PN – No more Mr Morality

In the end it seems Lawrence Gonzi and Simon Busuttil borrowed more than just a random campaign billboard idea from the President of the United States. They also helped themselves to the resounding motif that had carried Barack Obama to his memorable victory in 2008: the battle-cry of CHANGE.

The implications are quite stunning, when you think that (for rather obvious reasons) the same theme is universally associated with an opposition party trying to unseat an incumbent government.

Yet here we have the party in government arguing that it is "the party of change"... which implies that something must be wrong with the same government's administration, if the party that occupies it is itself admitting the country needs a policy overhaul.

Or is it? For with echoes of the 'change' motif ringing in our ears, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi on Thursday insisted that the country "does not need a change in direction".

"We are not in the position of Cyprus, Spain or Portugal," he told a packed auditorium at the PN headquarters in Pieta'. "Why should we change direction? Just so Joseph Muscat can become Prime Minister?"

But even if Gonzi insists that his government should be retained on the strength of its economic management in times of crisis - and this is clearly where his campaign is on stronger footing than that of the Opposition, which has no corresponding record of its own to show - the manifesto approved in the same Thursday meeting is replete with allusions to the need for change in other areas.

If nothing else, this document illustrates that the Nationalist Party has acknowledged that many of its policies over the past 10 years have irked or irritated a sizeable section of the population. And being a political party - and thus motivated by the unerring law of supply and demand - it is understandably repositioning itself in order to meet a perceived demand for complete policy rethink: not perhaps on the economic front, but certainly in the way the government interacts with society and individual citizens.

Admittedly, the resulting document reads less like a traditional 'manifesto' and more like a vague policy document (the PN will be publishing a more detailed programme in the days to come). But it nonetheless reveals a party with an eagerness to win back the trust of the same 'liberal' segment that had traditionally voted PN in the past... but which has been arguably driven into the arms of the Labour Party by the staunch conservatism of recent years.

For instance: the PN now believes that "government should not interfere with people's lives", nor behave "as though it had a monopoly of the truth".

Yet it was less than two years ago that Nationalist MP Edwin Vassallo - then chairing the social affairs committee - argued that "what happens in the bedroom is the government's business"... in what was effectively a prelude to an IVF law which had demonstrated an unwholesome interest in the most intimate aspects of any private individual's life.

In its original form, the IVF law that was passed through Parliament earlier this year (paradoxically, with the support of the 'progressive, liberal and moderate' Labour Party) was arguably the most invasive and restrictive regulatory framework to be found anywhere in Europe.

The original draft had even proposed setting up a board to evaluate eligibility of patients for a treatment which was officially restricted only to 'heterosexual couples in a stable relationship'. So what the PN was effectively proposing was a mechanism whereby potential patients would be screened by a committee to determine: a) that they are not homosexual, and; b) that their relationship is in fact stable.

It is difficult to comprehend a more direct interference in private lives than the one proposed by the PN earlier this year. And while the board idea was scrapped in the end, the active discrimination against single parents and gays remains.

Elsewhere, both the PN's claims (i.e., non-interference and a rebuttal of the old 'monopoly of the truth' maxim) sit very uneasily with the same party's behaviour on two other issues, both of which came heavily to the fore in the last five years.

The first and by far the most consequential was the Nationalist Party's rather elastic policy with regard to divorce... and in particular the same party's handling of the campaign and subsequent referendum result.

On that occasion, the PN chose to statutorily align itself with the anti-divorce lobby - and in February 2011 (i.e., almost exactly two years ago) it issued a policy document pronouncing itself as against divorce on principle.

In what was arguably the fastest policy U-turn in political history, it would withdraw that document after only eight months: when a clear majority dumped the PN's position and voted 'Yes' in the referendum, throwing one of the party's major policy planks into disarray.

