Constitution blues…

Honestly, though. Who would have ever guessed that a simple change of government was all we actually needed, for everyone – and I mean EVERYONE – to suddenly understand exactly what’s been wrong with our entire country for so goddamn long?

It’s the Constitution, naturally. Yes, indeed: that selfsame document that was drawn up in distant 1964 – a time when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, and one of them in particular (namely, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of England) was still the official head of our newly ‘Independent’ State. 

Interesting new definition of the word ‘independence’ there, I’ve always thought. And of course it got even better, for incredibly (and even more anachronistically)… we still had a flipping British Governor General to keep us all in check. That’s right, folks. The ‘independent’, ‘sovereign’ state of Malta was actually governed by a Brit for 10 whole years, under the terms of this astonishingly backward document called (if you please) the ‘Independence Constitution’ of 1964.

But in any case: give or take a few amendments over the years – including the all-important 1974 Republican reboot, which ironed out most of those bizarre anomalies…  it is still the same document (holes and all) that underpins our entire legislative framework as a European country today.

OK, we now have a President of our own, instead of a hereditary monarch… and we no longer urge God Almighty to take time out of his busy schedule to ‘save’ the British head of state every now and again. 

But the Constitution of Malta has still survived largely intact since an age when we wouldn’t even recognise our own country if we tripped up in it. Malta may have since joined the European Union, introduced divorce and civil unions (i.e., same-sex legal partnerships)… we may have removed Constitutionally entrenched prejudices against gays and other non-traditional minorities… but the entire codex of our national legislation is still rooted in an archaic document that holds (among other oddities) that ‘the religion of Malta is the Roman Catholic and Apostolic Faith’… despite such blatant evidence to the contrary.

There is of course a reason why our Constitution has simply not evolved in step with the rest of the country over the past 50 years. It can’t. It was so badly cobbled together, that amending it in any meaningful way has since proved all but impossible. 

Oh, don’t get me wrong: we talk about amending it… in fact, we have spent literally decades yapping away, like a chorus of little Chihuahuas, about the urgent need for a ‘Constitutional reform’. We have had any number of Presidential forums – including nice little business lunches at the island’s top hotels – in which we have discussed, and debated, and debated, and discussed…

But when it comes to actually amending the darn thing… forget it. Impossible. No can do. May as well amend the geographical position of the Maltese archipelago; or its climate, or the average intelligence quotient of its population. 

But this only reinforces the truly, spectacularly and bizarrely amazing thing about this state of affairs. The Constitution itself has barely changed at all in over 50 years… but it was only after March 2013 that we all suddenly started realising how seriously screwed up it really is. 

Nobody (or, well, hardly anybody) ever batted an eyelid about its many inconsistencies and glaring flaws during the entire 25 years the Nationalist government had spent studiously avoiding the need to update it in any way. Until, one fine day, Labour comes into power, and…hey presto! Suddenly everyone and his dog can see exactly where it needs to change, and why. And they all start banging on about it, too… all howling about how ‘incompetent’ the government is for dragging its feet over such an important reform.

Amazing, I must say. We should seriously consider changing government every other goddamn week. This way, maybe stuff will actually start happening for a change…

But let’s take a closer look at this sudden belated moment of self-awareness, shall we? Among the many things the Constitution governs as a legal document is the appointment (and, more contentiously, the removal) of members of the judiciary.

In the past week or so, Justice Minister Owen Bonnici has been in the doghouse over his latest round of appointments to the magistrates’ bench. I won’t rake up all the reasons why his decisions proved so thunderously unpopular. Let’s just say he carried on a proud Nationalist tradition of turning the judiciary into an unofficial political party ‘kazin’… where you have to be a family member of a government MP to even be considered for the role.

Of course, right there you can already see the pattern that has proved so utterly predictable in this country of ours. The PN spends a quarter of a century behaving in a certain way… and nobody ever so much as sneezes in its direction about it. Labour innocently tries doing exactly the same thing at the first opportunity… and suddenly, our national howls of protestation can be heard all the way from Antarctica.

But hey, nothing new. The really interesting thing is what happened next.

So the same PN which did absolutely bugger all about reforming the appointments system of the judiciary in the 25 years it had at its disposal to do just that… suddenly decides to kick into action. And what does it do? It presents a private member’s bill that proposes ‘reforming’ the judicial appointments mechanism… by officially turning it into a bipartisan decision.

Yes, that’s right. Having howled blue murder (literally) about ‘political appointments to the judiciary’, the Nationalist Party under Dr Simon Busuttil has just proposed a legal reform that would officially make all future judges and magistrates political appointees. How? Why, in the most primitive, backward way imaginable, of course (how else?) – by setting up a commission composed of (surprise, surprise) representatives of the Nationalist and Labour parties, on the basis that… well, if Labour and PN are happy with any given situation… who the heck is even left to complain?

In other words, the PN has proposed butchering the Constitutional mechanism for appointment of the judiciary in exactly the same way it already screwed up such entities as the Broadcasting Authority and MEPA. As long as the two parties get to call all the shots, and get to control every last grubby little power node this country has to offer… everything is just fine and dandy. Except, of course, for the rest of us down here at ground level. But hey, we don’t count. Only the two parties do, remember?

And of course, the truly beautiful thing in all this is that Labour can’t exactly complain too loudly. It takes a particular type of hypocrite to criticise others for proposing what you yourself have actually done. 

But the clincher is that this same squalid state of affairs also illustrates, with mathematical precision, exactly why our Constitution is such a hopelessly flawed, badly written and unworkable document in practice. Every last aspect of its entire being has been conceived a priori – and then tinkered with indefinitely – to keep the two parties firmly in control of the entire country. 

By extension, this also means that any other future amendment to this document (parts of which can only be amended by two-thirds majority, remember?) can and will only ever be amended to perpetuate these mistakes. In other words, to strengthen and extend the very flaws which make our Constitution such a hideously deformed and ugly piece of work in the first place.

Way to go, Labour and PN. Your efforts to diddle the rest of us out of our own country just never, ever cease to amaze me…