Fantasy island

I've always wanted to run a series of articles starting with the line: "You can always tell an election is coming up, when..."

So - um - what I am waiting for? Here goes: Camera, lights, and... ACTION!

You can always tell an election is coming up, when people suddenly gather round in small groups and start talking about... imaginary countries.

No, seriously, it happened to me the other day. I was in a group of people - for I still have a few human acquaintances, you see - and for some reason the conversation soon found itself revolving around this truly amazing, magical and obviously unreal place where everything was simply hunky dory, all the goddamn time.

On most occasions I wouldn't really mind discussing such clearly fictitious places. Makes a pleasant change from the usual topic of conversation, which tends to involve a certain country we all know to be very depressingly real.

Besides, I myself was brought up on fantasy literature (not that you'd ever, EVER have guessed, but anyway...) and 'Imaginary Places' happens to be the title of one of the larger volumes in my collection.

And guess what? A wonderful escape from reality it still makes to this day: with its detailed maps of Samuel Butler's Erewhon, for instance; or Frank L. Baum's Oz; or Skull Island from the movie King Kong... even Castle Dracula from the Bram Stoker novel (complete with such helpful tips as: "Visitors are strongly advised against entering the chapel crypt after dark", etc.)

But nowhere in this extensive volume of fantasy realms was there any reference to the magical land described to me in the course of that conversation: a land in which all aspects of the everyday infrastructure are simply flawless in their every manifestation; in which the wheels of justice revolve in perfect harmony with the Music of the Spheres; and needless to add it is also a land of total transparency and unimpeachable economic management throughout: in which the common purse has in past decades been administered with such prudence and propriety, that it is now simply unthinkable that anybody other than the present Glorious Ruler should have a stab at piloting the same economy... without instantly running it into the ground.

And of course, in the very best of fantasy tradition, all these imaginary blessings are at once under threat from an army of malevolent, twisted imp-like creatures, who - perhaps having not quite got to that part about the "Divine Right of the present Ruler to reign forever and ever, without competition, Amen" - conspire endlessly to usurp the throne, squander all this bounteous patrimony to the undying detriment of future generations, and of course (as one does, in fantasy novels) cover the land in a second darkness, etc.

You may even be familiar with sort of thing I'm Tolkien about here. So curiosity naturally got the better of me, and I felt I just had to ask. What imaginary place were we talking about here, exactly? Can the books be ordered via Amazon? And... does anyone know if Guilliermo Del Toro will get to direct the movie....?

Ah. Mm. Ok. Meanwhile, in case you were wondering about that rather loud crash, bang and tinkle you all just heard in the background... well, that was the sound of yours truly coming back down to earth rather more abruptly than I would have liked.

Needless to add, however, the rest of the people involved in that conservation didn't accompany me on my sudden, unexpected downward trajectory. Oh no. They're all still up there... still inhabiting that vaguely Celestial City, that Fantasy Island inhabited by midgets and sprites, without ever once pausing to ask themselves... "Yes, but how much of all this actually resembles this thing called... REALITY?"

Time, I think, to take that proverbial step back and fall off the precipice... I mean, take a look at the same picture from a slightly broader vantage point.

Those benevolent, omniscient, and divinely anointed rulers who administer the public purse with such diligence and propriety, and all that crap? Well, they've been in power for almost 25 years. That's longer than many individual first-time voters have even been alive, you know. And it's not as though they simply waltzed into government out of nowhere way back in another galaxy, long long ago.

You may be forgiven for not remembering this, but once the orcs and trolls of the previous administration had finished duly ransacking, smashing and pillaging the place, there was a rather clear set of priorities for the guys who came in afterwards armed with mops, brooms and bucketsful of disinfectant.

Suffice it to say that the incoming administration (led by Eddie Fenech Adami, if you'll remember) came into possession of an entire infrastructure which was still firmly plugged into the fabric of pre-war Malta. We had a power station that simply couldn't supply power to all the country at any one time; an airport that resembled a Misurata ammunition dump after a direct hit by a Scud missile; and a veritable compendium of known or suspected corruption cases dating back to the Stone Age of malfeasance ('Building a block flats, are you? Jolly good. Just remember: the top three stories are mine. Fond regards, The Honourable Minister', etc).

