[WATCH] Meritocracy: Labour’s biggest question mark in 2013

"Meritocracy", and whether the Labour government has delivered on its 'Malta For All' (Malta Taghna Lkoll) battlecry was the subject of Monday's Reporter on PBS, presented by Mediatoday's managing editor Saviour Balzan.

We interviewed people like Nationalist MP Robert Cutajar, who complained that the first eight months of Labour's administration had actually "reversed" the expectations of its electoral campaign.

"I understand that any government cannot implement, within eight months, what they have promised in an electoral programme for five years. But what I don't expect is things happening to the contrary of what was promised.

"The meaning of meritocracy, as Labour promised us, has been totally reversed. I ask whether it is meritocratic to even have Labour backbenchers taking various salaries... or having a minister's wife pocket €13,000 a month without a call for applications have been issued," Cutajar said, referring to Sai Mizzi Liang, wife of energy minister Konrad Mizzi, who was appointed a Malta Enterprise envoy for Asia markets.

On her part, Labour MEP candidate Miriam Dalli, formerly a One TV journalist and head of news, defended her own appointment inside the energy ministry. "I am suitably qualified for the fields of communications, CRS and stakeholder management... I understand the need for public calls to be made for certain positions, but there are certain posts where the minister needs to have people of trust around him, and the same happens in the private sector."

Dalli also said that Labour's current record on public appointments was 'somewhere in the middle', claiming that the public were either criticising the government for appointing "too many Labourites... or too many Nationalists" on public boards and committees.

"We previously had a government that, for 25 years, did not appoint Labourites who were able to offer the country their service," Dalli said.

In another interview, GWU daily l-orizzont editor Josef Caruana defended the introduction of Joseph Muscat's plan to sell citizenship for €650,000, saying that the money would be poured into the government's consolidated fund rather than to finance "the holes of the past administration's financial mismanagement."