We were pleased – early Saturday morning notwithstanding – to accept the president’s invitation to attend the conference on national unity on February 27.
We did so without easy cynicism. As an organisation which has been persistent, unflinching in its 27-year-old campaign for social justice across various sectors, we walked into the conference with confidence in its good intentions, some questions about its follow-up and not a single doubt about our own mission.
Meteorological considerations aside, the air was indeed lighter without the suffocating presence of PLPN, which, busy campaigning for votes before the nationwide shutdown struck, would do better to listen attentively to the interventions from distant Buskett.
We’ll go beyond national unity between tribes: the PL and PN ‘division’ is simply another instalment of a pantomime called party politics and they’re closer to each other than we all like to believe. Maltese society finds itself still torn between two behemoths that have completely hogged political discourse. Their dominance in parliament is stifling and their sweaty omnipresence in the media heavier than the southerly wind.
Recent parliamentary sittings have shown how keen PL and PN are to cower to the wishes of developers and speculators: the debates about the setting up of the Building and Construction Authority have seen government hold back from penning a decisive reform that truly protects residents while the opposition spent most of its time looking at its shoelaces trying to figure out how to tie a knot.
Let’s be frank: there’s no opposition. And, by opposition, I don’t mean the shadow of the Nationalist Party and neither do I simply mean opposition to Labour.
During our intervention in the conference, we spelt out the importance of a united front that comes together to fight greed, speculation and the theft of natural resources. In this regard, we’re on the same page as the president himself, who has repeatedly called for the protection of our open spaces.
There’s another resource that needs to be protected from greed: the human one. Calls for a ‘Team Malta’ will remain nothing more than a marketing stunt as long as the neoliberal philosophy, manifested in the Maltese fixation with achieving economic growth, continues to tread over the rights and dignity of the worker.
Here, too, we advocate national unity to put an end to inequality and social injustice suffered exclusively by those at the bottom; because here, too, there is no counterbalance to PLPN’s unity, as manifested in the bipartisan agreement to oppose a proposed EU directive on adequate minimum wages.
Politicians have been dragging their feet elsewhere, too. While Police Commissioner Angelo Gafà has promised the setting up of a unit to tackle domestic violence, a damning report by the Council of Europe highlighted how the judiciary and law enforcement together are, in the best of cases, “insensitive” towards the plight of women. It would be desirable, along with reforms where needed, if a united national front would come together to start changing mindsets, mentalities, procedures that invariably penalise women for crimes they didn’t commit but which they suffered.
In this regard, our group is disappointed at the cosiness between the presidency and so-called ‘pro-life’ networks, who regularly resort to threats and hatred, especially towards those who don’t live a white, heterosexual Catholic life. We have no issue with insults; we’ve taken them and returned them with interest for 27 years. But conservative, right-wing lobbies hellbent on discrimination, such as this one, have no space in the discourse about national unity.
Another key point of our vision on national unity includes the media. The political vacuum left by the opposition has made it necessary for civil society groups such as ours to step up and be counted. Nowadays, the Nationalist Party has no credible, let alone strong, voice on issues such as the massive roadbuilding spree conceived by Transport Minister Ian Borg.
Similarly, other organisations forming part of civil society, composed in its vast majority of politically-independent or single non-partisan issue-based groups, have their own battles to fight – from conservation to farming, to migrant advocacy, to the forgotten war against poverty. Most of the time they do so on their own, receiving nothing more than lip service from politics, if not their being shunned completely.
And, here, state TV comes disappointingly short, relegating the role of civil society groups to a mere few minutes every week. We barely get a word in against the likes of Ian Borg, in between a guffaw and a plaudit from friendly presenters; because politics deserves the live studio and we deserve Skype.
The reluctance to confront politics and civil society is not surprising, to be honest: because of uncomfortable narratives told by self-funded, independent groups that should not be aired. Dirty-moneyed, nepotistic structures like political parties don’t want you to hear that.
In its role as educator, informer and entertainer, state TV should have no qualms about opening up to diversity in its otherwise staid message and so should its regulator stop considering impartiality as the midpoint between two ideologically-similar political establishments. This is always more desirable than promoting racist sentiment through the selective placing of news items and the use of ‘creative’ headlines.
While thanking His Excellency for the initiative to set up this conference, we extend our request to the presidency so that we, and other organisations working for social justice, could present our agendas: politically independent, honest and leftist.
Wayne Flask, member, Moviment Graffitti.
