Foreign Minister says to you: “You’re not qualified to speak about abortion.”

Are you a woman? Then you’re not qualified to speak about abortion. To do that, you’ve got to be a doctor, like Joseph Muscat’s foreign minister, who is furious that Nationalist Party candidate Salvu Mallia said in an interview that these are decisions people should take for themselves and not have the state take on their behalf.

Quite frankly, the rest of the Nationalist Party can just put a sock in it and let David Thake (on Radio 101, though) and Salvu Mallia win back those votes together. But catastrophically, the party hierarchy can’t see that those two can make massive inroads just on their own, doing what they do. And that’s because the Nationalist Party post 2003 has systematically failed to understand the audience that Thake and Mallia understand instinctively. They refuse to even acknowledge that it exists.