Here’s another conflict of interest explained to those who “have to eat”

The duty of the Opposition is to scrutinise the government and find out every last detail of the shady deals into which it enters with business operators.

When one of those shady business operators retains the services of a member of parliament for the Opposition, and still more a deputy leader of the Opposition, he effectively gives him access to details about those shady deals and even gets him to work on the contracts and agreements which the Opposition would so dearly like to discover and publicise on behalf of the electorate.

But at the same time, the shady operator has bought this member of the Opposition’s silence because professional secrecy decrees that you can’t reveal anything you discover about your client in the course of your work for him. So what we have here is a situation in which, perversely, the shady operator has bought the deputy Opposition leader’s silence on the details which, as deputy Opposition leader he should be seeking out and speaking about, by giving him full access them as a lawyer who invoices for work done.

What Silvio Debono has done here is render the deputy Opposition leader unable at law to reveal details about Debono’s business, let alone seek out the details, expose them to the public and take them to pieces in parliament and the media. Demarco’s reasoning is that the rest of the party can do that and he won’t stand in their way. My response was that it’s his job to take Silvio Debono and his shady deals to pieces, not leave it up to everyone else while he takes Debono’s money and maintains professional secrecy.

Only the worst kind of bogans would think this is somehow appropriate for a Mediterranean context, or an improvement on the bay as it is now.