People must be told what they're voting for
Labour shadow minister Anthony Zammit: the public has a right to know
In The Times, today:
Dr Muscat said he was “disgusted” with the way people within the PN tried to use people’s private lives to denigrate them
He said that, on several occasions, he was presented with information about the private lives of people within the PN, which could have been used for a political advantage. However, he personally had always given instructions for such information not to be used. A line of “decency” between Maltese politics and personal life had to be dawn. “Those were, and still are, my standards,” Dr Muscat said.
Disgusted? I hardly think so. Worried, more like. The Labour Party is perfectly content to use people’s private lives to denigrate them, and I am a living example of that. When it doesn’t have anything to go on, its anonymous supporters – and I suspect, people who work for it – hover on the internet just out of reach of the police, spreading vicious lies and malicious slander about any member of my family they can name.
And look at what was done to poor, decent Joe Mizzi by that scum Julia Farrugia, former Super One reporter and now Saviour Balzan’s axe-grinder. Who do you imagine filmed him – the people from Net, from PBS or from Super One?
Drop me a line, and I’ll send you a free gift.
I didn’t notice Joseph Muscat expressing shock and horror at what was done to a really nice and trusting (and trustworthy) man.
The Nationalist Party does NOT use people’s private lives to denigrate them. In all my 20 years of writing about politics, I have never come across any such incidence. If the Nationalist Party were that way inclined, it would have a field day with Labour.
The Nationalist Party didn’t even follow up on the highly dubious circumstances in which Labour shadow minister Anthony Zammit was found, tied up in his bedroom, by the police. I disagree with this because it is very much in the public interest to discover whether he fabricated that story about a robbery or not.
We might just about think it’s all right to have a cabinet minister who enjoys being tied up in his closet by strangers to whom he’s given his house-key. But a cabinet minister who lies to the police is a different matter.
Cyrus Engerer’s is not a ‘private life’ issue. Had he merely had a tiff with his lover and a bit of a storming out, nobody would give a damn and I agree that it shouldn’t be reported or discussed. Couples, married or unmarried, fight all the time and if they don’t fight at all, it’s generally because they’re practising an unspoken policy of avoiding issues.
But Cyrus Engerer did not just have a normal row, however spectacular that row might have been. He entered somebody’s home when they were out, lifted material from that person’s computer and emailed it out to his bosses and colleagues in a homophobic attack.
That is certainly not a private life issue. I would want to know about this were he my candidate. My mother, who voted for Cyrus and helped make him deputy mayor, is absolutely horrified. She knew he is gay when she voted for him (she also voted for Karl Gouder, incidentally), but she did not know he is capable of doing anything so dastardly. She voted for him because she thought he was a nice, smart and decent young man who made a pleasant change from the old fossils and suspect characters who tend to get foisted on us come election day.
And then she finds out too late that he’s a suspect character too. Just as I did with that Jeffrey.
When former police commissioner George Grech was caught out in an illicit liaison which led to his resignation, the Labour Party went to town with Malta Today and enjoyed every minute of it.
The Nationalist Party has so many scruples about decent behaviour that it sometimes fails to separate the public interest issues from the purely personal, and the presence of sex does not make something purely personal.
In the early 1990s, when the Labour Party’s Propaganda Secretary – I believe he was Stephen Ciantar – produced homemade pornographic films, filmed at the then Labour HQ, Il-Macina, starring himself as the stud copulating with the Labour Party’s ‘pom-pom girls’ (cheerleaders – yes, really – one of them was Super One cameraman Byon Jo Zammit’s mother, whose ‘rabbit ear’ labia became legendary), party leader Eddie Fenech Adami was absolutely furious when the PN newspaper reported it.
He didn’t understand that it was very much a public interest issue. He just found the whole thing distasteful. But imagine not reporting news like that. When the story broke, Stephen Ciantar fled.
The reason the Labour Party and Joseph Muscat hold off from talking about the so-called ‘private lives’ of politicians, even when there are public interest concerns, while being perfectly happy to talk about the private lives of enemy journalists and enemy police commissioners among others, is because they are practising, or hoping for, an unspoken pact or form of unilateral disarmament.
‘You don’t talk about ours and we won’t talk about yours.’
Muscat holds off because he’s scared that if he even begins to say something, the floodgates will open and drown several members of his Labour Party, possibly including himself.
What it all boils down to is that the public is being sold short. We are being asked to vote for people without knowing what they are really like, or what their circumstances are. I will mention again here my angry telephone calls to the Nationalist Party in the lead-up to the last general election, when Robert Musumeci was left on the candidate list and presented to the electorate as a decent family man even AFTER the party discovered that he was lying and cheating and conducting an affair with the Labour magistrate, herself a cheat, for whom he left his wife eventually. Imagine how those who voted for him felt when the story became public.
