The prime minister told us at his press conference yesterday that those who buy their passports will get the right to vote
The prime minister, just as he did when he was leader of the Opposition, always reveals what’s coming next and what he plans to do. He does not do so carelessly but deliberately. He drops information purposely, to set the stage for what he intends to do.
All you have to do is take diligent note, listen carefully, and join the dots, and you’re home and dry. Muscat is not clever. He is cunning. Cunning requires a different set of interpretation tools to clever.
Once you get into that mindset, it’s easy to read and to anticipate the next move, and that is why I am driven to the point of despair by the way those who should be doing this are not, unless I am missing something.
Yesterday, Muscat told us that those who buy passports will get the vote. He did not say it in so many words, but still he spelled it out. The trouble is that not many people seemed to be listening.
He said that those who apply for Maltese citizenship and buy or rent property (which gives them an address in Malta) will immediately be considered resident in Malta for the purposes of this scheme. Residency of one year is mandated, he said, but this does not mean that they will have to live in Malta for that one year. Nor, he said, “does this mean that they will not come to Malta at all”. By that last bit, he made it clear a holiday in Malta is going to be enough, or what we would call in other circumstances, ‘making present’.
Do you see what he has done here, or shall I spell it out? I think I should spell it out.
In Malta, the vote hinges not just on citizenship but also on being resident in Malta. By making it clear that these passport-buyers will be registered as residents even if they are not actually and technically living in Malta, Muscat has acquired the legal parameters for giving them the vote.
That is why negotiations were concluded so rapidly: Muscat threw in the one-year residency because it allowed him to leave things exactly as they are (people getting passports without having to live here) while at the same time making it possible for him to have them put on the electoral roll as citizens who are also residents.
Yes, as matters now stand, you have to be actually living in Malta for six months in the year leading up to the election so as not to lose your vote. But the reality is that so many thousands of Maltese are now working and studying elsewhere in Europe that it is not practical or even right/desirable to enforce this. We can’t prize freedom of movement in the EU and then tell people that the price they pay for their European freedoms is the loss of their vote at home.
With supremely ironic timing, the European Commission chose this moment to announce that Malta should allow its citizens who live abroad to vote abroad.
But these passport-buyers are only going to be resident for a year, I hear you say. Come on, get real. If the government’s definition of residency is renting a flat and popping over for a quick visit every now and again, that’s hardly onerous. Why are they going to bother de-registering as residents after a year? They won’t, especially as Maltese law distinguishes between being resident and being domiciled, for tax purposes. They can be resident here in Malta and domiciled elsewhere for taxes and everything else.
But why would they bother staying registered as residents and why would they be fagged to get the vote and make sure they keep it, is your next question.
Simple: the Opposition has said that it will withdraw all passports issued under this scheme. So anybody who buys his Maltese passport is going to make damn sure of getting onto the electoral roll, staying there, and voting Labour in the upcoming general election.
This is no joking matter for anybody with the slightest appreciation of democracy – yes, and that includes people who support the Labour Party but who are nonetheless democratic in spirit.
The government has said it will now “raise the capping” on the number of passports sold: in other words, it is going to sell more than 1,800 + extended families, and it won’t say how much.
It has, effectively, found a way to be paid handsomely for increasing the number of Labour voters by many thousands. It is not buying votes, but being paid to acquire them – unless, of course, you boil it down to the essence of the transaction and then it becomes a matter of Labour buying votes with Maltese passports.
But the bottom-line is this: those who buy their passports will now get the vote on the strength of this spurious definition of residency and the fact that challenges are no longer put up to the voting rights of Maltese citizens who have been away from Malta for months or even years before an election.
If the Opposition considers putting up such a challenge to their inclusion in the electoral roll, or wiping them off it, a concomitant problem immediately presents itself: all those ‘real’ Maltese citizens who live and work elsewhere in Europe and who will face retaliatory challenges on the grounds that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Houston, we have a much bigger problem than we thought we did. And by ‘we’ I don’t mean the Nationalist Party or the Opposition because I don’t think in those terms at all. I mean Malta. I mean we Maltese.
We didn’t need these problems.
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So is Simon Busuttil still in favour of the scheme?
We’re waiting for an answer.
With the EC on board? No-brainer.
There you go. The PN thought it had an ally in the European Commission, but it turned out to be a three-sided fight, not two-sided.
Muscat attacked the stronger opponent first, neutralised him, turned him into an ally and has now killed off the PN before the fight ever started.
Game theory again.
Hold your horses Baxxter, so he duped Reding.
He needs to be very firm and say ‘no’ to the scheme. European Court of Human Rights has to be the next stop.
I totally agree. This is madness.
Keep an eye on this:
“Since the new identity cards will contain electronic features, they can no longer be issued at the same time of application, although details on the distribution of newly-printed cards will only be given at a later stage”
Electronic features can be duplicated at will and used as necessary by anyone amoral enough to do so.
What’s the track record been?
At this point, it’s in the interest of the Opposition to disclose all previous negotiations.
The distance has to be widened, bit of a ditch perhaps, nothing too dramatic, but if the PN doesn’t he’ll continue with the camouflage provided by earnest goodwill.
Muscat’s future political interests lie with those who, as far as we’ve been told, aren’t yet citizens.
Anyone’s guess what this government will do to accomodate these votes at our expense, and there’s no money there.
To the young ones reading this, we’ve been through this sense of unease when we discovered ‘blood brothers’ organised in a paramilitary regime run by a child rapist.
His henchmen could come and do as they pleased. We felt cheated then.
