Why is the Labour Party still raising funds?

Australia Hall: one of the greatest acts of corruption and abuse perpetrated by Joseph Muscat’s government

The Labour Party held a fundraising marathon yesterday and raised almost 200,000 euros. But it’s time to ask why the party is still having to raise funds.

Haven’t China, various ‘tender-winning’ consortiums (let’s not mention names), real-estate speculators, Jordanian camel-traders, dictator friends of the prime minister’s personal consultant Shiv Nair and the weirdos in Baku put enough in its war-chest already?

And what about the fact that the (Labour) government called off its case for the repossession of Australia Hall, allowing the (Labour) party to strike a deal on it, worth millions, with yet more property speculators?

It has taken the return of the Labour Party – in its full, corrupt glory – to government to remind us just how weak institutions are in this country, and that for 25 years under Nationalist governments it wasn’t the strength of our institutions that kept us safe from abuse and corruption, but the basic decency of those in government.

After all, as we know now (and many of us suspected or knew then) John Dalli did pretty much as he pleased and Michael Falzon (the PN minister) and Ninu Zammit were lying brazenly to the prime minister, their cabinet colleagues and the electorate, squirrelling large amounts of money away in secret bank accounts in Switzerland, with Zammit then having the brass neck to secure a tax amnesty on his hidden 3.3 million euros, from Joseph Muscat’s government.

I’ve said it repeatedly and I’m going to say it again: democracy is so weak in Malta because Maltese society doesn’t understand it. It was literally forced on us by a thoroughly alien culture ‘for our own good’ and never fought for as it was elsewhere in Europe.

We make so much fuss about the ‘Sette Giugno’ riot as though it was some kind of civil rights uprising, but it wasn’t. It was about the price of bread. Typical: put cheap bread in a Maltese person’s mouth and money in his pocket, and he’s content to live with corruption and abuse, minding his own business and keeping his head down. How very primitive.