Wasn’t ‘il-bagit tal-qawsalla’ a Lino Spiteri masterpiece?

David’s right. The Maltese have crap thinking skills, and crap language skills to go with them. But that’s the price you pay for independence.

Not only are they disrespecting the government, their colleagues in the Opposition, and the entire decomcratic process, but simply put they’re not doing their job.

Facebooking on company time is grounds for dismissal at many “ordinary” jobs; certainly MPs should be held to even higher levels of professionalism.

But what’s even more disgraceful is that no one really seems to be outraged about it.

Get mad, Malta! You only ever seem to get REALLY mad about something if it is initiated by or suggested by a foreigner (such as Arriva, CABS, the EU, shall I go on?).

If it’s a “homegrown” abuse or offence then it’s typical Maltese mentality: “Hazin, imma m’hemmx taghmel.”

The entire country should be embarrassed by these mens’ behaviour. They are making a mockery of the institution of Parliament, and a mockery of you all.

And with your silence they’re doing so with your tacit consent.

Do they have to ridicule anything not of their making? When will they realise this country has learned to move on without them?

Why should the Maltese budget take more than two hours, and the UK Budget only one hour?

[Daphne – Because of cultural differences, David: concise language and mentality versus long-winded language and mentality. In Italy it’s probably three or four hours, for the same reason.]

Frankly I think there were many parts of this year’s speech cut and pasted from last year’s , a shopping list of projects yet to start , and repeated ad nauseam every year.

The budget speech should be the salient points of revenue and expenditure, and new initiatives, not a narrative of the smallest of projects or measures which have a budget allocation of Eur 100 K..

But in Labour budgets, it was the price of “kavalli” , so I guess there is some improvement – but let’s cut the crap by half.

And what about Tonio Fenech’s procession walking into parliament , followed by Robert Arrigo , and Jason Azzopardi – it was like the Duluri.

I am looking forward to reading Lino Spiteri’s comments in The Times. He always finds fault in anything the PN does.

His budgets, when he was Minister of Finance under Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, also had grandoise sounding titles or names.

Or tonn taz-zejt or Flying Wheel luncheon meat.

Ghandi T-shirt ahmar ghallukkazjoni.

Yep. And what kind of self-respecting government refuses to give the budget a name?

In the glorious 1980s, Mintoff used to lovingly provide a name for every budget. I vaguely recall “il-budget tal-qawsalla” among others.

[Daphne – That’s the one we all remember, because it was the November 1986 budget speech and things could not have been worse.]