It is the very people who present themselves to the public for election who should be subject to this sort of scrutiny. We have every right to know who or what we are voting for. We don’t care if a politician fights with his wife, but if he cheats on his wife, especially with an unsavoury character, then we want to know about it. And if a politician perpetrates a homophobic attack on a lover who has rejected him, then we must definitely be told about it.
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Reply to ciccio2011 Click here to cancel reply
Political parties should do well to vet any prospective candidates very carefully before presenting them to the electorate.
Even those with the best of intentions and a single candidate on each constituency don’t quite manage to do that. Look at Britain.
I agree. Joseph Muscat obviously prefers that we should vote for strangers to represent us in parliament and local councils, because let’s face it, who in their right mind would vote for the ridiculous people that make up the Labour Party today.
The Labour Party and their ‘football club’ supporters do not f**king get it. They never have and they never will.
They equate this with attacking journalists, because they have no brain. They don’t understand the difference between trying to silence a journalist and trying to stop people voting scummy characters into parliament.
“Cyrus Engerer’s is not a ‘private life’ issue”.
Precisely. But I suppose the thing that’s worse than being thick, is assuming one’s own supporters are.
How right you are in your assessment.
Mentioning George Grech’s framed-up case I’m surprised why you damn Consuelo all the time and never a word on that Miriam Hayman. It’s not fair.
[Daphne – I don’t know enough about her, I’m afraid. I know a lot about Consuelo.]
I just keep telling myself what a terrible blow Cyrus Engerer has dealt to all homosexuals here in Malta.
In the pizella-head mentality out there, that ‘homosexuality equals perversion and flakiness’ has now been proven beyond reasonable doubt.
Planks in their heterosexual eyes don’t count, of course.
Shame.
“Couples, married or unmarried, fight all the time and if they don’t fight at all, it’s generally because they’re practising an unspoken policy of avoiding issues.”
I will not go into the merits of how bad or stupid Cyrus was by doing what he allegedly did, but if you think you can measure gay or lesbian relationships with a heteronormative ruler, you are totally wrong.
[Daphne – Homosexual relationships are the same as heterosexual relationships in which there are no children and no plans to have any: the dynamics are different and the focus more intense. That’s all. As for promiscuity, if you think heterosexual men, and now women too, are not promiscuous, you live on another planet.]
A relationship is a relationship – there are no “heterosexual”, “homosexual” or “heteronormative” rulers.
The universal rulers in healthy relationships are trust, respect and honesty.
Daphne, you may delete the above comment…somehow it disappeared when I posted it, and now it has reappeared.
[Daphne – It went into spam. One of the downsides of the topic of the moment is that I have to keep going through the spam folder to find the very many comments that wind up there because they include naughty words.]
There are only three common rules for a healthy relationship of any kind: respect, trust and honesty.
It has nothing to do with promiscuity. The dynamics and emotional intensity of different kinds of relationships are different. Even gay relationships are different to lesbian ones. Hence one can’t compare gay relationships with lesbian relationships or with a relationship between a man and a woman, not even in the slightest.
[Daphne – Senseless observation: I don’t see very much in common between one heterosexual relationship and another, David. These things don’t come out of a cookie-cutter. ‘This is a heterosexual relationship’; ‘this is gay relationship’. The type of relationship is the common factor, not the sexuality of the people in it.]
@Kenneth Cassar – I think you’re trying to oversimplify things from your self-righteous throne.
[David II – @Kenneth Cassar – I think you’re trying to oversimplify things from your self-righteous throne].
Of course I’m oversimplifying. I mentioned three factors of any kind of healthy relationship. Each relationship is unique, but a healthy relationship must have all the three factors I mention, or else it’s just a matter of time before it fails.
If stating what should be obvious makes me self-righteous, so be it.
Joseph Muscat’s position is to protect the skeletons in the closet.
By the power of Greyskull.
Skeletons? They look pretty damn well fed to me.
Someone’s been feeding them kiwis.
no ciccio not kiwis, they go to Mcdonalds.
I cannot wait for the election to see Cyrus presented on the Labour party ticket. Imagine the quarrels he will have with the other Labour candidates on the district, just like he had with the PN candidates.
Then I cannot wait for the results to be published, so he will have the trashing that he so much deserves.
Already Labour supporters are grumbling about him being somehow associated with them, not those who seem to be employed 24 hours a day, posting vicious comments on every social and news website. No not those, but the genuine Labour supporters who see their party going to the dogs again when it had barely begun to recover.
” not those who seem to be employed 24 hours a day” –
Are you talking about Jeremy Camilleri, a full-time employee with GWU, who appears to spend his time uploading idiotic anti-Gonzi slogans on Facebook?
Sadly, he must have felt exposed of late, after realising that it’s not just the same half-dozen (out of 1700+, Alla jbierek) semi-literate FB buddies who read his posts, so now he’s depriving us of his pearls (of wisdom…).
Daphne, what’s your opinion on this missile thing?