Independence, according to Labour, was also short of cash inherently a failure.
‘Indipendenza gifa’, fool’s independence, they called it, some still do, just ask our tourism minister.
Remember those faces painted red and white everyone, and take in the scam that he is.
Anyone wondered why he didn’t stop the one moment from this thing?
The Labour Party should have disclosed:
i) its 2010 agreement with China;
ii) its agreement with Henley & Partners.
The Labour government should disclose:
i) the nature of that agreement with China;
ii) the nature of its agreement with Henley & Partners;
iii) the briefing and conditions under which its ‘special envoys’ operate.
We have no transparency on any account. And the buffering continues.
Min jaf uħud mill-Maltin madwar id-dinja hux se joqomsu fuq din li dawk li se jixtru l-passaporti jkollhom il-vot! Ilhom tant jitolbu lill-gvern biex jagħtihom id-dritt għall-vot għax ħafna minnhom ukoll barra li għandhom ċittadinanza doppja, għandhom dar hawnhekk, għandhom l-ID card u jiġi jqattgħu sitt xhur f’Malta kull sena. Jew issa mmutaw? Fejn huma l-membri tal-kunsill tal-Maltin li jgħixu barra minn Malta?
An interpretation of residence according to the Labour Party:
According to our Constitution, a person qualifies to be registered as a voter is “he is resident in Malta and has during the eighteen months immediately preceding his registration been a resident for a continuous period of six months or for periods amounting in the aggregate to six months”.
The Labour Party successfully instituted numerous court cases to strike off non-Labour leaning voters from the electoral register on the basis that they were not physically present in Malta for six months in the preceding 18 months.
The Courts always interpreted “residence” in these cases as the number of days one is physically present in Malta. Passports and embarkation cards used to be produced as proof, and the number of days abroad counted.
The Labour Party sent letters warning voters who used the Air Malta election flights that even if they received the voting document, they should not vote unless they physically lived for “six months” in Malta.
On the insistence of the Labour Party court cases were instituted against persons who, they claimed, voted when they should have not because they were not living for six months in Malta.
Is this no longer valid for Labour?
This is Mintoffian politics at its most obvious.
One classic example not to be missed: 1981, pre election campaign, at Zebbug. A meeting is held in the main square and is nearing its end. Philip Muscat, then Minister for Education, is speaking.
Then the crowd whispers “Mintoff is here”. Mintoff takes the stand, shoulder to shoulder with Philip Muscat. He snatches the microphone from Muscat. He addresses the crowd and passes a remark about Muscat. Then in the most solemn way he declares that EDUCATION TOO HAS TO BE SOCIALIST. That was a declared battle cry.
It took three years of brewing and stewing to come to the fore. When it did come to the fore, the country was on the path to civil unrest.
This is the NEW WAY OF DOING POLITICS that Joseph Muscat publicly and solemnly announced repeatedly. This is the NEW WAY STYLE OF POLITICS as he dreamed of and on which Manuel Mallia went sleep walking. Brilliant.
No taxation without representation.
If they will be paying income tax and VAT in Malta they will have the right to vote here.
[Daphne – No. The right to vote is not linked to taxation, which is why people who don’t pay tax (because they are under the threshold or because they don’t work) do not lose their vote, while lots of people who do pay tax in Malta (non-Maltese who are employed in Malta, for example) do not have the right to vote because they are not citizens. The right to vote in Maltese GENERAL elections is tied primarily to citizenship AND residence. In other words, the salient documents are your passport and your identity card. The third condition, having been in Malta for at least six months in the year leading up to the general election, is open to dispute on many fronts.]
The PN insisted on throwing them out because there was no residency; it seems that now they should be accepted, once the EU standards are that low.
Reding’s decision confused me. We will read the small print when everything is made public.
For election time; is there any corrupt practice issue?
Approximately how many people vote in the general elections please (not including those who buy our citizenship)?
[Daphne – http://www.independent.com.mt/mobile/2013-01-05/news/-332000-voters-eligible-for-9-march-election-635273216/ ]
So if a man from China or Saudi Arabia buys a Maltese passport, he gets the right to vote? Because he is now marked as a resident after spending just 183 days here? At the next general election, Labour is going to have a two-thirds majority in the house and can change the Constitution. Just like in Hungary.
One should recall that one of the first acts of this government was to remodel the Permanent Residence Scheme into something that most likely fits in line with the first part of this passport scam, with an appropriate name to fit in line with Muscat’s intentions here.
According to the arranged scheme the residency permit is now newly available as soon as two easy conditions are fulfilled.
The intent to deceive is clear from the wording used in all the press conferences, linking the schemes to investment and additional employment on the island.
Malta Development Association and the Estate Agency Federation (or similar name) under Ian Casolani – who was present at the launch of the Passport Scheme in London, were vociferous in their complaints and pre-election visibility on this score.
One wonders at what point Professor Bannister was indeed made aware of this scam.
I would wager it was prior to the elections.
I tend to reason on the same lines as you do on almost all the issues you address, but in this case, whilst I am by no means discounting Joseph Muscat’s intentions, I think that realistically most of the people who will in fact buy a passport will not bother to come to Malta to vote.
Why the hassle? They got what they wanted after all.
[Daphne – ‘Why the hassle?’ To keep out of power the party which has committed itself to revoking those passports, Sapiens. In other words, the same reason we rushed to vote to keep Labour out of power in 2003.]
I think that realistically the PN will have a difficult time justifying a blanket revocation of citizenship to everyone. After all, those people who will actually buy a passport would have done so legitimately (hopefully) whether we like it or not.