Better late than never

I’ve always considered that saying to be kind of… um… stupid, really. Works well enough for most occasions, I’ll grant you. But is it really the case that everything is always ‘better late than never’? 

Off the top of my head, I can think of dozens of instances when the clean opposite is true. Your next water and electricity bill, for instance. Which would you prefer: receiving it a few weeks after expected… or not receiving it at all? 

Or how about the next scheduled terrorist attack by ISIS? An indefinite postponement sounds slightly better than a slight organisational delay, don’t you think? 

Same goes for the next outbreak of Ebola. Or the next album by One Direction (depending which of these calamities strikes first). Or, for that matter, your once-in-a-lifetime appointment with the Grim Reaper.

Make no mistake: the list of things which are very emphatically ‘better never than late’ is almost literally endless.

But still… for everything else, there’s Mastercard. Some things are indeed welcome… even though they come far too late to be of any practical use. And I can’t help but notice that one of these things seems to keep recurring with spectacular predictability in this country of ours. It’s the way political parties of all hues suddenly master all the intricacies of how to actually govern… and how to do it pretty damn well, too… only when they’re no longer actually in government themselves.

Weird, huh? And yet it’s always the same. A political party could spend a lifetime in government, and rarely (if ever) come up with a single innovative proposal concerning ‘good governance’. And yet, give that same party just a couple of years in opposition, and… wham, bam, thank you, ma’am! Policy proposals suddenly come pouring out of that party’s every orifice, making you wonder how it never came up with any of these ideas in the 25 years it had to actually implement them.

Oh, and before you think I’m having a go at Simon Busuttil for realising what ‘good governance’ is all about only now – which I am, naturally – it works just as well for all political parties everywhere. Labour is an unusually good example. It had to spend 25 years in Opposition before realising that it could only ever regain the electorate’s trust by convincing it of its ‘good governance’ credentials. Then, once in power, it took only two years to spectacularly forget 90% of the ‘good governance’ promises it had made to actually get there.

Who knows? Maybe the next time Labour gets unceremoniously booted into Opposition by the same electorate, it will once again suddenly remember all the things it was supposed to have done when in government for all that time. And once again, it will make a public commitment to do all those things when re-elected.

Only it would be different this time round. This time, those promises would be kept. Cross my heart and hope to die, etc…

In the meantime, of course, another party will have come into power on a whole raft of similar ‘good governance’ promises… and it, too, will spectacularly forget all about those commitments within a couple of years.

And this cycle will go on indefinitely, forever, without the slightest variation or exception. And people will carry on supporting these two parties with increasingly mindless fervour… seemingly blind to the glaring fact that they simply metamorphose into each other every few years.

Hmm. You know what? I think I’ve changed my mind about that whole ‘appointment with the Grim Reaper’ business. Enduring this endless cycle of farcically predictable Damascene conversions is bad enough over the course of a single lifetime. An eternity of it? No, thank you very much. Under the circumstances, even Death would have to be admitted into the ‘better late than never’ category…

But in any case: while we’re still alive, we may as well take a look at the latest list of promises that (this time) will definitely be kept if the Nationalist Party gets back into power. Cross my heart, hope to die, ‘the past is not a guarantee of the future’, etc.

Yeah, right. Still: I’ve given the proposals a once-over, and what can I say? They’re brilliant. So good, in fact, that with all these policies implemented, there wouldn’t actually be any further need for either government or opposition at all. The internal system of checks and balances would be so finely tuned, that it could just be left to run indefinitely on its own steam.

In fact, it would probably have to. Consider Busuttil’s proposal that “the President of the Republic is to be appointed by a two-thirds majority of the House instead of by a simple majority.”

According to the document unveiled by the PN this week, the “two-thirds rule” would also apply to “persons appointed to high public office … such as the principal permanent secretary, the Commissioner of Police, the Commander of the Armed Forces, the Central Bank Governor, the chief statistician at the NSO, as well as Broadcasting Authority members, the Public Service Commission and the Employment Commission…”

Sheer bloody genius, if you ask me. You will, of course, have observed that practically all the public offices listed above are institutions with which the Opposition party has variously taken umbrage over the years. Busuttil himself has in fact called for the resignation of the Police Commissioner and at least one BA member, while also publicly disputing the NSO’s statistics, and complaining repeatedly about Broadcasting Authority imbalance. 

What better way to ensure that these offices comply with the Opposition’s expectations, than to see to it that none of them actually exists in the first place?

We are, after all, talking about the same ‘two-thirds rule’ that applies to the removal of judges and magistrates. A brief glance at its usage over the past five decades will result in a successful application rate of… erm, zero, I believe. Not once (in the handful of times a two-thirds majority was demanded) did the two sides of the House ever agree on the matter for long enough to actually remove a sitting judge or magistrate. 

How, then, are they expected to ever agree on the appointment of such extremely sensitive positions as Police Commissioner?

Yes, of course, it would be great if it actually worked in practice. Would also be kind of cool if all IS militants were to suddenly metamorphose into a bunch of hippie peaceniks brandishing flowers instead of bloodied machetes. 

But both scenarios are equally unlikely to happen in practice, and we all know roughly why.

As for the President of the Republic… well, just consider that we failed, as a nation, to even concur on her choice of dress for a meeting with the Queen of England. Never mind that it was a spectacularly awful choice of attire in itself… the fact remains that the President could have worn anything under the sun, and the reaction would have been identical. Reviled by roughly half the nation, and defended by roughly the other half.

There are no ‘two-thirds’ in this equation. It is all or nothing, like every other aspect of Maltese political thought.

Extend the same level of choice to the role of the Presidency itself… and I can assure you all, this country would never elect another President again. No Central Bank Governor either, nor Commander of the Armed Forces. With one modest ‘good governance’ proposal, the PN would have wiped practically all Malta’s governing bodies and institutions clean off the map. 

That, at any rate, would be the long-term effect if the proposal were ever actually implemented. In the short-term, the measure would lead to interminable Parliamentary impasses and Constitutional crises, as one or both sides of the House avail of this glaring loophole to simply sabotage any public appointment at will. 

It would be like the failed attempt to impeach former Judge Lino Farrugia… only all the time, and with the opposite result. It would be impossible to ever appoint, not remove, people to public office.

All of which, of course, amounts to a spectacular guarantee of good governance all around. After all, what better way to ensure that Malta’s institutions are forever free from corruption… than to simply destroy those institutions utterly, so that there is nothing left to actually corrupt?

Like I said earlier: it is a vision of impressive political genius, unrivalled by anything ever proposed before. Such a shame it will never actually happen… for the simple reason that the PN will have to get into power to actually implement it… and we all know from experience what happens to a political party’s ‘good governance’ commitments, when it is no longer in Opposition.

So perhaps it really is a case of ‘better late than never’ after all. Even if it will be far likelier ‘never’ than ‘late’.