GWU president does not want Maltese to ‘wash their dirty linen in public’

General Workers Union president Victor Carachi has reiterated the GWU's support for the sale of Maltese citizenship, in a New Year's Day message that criticised the international media attention on Malta.

Carachi suggested that the international media's attention on Malta's sale of citizenship for €650,000 could have been "instigated locally" and that the Maltese were "obliged" not to "damage their country."
The Maltese government recently added a €350,000 property acquisition and €150,000 government stock purchase into the price for a passport under the Individual Investor Programme.

The Labour-leaning GWU is so far one of the sole unions, apart from business organisations like the MHRA and the Chamber of Commerce, to support the IIP.

Carachi said Malta's political battles should be "kept under the local radar if we really believe in a health and active democracy... if we wash our dirty linen in other countries, we would only be damaging our country's name. Our politicians have to be an example of national unity not just during these festivities, but throughout the entire year."

In his message, Carachi also called for a unifying, national day for the Maltese, which can go beyond any partisan aspirations and that can be representative of all Maltese.

"There is a good will to have the Constitution reformed. It should be a dynamic instrument that can change with time, so we should see whether time has come for a national day that does not take anything away from other public feasts. We must find a national day that unites us as a people and which symbolises this union," Carachi said in a new year's day message on behalf of the union.

"We must be mature enough to recognise a national day that is ours as a people, and not that of a political party - we are one nation and we have proven that we are able to set apart any divisions that exist between... by uniting in providing aid to other beleaguered nations, let us now find new ways of uniting and feeling proud to be Maltese."

Malta has five national feasts: Independence and Republic Day mark the 1964 and 1974 constitutional changes under, respectively, Nationalist and Labour administrations; Freedom Day marks the 1979 departure of British forces from Malta; whilst the Sette Giugno (7 June) marks the 1919 bread riots and Victor Day on 8 September, marking the end of the Italian war on Malta after surrendering in 1943.

Carachi also said the union had in 2013 managed to put precarious employment on the national agenda, although the challenge of eradicating precarity had not yet been overcome.

"We are also facing the cancer of poverty at all economic, social and educational levels. We cannot let this phenomenon pass us by. Not only is degrading and dishonourable to us as a country... we don't solve poverty solely with solidarity, but with the social obligation to eradicate this plague," Carachi said.

The GWU president also made reference to the Enemalta oil scandal in which he called for the full truth to emerge in this case. "Unfortunately it looks like the PAC is being used to divert the public's attention from this fact alone. All suspicions on the way the presidential pardon was granted to the State's evidence [George Farrugia] in this case, should be cleared up."