A hurried cat gives birth to blind kittens

Jeffrey and Evarist ask the police to investigate whether somebody is listening to their mobile telephone conversations

There’s a lot of truth in that Maltese saying. With all the pressure and confusion, the divorce issue is being badly bungled, leading to a referendum rushed past people who don’t know what is happening and who largely cannot make the distinction between divorce, declaration of nullity and separation.

When Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando put his private bill before the House, I assumed – or rather, I hoped, because I should have known better – that he would take a step back and allow the House to proceed at its own pace. I didn’t think he would hijack the House agenda, stick a revolver to the prime minister’s head and begin negotiations with the Opposition, striding in and out of the Auberge de Castille with photographers and reporters from Saviour Balzan’s and Roger Degiorgio’s newsroom on red alert, and dressed like John Wayne off to meet the sheriff.

Those of us who thought that he had pulled the rug from beneath Joseph Muscat’s feet with his divorce bill now see that, as with the St John’s Cathedral Museum vote, it is very likely that Pullicino Orlando has been used spectacularly by the Opposition to its own ends.

Muscat has not been outmanoeuvred by Pullicino Orlando. He has outmanoeuvred him and been relieved in the process of the burden of getting into just this sort of horrible mess himself.

Now Muscat doesn’t have to keep his word and fall flat on his face the way Pullicino Orlando is doing, and when the electorate votes against divorce, as it certainly will in a referendum. He needn’t even face internal battles about committing his party to introducing divorce legislation after 2013.

Muscat won’t say, after a No vote, that divorce is dead and buried, because he will want to hold out hope to pro-divorce electors that he will do something about it: another referendum, perhaps, after a massive campaign that will miraculously change people’s minds. Then when he is elected he will do nothing and, when challenged, say “But the people voted No. You can’t go against the people’s will.”

This is one referendum in which he won’t be using five years of hindsight to work out what the result was, as he did with the EU membership vote.

Let’s see what we have had so far in this mess.

Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando sticks his bill before parliament and holds the government hostage. The Opposition, far from being wrong-footed, rubs its hands in glee.

Some people begin to suspect collusion. Pullicino Orlando denies consorting with the enemy and becomes fiercely indignant. The more indignant he becomes, the more suspicious others become.

With the country emerging from recession and a hundred and one more pressing matters to be attended to, divorce is strong-armed into the number-one position on the national agenda.

Pullicino Orlando emerges from the prime minister’s office and rings Malta Today to announce that there is to be a referendum. The prime minister’s office immediately issues a statement denying this.

Pullicino Orlando is questioned by the press and says that the prime minister didn’t actually use the word ‘referendum’, but he thought that this was what the prime minister meant.

The prime minister says in an interview that the government has no mandate to bring a divorce bill before the House, so nothing can be done before the people decide. Journalists take this to mean a referendum, when it was quite obvious, because of the relative proximity of the date, that the prime minister meant a general election.

With everyone taking a referendum for granted, it becomes a foregone conclusion. The government and the Opposition find themselves negotiating for a referendum when it makes more sense, from a financial and organisational point of view, to have people vote for or against divorce in the general election in two years’ time.

Those who are against divorce can vote for the Nationalist Party, which has taken a position against it. Those who are for divorce can vote for… nobody, because Labour has not taken a position in favour and cannot do so because so many of its candidates are firmly against.

So a referendum it is, then.

The prime minister correctly points out that a referendum can only take place at law after the House has debated the bill. The Opposition, Pullicino Orlando and the Divorce Movement become hysterical. How dare he. They want a referendum before the debate.

This means that it will be a consultative referendum which is not linked to a bill. Please register this point because it is a crucial one, as we shall see further along in this column.

Now bickering about divorce has been suspended while we bicker about the referendum.

The prime minister says – correctly – that a consultative referendum which takes place before a House debate must have a simple question. This should be something like, “Should Malta have divorce legislation? Yes/No”.

Again, Joseph Muscat, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando and the Divorce Movement object. They want a question directly linked to Pullicino Orlando’s bill. The prime minister responds – again, correctly – that the question can be linked to the bill only if the bill has been debated, and that in any case the question can’t be long-winded and detailed.

Joseph Muscat rushes out with a pedestal and Pullicino Orlando leaps onto it for some more grandstanding. If the referendum question is a simple one which asks the people whether they wish Malta to have divorce legislation or not, he announces, then he will vote No.

Malta Today and the rest of the Labour media are in raptures.

Lest he be accused of a narcissistic desire to have the people vote for or against his bill rather than for or against divorce legislation, Pullicino Orlando tells us that he will vote No because a simple question about divorce will give legislators carte blanche for a Las Vegas-style divorce law. The inconsistency of this statement escapes – or perhaps it doesn’t, and they are only pretending – the questing souls in the newsrooms at Malta Today.

You cannot accuse the prime minister of being an ultra-conservative papist opponent of divorce and then say that you don’t trust him not to use a Yes vote on a simple question as carte blanche to sneak in Las Vegas-style divorce.

Has Pullicino Orlando been using his head at all recently, instead of just rushing around like some barnyard fowl after a close encounter with a kitchen knife?

In the unlikely event of a Yes vote in this referendum, the person who will have to bring a divorce bill before the House is nobody else but the prime minister. That would be Lawrence Gonzi, not Joseph Muscat, who won’t be getting in for another two years. Can anyone out there even begin to think of the prime minister crowing with delight if the people vote Yes to a straightforward question about divorce, cackling to himself, “Oh goody! Now’s my chance to give Malta Las Vegas-style divorce legislation”?

Ah yes, that little matter of the divorce bill. I think Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando just might change his mind about holding the referendum before the House debates his bill when he understands – I am surprised that nobody has yet explained this to him – that if the referendum does not take place after a debate on his Bill and is not directly linked to that debate, then the government is obliged to bring before the House a divorce bill of its own and Parliament will shelve the Pullicino Orlando Bill and forget about it.

A referendum held before a debate on Pullicino Orlando’s bill is not linked to that bill. That much should be obvious, but apparently it is not – not even to Pullicino Orlando himself.

I rather suspect, however, that elements within the Labour Party fully understand this but have not explained it to Pullicino Orlando because it does not serve their purpose.

If the people vote Yes in a referendum held before the House debate, they are empowering the government – not Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando – to bring a divorce bill before the House. Any pre-existing divorce bills become irrelevant if they have not been debated and linked to the referendum.

Pullicino Orlando’s bill can and probably will be discarded in any case,whether it is debated before the referendum or not. If the outcome is Yes (unlikely), then this means parliament has a mandate to legislate for divorce and a new bill can be drawn up afresh and properly.

One thing is certain in all this mess: it is that a referendum which does not take place after a proper information campaign will return a skewed and unreliable result.

The EU membership referendum was preceded by a lengthy campaign on which the Yes and No camps spent a great deal of money, and also a non-partisan information campaign which ensured that even those who didn’t want information still got it. The Yes campaign had the entire Nationalist Party media machine at its disposal and even the English-language newspapers, which took a pro-EU membership editorial line. The No campaign had the considerable resources of Super One and the rest of the Labour media.

Now we’re talking of a referendum in May – less than three months away – but with no idea of how people are going to be apprised of what all this means before they pick up their ballot sheet and pencil. Then the validity of the result, whatever it is, can be challenged on the grounds that people didn’t know what they were voting for because there was no information campaign. I think the aftermath of the referendum is going to be worse than the run-up.

Thank you, Jeffrey. You couldn’t have made a worse botch-up of it if you’d been working for the anti-divorce movement and the Labour Party.

This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.