Goodbye, cruel year

In retrospect, 2016 turned about to be a little like the Grinch who stole Christmas. It took away a lot that was dear to us all (David Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen, Gene Wilder) and some other things we only realised were dear to us once they were gone (George Michael, Pete Burns, the guy who played R2D2 in Star Wars, etc)... and also a couple of things few us even knew we still had: like Zsa Zsa Gabor, who died last week (though I was under the impression she had actually been dead for years).

And what did 2016 give us in return?  Donald Trump. The promise of a partial Spice Girls reunion in 2017. Glenn Bedingfield’s blog. A Gieh Ir-Repubblika award for Freddie Portelli...

Sorry, 2016, but that’s just not good enough. You owe us, dude. And there’s still four days for you to start paying back. The very least you could come up with is a reincarnation of Freddie Mercury or Elvis Presley to make up for a few of the rock legends you killed since last January. It doesn’t matter that we’d have to wait around 20 years to actually hear them perform. It’s not like we have anything else to look forward to in the meantime, anyway.

Ah, but that’s the thing about years, isn’t it? We all know the cost of 2016 in terms of what it actually took away – the people who died, the dreams that ended, the events that unfolded – but we know nothing at all about what the passing year actually left its wake. Who knows? Maybe 2016 wasn’t such a cruel year after all. Maybe for every musical legend it mowed down with its scythe, it also planted a whole new generation of Mozarts, McCartneys and Glenn Millers, all waiting for their first break.  Perhaps maternity wards all round the world are now overflowing with newborn little David Bowies, Miles Davises and Christopher Lees, and we just don’t know it yet... nor will we for a few decades at least.

And that’s just music. Who’s to say 2016 didn’t also being to light the future men and women who might actually one day save the entire planet? For all we know, the scientist who will one day hit on a solution to global warming, or end our dependence on fossil fuels, might have just been born somewhere. The future discoverer of a cure for cancer might be taking his or her first uncertain steps even as we speak. Or the next great political unifier might have only just deposited his or her first solid dump into a diaper...

There, now that’s an encouraging thought. From the poop of babes, a new hope for the future is born. Could almost be the strap-line for the next Star Wars instalment. So come on, folks. Let’s not be too hard on poor old 2016. You never know: it might still have one or two surprises up its sleeve.

OK, so much for my attempt at forced optimism.  (It was, let’s face it, a pretty shit year when all is said and done). Meanwhile, here are a few of the other things that didn’t quite manage to survive the ravages of 2016... though whether they will be missed or not is another question:

Malta’s electoral system

2016 can add to its hit-list our ‘single-transferable vote’ system, which – not unlike Dead or Alive’s Pete Burns – died this year after complications arising from excessive cosmetic surgery.

Even long before it finally kicked the bucket, the question of whether Malta’s single transferable vote system was ‘dead or alive’ had been raging for decades. Originally, the idea was to forge as accurate a system of parliamentary representation as possible, in the context of a (now defunct) political landscape characterised by several small parties. Once the number of parties was whittled down to only two, however, this otherwise logical  system no longer served its original purpose... and because consensus was all along required to upgrade the entire system to one which actually works, the necessary Constitutional changes could never be effected.

Instead, we only tinkered with it here and there... performing sporadic surgical interventions to ensure that Malta’s electoral law kept reflecting an artificial two-party structure which it was never designed to cater for. Over the years, the system was cannibalised to such a degree that it no longer even made sense: voters gave their preferences to candidates in numerical order... but since 1987, the first-count votes have always been counted on the basis of the chosen party, not candidate. And whenever the result couldn’t be hammered into the shape the two parties’ wanted, they simply resorted to dishing out unelected seats to make up the required parliamentary majority.

It was in 2016, however, that this trend of cosmetically modifying the STV system (without ever actually fixing it) was carried several operations too far. Last month, the Constitutional Court ruled that the Nationalist Opposition had been denied a seat by a counting mistake... and rather than restore the result to its intended configuration, the Constitutional Court ordered the Electoral Commission to simply increase the number of seats in parliament to an unprecedented 71.

So we now have four more seats than the original quotas would have yielded. This forces us to confront the fact that parliamentary seats, in the current set-up, are no longer won through democratic elections at all... but instead are pulled out of a magical top-hat like so many bunny-rabbits, on the basis of a logic that no one seems capable of even understanding any more.

Looks pretty dead to me. All that remains is to erect a tombstone with the words: ‘Elective Parliamentary Representation in Malta, 1964 -2016. RIP.’

‘Malta Taghna lkoll’

The fatal signs were perhaps visible long before 2016, but this was nonetheless the year when the illusion that Labour represented a ‘different’ and more ‘inclusive’ political vision for the country finally bit the dust. The Panama Papers revealed that even in its first few days in office, the incoming administration had already set up the financial structures intended to receive and conceal money that it was clearly expecting, from sources it clearly wanted to keep hidden. And the racket just happened to involve the energy sector, too... i.e., the same sector that had already plunged the Nationalist administration into a quagmire of corruption and scandal.

This, mind you, at a time when Labour was promising an ’earthquake of change’. Well, it certainly delivered on the ‘earthquake’ front –  since March 2013, we have had nothing but a series of tremors and shockwaves (mostly concerning shady land transfer deals and blatantly political public appointments) – but... where’s the change? It’s still a classic case of ‘same old, same old’... the only difference concerns the identity of the people at the helm.

The PN as a credible alternative

Speaking of ‘people at the helm’... the chances of those being Nationalists any time soon could well be another of 2016’s casualties. Since its electoral rout in 2013, the PN has unaccountably chosen to keep up its nasty habit of simply bashing anyone or anything – including their own – that doesn’t chime in exactly with their tune.  How they expect to win an election by insulting and alienating the very category whose support they actually need the most – i.e., former Nationalists who abandoned the party in droves before the last election – is at best a mystery. But until 2016, it was possible to argue that this was more a case of political short-sightedness and inexperience, rather than a concerted, deliberate (and doomed) electoral strategy in its own right.

As of this year, however, such illusions are no longer possible. The PN now selects its ‘star candidate’s precisely on the basis of how often and how vulgarly they debase and demean their political adversaries. ‘Belching out insults’ is now the standard Nationalist way of doing politics.

Meanwhile, 2016 also brought with it a series of reminders of just how poorly-placed the Nationalist Opposition actually is, to be belching and barfing about ‘transparency’ and ‘good governance’. The latest National Audit reports into government transactions dating back to 2011 seem to be a mirror image of every scandal the PN has shrieked about since 2013.  Consider how closely the following quotes echo the findings of the Gaffarena inquiry, for instance:

“Failure in terms of good governance, to varying degrees, is a recurring theme that emerged” from the NAO’s investigation of the transfer of land at Ta’ L-Istabal, Qormi. The same inquiry revealed an “element of political pressure” which led the Auditor to conclude that “the facts of the case render immediately evident that pressure was in fact exerted to the detriment of Government’s interests.”

And these are the people who intend to clean up the governance mess made by Muscat? Pull the other one...