Elsewhere, we also had a massive great big black hole where 'human rights' were supposed to be - with a police force that had even been found guilty (albeit indirectly) of murder.

Oh, and to give all those orcs and trolls their full due: they also left a tidy bit of cash piled up in the country's coffers... after almost 16 years of meticulous, dedicated and quasi-pathological parsimony.

This, then, was the mess that Eddie Fenech Adami and his band of merry Nationalists came into power on a very specific promise to clean up. Personally I would have thought 25 years was time enough to sort out at least the most pressing of those issues. Like the police, for instance. Or the electoral system that lies at the heart of so very much that was actually wrong with the situation between 1981 and 1987.

Allow me to ask you the million-dollar question (without, of course, also offering you the million dollars that should go with it). How much of all that was broken did this so-called 'magical', 'infallible' and 'indispensable' government actually fix since coming into power in 1987? And how much of the same mess did it simply sweep under the carpet, to be discovered by successive generations of unsuspecting citizens?

Well, hard as it is to fathom, the answer to the first question is: not nearly enough. To the second? Way, way too much.

Inhabitants of fantasy islands do not like being reminded of this, but... a quarter of a century, one new power station and literally hundreds of millions of euros' worth of investment, and the only significant difference the Delimara extension actually made was to add a pervasive stench of corruption throughout (no longer of the Stone Age variety, I'll grant you - more like the Yellow Pages, if you take my meaning.)

Yes, but... what about the power? Or has nobody else actually noticed that there have on average been more power cuts over the past two years, than in the corresponding last two years of the pre-'87 administration?

As for the black hole of human rights I mentioned earlier... why, having won an election on a very specific promise of redressing the situation faced by persons in police custody, Fenech Adami (and Gonzi after him) spent the next two decades studiously avoiding introducing any of the relevant rights. And when they finally did succumb to pressure, and grudgingly wrote some of the basic rights into legislation... by a huge coincidence they managed to make a pig's breakfast of the entire exercise: with the result that you now have the right to a lawyer at every stage of proceedings... except while under interrogation, which is obviously when you need one the most.

I won't go into much detail on the various other areas that the PN should really have done a whole lot better - and I mean a whole UNIVERSE better, considering the sheer amount of time they've had to work on things, not to mention the stratospheric altitude of the moral high horse they go galloping around on... but of all the cock-ups and unlept electoral pledges, one sin of omission is simply too consequential to pass without comment.

To the enduring shame of successive PN governments, Malta will in two months' time go into yet another election against the backdrop of a dangerously flawed and patently undemocratic electoral system... despite endless forgotten promises of electoral reform.

Apart from an inherent injustice which limits parliamentary representation to a prohibitive 16.6% of any one district - when most normal electoral laws propose a much lower threshold, and on a nationwide basis - Malta's electoral law also results in an unacceptably massive number of votes which end up simply not being counted at all.

That's right, folks. Every time you are badgered and bullied into voting 'because it's so important', etc... bear in mind that there is a high possibility that your vote will not even be lifted out of the ballot box to be counted in the end.

And with every passing election the need to address this anomaly grows ever more pressing. At the last election, the number of uncounted votes stood at around 4,000. Considering that the two main parties were separated by only around one-fourth that number, the fact that so many votes were ultimately bypassed in the counting process can only raise very serious questions about whether the result of that election (or indeed any other since Independence) was in fact an accurate reflection of the will of the electorate.

Yet here we all are again, 25 years after a promise to revise that same system... and we face yet another election whose outcome will be inherently questionable from the outset.

And why, pray tell, did the Nationalist government fail to fix such a glaring bug in our system... despite the existence of broad consensus on precisely how to go about fixing it?  I imagine for the same reason that Labour never did much about it when the shoe was on its own foot.

It's simply not in the incumbent government's interest to have a fair election result. The only thing that interests an incumbent government is to carry on governing. The will of the electorate? That just gets in the way.

And oh look: if there is yet another mismatch between votes and seats (as there was in 2008), we will once again fall back on a Constitutional mechanism that was originally concocted by the late Guido de Marco and Dom Mintoff way back in in 1986, with a view only to guarantee majority rule in cases where the number of seats does not reflect the percentage of votes cast.