Malta deserves better

The headlines from yesterday's news: the President of the Republic has asked the Constitutional Court to evaluate whether the European Constitution complies with the country's Constitution; minimum wage to be lowered to motivate employment; the Prime Minister to explain to Parliament where he got the money to buy his expensive new home; moves to document migration in the region; praise for bold new tax reforms that will introduce a uniform business and personal income tax rate of 19 percent; Bill Gates visits the capital; authorities to double controls on taxi drivers; injured British tourist to receive compensation.

Most of the above themes may sound familiar to a Maltese audience but as you can see from this link they represent the highlights of the Czech news as reported yesterday by Prague radio. To some extent the Czechs are faced with similar challenges to us but they certainly have a different approach in dealing with them. For years, I have closely followed events in Central and Eastern European countries particularly due to my professional engagements related to the EU accession process. Having a part-time lecturing appointment with an economics faculty in the Czech Republic, I can continue to follow at close range the transformation of these ambitous countries run by a new generation of business leaders and politicians (the Czech Prime Minister is 35 years old).

In contrast, an old and tired establishment continues to rule these islands. The Nationalist Party, with many permanent faces and features, is now in it's 18th year of Government since defeating the Socialist administration of the eighties. While the transformation of Central and Eastern Europe has been boosted by a free and prolific media, real media freedom - an excellent gauge for democracy - still eludes this country. Most of the influential audio-visual and print media are controlled by the political establishment. And the content quality is not improving. The main story tonight on the Nationalist Party owned media was the false claim that the MLP intends to tamper with workers' wage bonuses. There is no such plan and it is puerile and childish to extract in such a manner from an anonymous document published by the party as one of the many tools for it's policy discussions. And PN journalists ( recently criticized by their own party leader) spent part of their day filming vox pops asking silly, misleading questions to the public. Instead of enhancing the development of our democracy, such behaviour prevents serious debate about urgent national issues. The Maltese deserve better.