The way you write reveals a great deal about you, qa, and I believe you hands down that you were considering voting PN for the first time.

Matthew, you are now officially one who’s into negative campaigning.

‘U ajma, ghalfejn ggibuha bi kbira?’

Labour’s underlying philosophy: ‘B’xi mod naslu’.

“Lie down and weep.”

Consider it done.

job well done!

[Daphne – Yes, right. I don’t think you’ve ever had a vote before now, actually. ‘Qa, I forgot to mention…’. Jaqq. Learn how to communicate like something other than a guttersnipe. It’s mandatory, outside chavtastic Malta. ]

stop being such a child!

It is flabbergasting to see how poorly thought out all of Labour’s proposals are. Karmenu didn’t have ANY specifics on ANY proposals.

I will use four proposals to demonstrate how amateurish Labour’s proposals are.

1) The disabled and the elderly will not have to go and pick up free medicines from a pharmacy but someone will take them the medicines. Lou Bondi calculated that there are around 25,000 people who are entitled to such medicines.

Karmenu thinks that all you need to do this is have a few drivers and a few vans. Wrong. There are professionals who handle medicines and they are called pharmacists. You can’t have any old driver giving out medicines. A pharmacist takes responsibility for the medicines he or she hands out. Even if the medicines are pre-packaged in plastic bags and labelled as belonging to Mr Borg or Mrs Caruana (and you will need a whole army of people doing all this pre-packaging), you still need pharmacists to answer the 101 questions that patients ask. They want to be reminded which pills they should take in the morning, the afternoon and the evening, they want to know why the packaging has changed and they want to know whether to take them before or after they have something to eat as well as many other things. This is not frivolous. The employment of pharmacists in every pharmacy is required by law.

Another issue is that you cannot have vans laden with medicines driving around all day in sizzling hot weather. You need refrigerated and well equipped vans.

Neither pharmacists nor specialised vans come cheap. It’s already hard to find enough pharmacists to fill all vacancies in pharmacies and pharmaceutical factories. This will make it harder.

2) Directors who sit on public boards will be voted for by the public.

Karmenu Vella thinks that this is as easy as choosing a song to represent Malta for the Eurovision Song Contest (and even that is taken very seriously by the organisers). Wrong. The job of a director is an important one and it is well paid. There’s no point in doing it unless it’s going to be truly fair and transparent. This means that an electronic voting system which forbids multiple voting and can be relied upon will have to be devised.

Contrary to what Karmenu thinks, the electoral commission will have to get involved. Someone needs to take responsibility if the electoral result is challenged by the other hopefuls.

3) All teachers and learning support assistants will be entitled to a sabbatical.

Teachers don’t just teach a single class but many classes throughout the day. There are several teachers who don’t just teach one subject but two like for example geography and history. There are also subjects for which finding teachers is hard (mostly sciences) because people who read degrees in such subjects have more lucrative careers to choose from.

Having so many teachers leaving schools for a whole year will create complete chaos and finding replacements who will take a job for a single year only will be a major headache.

Another question which needs to be answered is whether teachers who take a sabbatical will be obliged to give a year back to the school or whether they can take the sabbatical and leave for another job at the end of that year.

4) Malta will be turned into a wi-fi state.

This will create a lot of spillover. People who don’t use the internet heavily (and there are many) will stop buying internet and just use public free internet on their home computers.

Unless an agreement is reached with internet service providers, they will be run into the ground. if the government on the other hand buys its public service from these same ISPs, they will demand a price high enough to make up for all the lost revenue. This will be hugely expensive.

The proposals are a disgrace. Completely bonkers. It’s quite clear that they have no idea how they are going to implement any of them. At one point, Karmenu Vella summed up Labour’s costing plans with “Tigi tiswa kemm tigi tiswa.” This after five years of complaining that GonziPN has ruined Malta’s economy.

Lie down and weep.

After the first ten minutes Lou was clearly feeling sorry for Il-Guy and stopped pestering him for remotely pertinent and coherent answers.

I guess Joseph could do an Anglu on him.

I can just see his supporters going from ‘He did great, all hail Karmenu’ to ‘Ohh well, he was a liability and the Moviment has better to offer’.

Edward Scicluna declared they intend to postpone deficit control, try to convince the EU and rating agencies.