue alone, the Opposition is right to ask questions… but cannot also be taken seriously in view of its own record in the same department.

As a result, the Labour government can get away with behaving as though the opposition doesn’t exist at all. It seems to think it has carte-blanche to silence its critics interminably, on the ground that they fared no better when the decision-making process was in their hands.

This is clearly an unsustainable approach to governing a country. The only conclusion we are left with is that the institution that has a privileged status at law – which can insist, for instance, on the publication of government contracts – uses this privilege to serve its own partisan interests. This leaves the country with no entity that has unfettered ability to hold the political class to account. Ideally, this is where the media should step in as the so-called Fourth Estate.

It was precisely to address this evident flaw in the current parliamentary situation that MaltaToday joined two other English language newspapers, The Times and The Independent, to form a common front in favour of a Yes vote in next year’s referendum on spring hunting.

This is yet another issue which the political class, acting out of their own self-interest, had collectively failed to address in a way that reflects public opinion. Regardless of one’s views on spring hunting, it remains a fact that the two parties represented on both sides of the house had gravitated to almost identical positions over the years. Both claim to want to ensure that hunters’ rights are respected at European level; both are locked in an arms race to appeal for the votes of a sizeable single-issue lobby (there are 10,000 licensed hunters).

Somewhere in this transaction, the two parties lost sight of the concerns and demands of the wider electorate. There are large swathes of the general population that disagree with both parties’ habit of pandering to this lobby indefinitely. Yet these are not represented in parliament, and their views are never taken into account when drawing up national policy.

It was to address this lacuna that civil society felt the need to step in. Signatures for the referendum were collected by a coalition of anti-spring hunting NGOs, on the basis that this was the only way to ensure that the voice of the wider electorate was given a fair hearing in society. The three abovementioned newspapers felt the need to create a common front for much the same reason: with both sides of the political spectrum conjoined in defence of spring hunting, there was no space left for the wider electorate’s views to also be represented in parliament.

There are other examples of individual issues or policy areas where the two parties appear locked in a permanent tit-for-tat that focuses only on their own interests at the expense of the rest of the country. Both allowed an illegal shantytown in Armier to gain legitimacy, for instance. Both sacrificed environmental concerns for partisan gain, and went on to criticise each other for the same behaviour.

What these and other examples collectively illustrate is that Malta’s political scene urgently needs to take a quantum leap forward, if necessary leaving its present protagonists behind. Until such time, it will be left to the Fourth Estate to try and hold governments to account.