Within days of that result, the PN published what was effectively an equal and opposite document from the one it had issued earlier that same year. Entitled 'Our Roots', it claimed that the previous 'point of principle' was suddenly no longer valid - and just like Labour's reinvented attitude towards EU membership (which it first opposed tooth and nail, then later championed), the PN went on to add the 'introduction of divorce' to its own list of achievements.

Yet despite the volte-face in policy direction, the party retained ALL the people who had been involved in the previous (and unceremoniously discarded) policy: from the party leader who had insisted on the referendum in the first place, but who would go on to defy the result with his parliamentary vote; to the secretary general who had presented the anti-divorce platform in February 2011, etc.

The implications are that the PN feels it is a party that can change its policies at will, but not the people who authored those policies in the first place... and this makes it somewhat unique among European political parties, which generally tend to ditch the political players along with their game strategy, in cases of clear policy defeat.

The second indication that the 'change' in the manifesto may only be skin-deep took the form of a surprisingly aggressive attitude adopted by the PN towards censorship. Strangely for a party which now believes in individual freedoms and the principle of non-interference, the Nationalist Party - in particular, its communications office (especially NET TV) - had actively championed the criminal prosecution of one of Malta's most respected and acclaimed novelists, Alex Vella Gera, over an 'obscene' short story published in a campus magazine.

This was but one incident in a veritable clampdown on 'immoral behaviour' (which included prosecutions of people who dressed up as priests and nuns for a Carnival party, among many other examples), which came heavily to the fore in the past five years. The zeal with which the PN machinery sought to discredit Vella Gera's defence, and especially the way it attacked Labour MP Owen Bonnici for speaking out against censorship, painted the picture of a party that does in fact uphold a 'truth monopoly', at least on a moral plane.

It is the same unswerving faith in its own beliefs that lies at the heart of the PN's equally monolithic views on so many other 'moral' issues. In 2005 the same party led a crusade to entrench its own views on abortion into the Constitution, with the declared aim of making it harder for future generations to challenge or change these views in any way. What was that, if not clear evidence that the PN does indeed believe it has a 'monopoly of the truth'?

That's not to mention Austin Gatt's proud boast that the PN would "win every election for the next 20 years" - a claim he would have hardly been expected to make, had he not firmly believed his party was inherently right on all matters.

Elsewhere Gonzi's repeated claim that the PN 'has always been on the right side of history' (in itself a variation of the 'monopoly' claim) is questionable, in the light of the frequency with which it has had to amend its policies to keep up with a fast-changing world.

Divorce remains the clearest example, but there are others: not least the same government's U-turn regarding our national relations with Libya.

In 2008, Justice Minister Carm Mifsud Bonnici and Foreign Minister John Dalli separately lambasted this newspaper for 'criticising Libya' on its human rights record. Gonzi himself became the last Western leader to exchange hugs and pleasantries with the Libyan leader in his tent in Tripoli. Yet a few months later - with the Gaddafi regime literally about to collapse - the same Gonzi experienced a Damascene conversion: and not only did he launch into a scathing attack on Gaddafi himself, but he also accused Labour of having had close relations with the same dictator, of the kind that he himself had defended just a few months earlier.

All this suggests that the PN's claims to be a 'natural party of change' require some substantiation. The truth is that the Nationalist government we experienced in the past five years was one which proved singularly resistant to change... until change was practically forced upon it by external circumstances.

Having said that, the same document also attests to the PN's consistent knack for reinventing itself quite convincingly, when the need arises. It is an acknowledgement that the PN may have misread the popular mood on issues where personal privacy and moral bearings are concerned; and as a result it now promises to make amends on those two specific areas, while retaining its otherwise successful policies on other matters: namely the economy, which it rightly considers as among its stronger electoral assets.

The question however remains: is the 'new and improved' PN a case of change we can really believe in? And how can we expect the party to honour this promise of change, when the people at the helm remain the same as the ones who had argued the opposite less than a year ago?

That is but one of the questions the electorate will have to bear in mind on 9 March.