There’s no place in politics for Toni Abela, either

Toni Abela, deputy leader of the Labour Party, had the brass neck to say to the media yesterday that there is no place for Giovanna Debono, the former Gozo Minister, in politics, on the basis of the current allegations against her.

Ihappen to agree, because fiefdom-building is a recipe for trouble and is fundamentally undemocratic. It defeats the essential purpose of electoral democracy if we use the system to elect our personal representatives to do us personal favours. But that is the way it is used in Malta and in Gozo, more so.

But it is intolerable that somebody like Toni Abela would be the one to pass this judgement about a fellow politician. There is no place for him in politics either. As far as I can recall, Mrs Debono was never recorded discussing how she helped conceal from the public and the police the fact that somebody had been found carving up a white brick in the kitchen at the Hal Safi Labour Party Club. It’s amazing that Abela got away with that, but he did. He was recorded trying to justify his actions and asking what he was supposed to do – head to the police to report the matter, hoping to find a “Labour policeman” (his exact words) who would presumably help him out, running the risk of the whole thing exploding into the media, or have the thing chucked in the bin. The likelihood that something like that would be thrown into the bin is negligible. So it doesn’t take much imagination to work out that the carving-up simply moved off the premises to somewhere more convenient.

And Toni Abela is still in pol- itics, still legal adviser to Malta Today (which guarantees that he is one subject that newspaper will not investigate or pursue), still deputy leader of the Labour Party and, since that little bit of business with the white brick, even a member of the cabinet of government. It is astonishing, really, what low standards the Labour Party has and how very low the rest of us set the bar for that political outfit.

So Toni Abela is really not in a position to speak, but then neither are many of those around him in the Labour Party and government, beginning with his boss the leader and prime minister who is currently up to his neck in dubious deals, and those are just the ones we know about through pure chance and a couple of National Audit Office reports. Then there’s the boss’s sidekick Konrad Mizzi, who is supposed to be Minister for Health and Energy but has let health slip so far that Chris Fearne may as well be health minister himself for all we ever hear or see Mizzi involve himself with any health-related matters. Yes, Konrad Mizzi has no place in politics either, because of that business with his wife – paid to live in China as a representative of Malta Enterprise, but with no known address or telephone number where she may be contacted. He should resign, too, because of the utter mess with his party’s gas-fired power station, which was supposed to be up and running and instead is still being pulled this way and that on the drawing board. And the most recent reason why there is no place for Konrad Mizzi in politics is the National Audit Office report which pins him to the wall over his “ministerial discretion” in dealing directly with the dictators of Baku – one of the most corrupt and abusive regimes in the world – to the tune of millions of dollars.

While the Labour Party goes about with a microscope looking for motes in the eyes of those on the Opposition benches, the beams in its own are so great that they can’t see them. Perhaps Toni Abela should tell us whether he thinks there is a place in politics for his political buddy Emmanuel Mallia, he of the trigger-happy babysitter-cum-chauffeur, the mattress stuffed with half a million euros in cash, and the birthday parties hosted by Frankie Grima. Lots of people don’t think so, but there Mallia still is in parliament, hanging around and waiting to make his big return to the cabinet.