A leap in quality… but not in debating skills

There was an awkward moment towards the end of this evening's debate when - echoing the classic images of the "pigs and the humans" from the end of Orwell's Animal Farm - one could almost look from the Labour participants to their PN counterparts and back again... and not be at all sure which side was which.

This was in part attributable to the restrictions imposed by the Broadcasting Authority. So far these rules have undeniably raised the courtesy levels in political debates - we can now actually hear each individual speaker without straining our ears above a hubbub of interruptions - but this improvement came at a cost.

With speakers now exchanging pleasantries instead of the traditional insults, at moments the whole affair came across more like internal bickering between rival candidates within the same party, than an all-out confrontation between two wannabe governments ahead of an election in four weeks' time. And apart from robbing the debate of any sense of urgency, it also slowed the tempo down almost to the level of a kindergarten lesson.

A second reason for the uncanny resemblance between the two sides was that all four speakers were essentially from Nationalist stables. On the government's side sat Simon Busuttil (PN deputy leader) and Tonio Fenech (finance minister) - both of whose PN pedigrees are hardly in doubt - and on the other, former Labour minister Gavin Gulia and first-time candidate Adrian Meli: both originally 'converts' from PN backgrounds.

Not only that, but with a few exceptions here and there, the debate was overwhelmingly about the Nationalist Party's performance in government over the past five years... and as Busuttil constantly reminded us, this was largely because the PL (not having yet launched its own manifesto) brought hardly any proposals of its own to the table.

But onto the substance of the discussion. Busuttil was first to take the floor, and - PN programme in hand - proceeded to treat us to choice morsels from the manifesto: reiterating promises of special incentives for 25-year-olds to start up their own businesses, including two years' (three, in case of 'women and Gozitans') tax exemption; annual sick-leave extended to also parents of sick children, and various others.

Placing conspicuous emphasis on the word 'haddiem' - a distinct echo of the rhetoric of Old Labour, which stands in stark contrast with Labour's conscious effort to glorify the middle class - the overall impression he projected of the PN was that of a latter-day workers' party: one which employees and employers alike can trust to create the right condition for jobs, and to continue weathering the international economic storm (a metaphor to which he would emphatically return for his 'grand finale') as it has successfully done  in the past term.

This was the point where Reno Bugeja - sadly reduced from the journalist who asks all the right questions, to the human equivalent of a conductor's metronome - passed the mike over the Gavin Gulia (oh, and Tonio Fenech please note: it's 'Gavin'... not 'Kevin').

Taking his cue from the PN's choice of debating topic, Gulia had a little fun deflating Busuttil's claims of a 'qualitative leap forward' in past years. This was not the first time the PN had promised such a leap, he began - and producing several cuttings of old (mostly PN) newspapers, he enumerated numerous identical promises from past manifestos that never quite saw the light of day: the White Rocks sports complex, Smart City, the Carnival village, the Ta' Qali crafts village, wind-farms, golf courses, and so on.

Quality leaps, he concluded with some style, were things the PN always promised before every election, only to deliver the opposite.

But this only gave Tonio Fenech - by far the most polished of the four public speakers, it must be said - a useful point of entry for some repartee of his own. Gulia, he began, was arguably the last person to talk about 'credibility' and undelivered promises... having once sat alongside former PM Alfred Sant, and promised to remove VAT before the 1996 election.

Yet VAT was not 'removed', Fenech added. It was renamed and reinvented, and the Labour government Gulia once formed part of had to introduce a 'rain of 33 new taxes' to compensate for the gargantuan fiscal mess the short-lived Labour government managed to concoct.

In what constituted the harshest criticism of the evening, Fenech accused past Labour governments of being 'synonymous with failure'... especially in the employment sector. The PN, on the other hand, has a track record o boast about: even the European Commission gave his own government a 'certificate' of economic stability.

Next came Adrian Meli - pharmacist, and a former PN voter who has registered as a Labour candidate - and again his contribution was largely reactive to Fenech's boast... though rooted almost exclusively in his own experience as a practitioner in the medical field.

Far from a litany of successes, Meli claimed that the PN had systematically failed the country's health sector. The PN is very good at coming up with slogans, he said, but not much else. Rattling a list of woes in healthcare - from waiting lists that just get longer, to government's apparent inability to address a shortage of medicines - Meli accused the PNof having created a culture whereby people almost expect inefficiency and delays from government. Under PN governments Malta had grown used to hospitals taking 13 years to build, while sea passenger terminals take 10 years and more. Is this what the PN meant by quality leap, he asked?

Looked back on there were no obvious winners or losers when Bugeja brought the discussion to a close. For what it's worth the following are my own personal verdicts.

Best speaker of the night? Undeniably Tonio Fenech: composed, calm and precise in practically every instance (except a small problem remembering names)... and his performance was only marginally ruined by an unaccountable slip in standards, when he produced a 'Mail Online' (!) article about France's President Hollande to discredit socialism in general (and, by proxy, the Labour Party).

Simon Busuttil produced no memorable one-liners - nor gaffes, for that matter - but nonetheless proved fairly dependable throughout. His finest moment (which he even offered up for One News commentary) was a resonant 'mea culpa', clearly aimed at reassuring Nationalists that the party had indeed learnt from its mistakes in the last term.

Gulia, on the other hand, seemed on comfortable territory only when dissecting PN failures... but even here I found him rather repetitive throughout. There's a limit to how often you can pinpoint the same detail - i.e., the 2008 electoral promises that were never fulfilled. And besides: while we can all agree that the PN scored its fair share of own goals, this in itself does not automatically make Labour the better of the two strike-forces.

If you ask me, the most interesting moments by far - if not exactly the most coherent - came from Adrian Meli: who almost waxed emotional when rounding on his adversaries and reminding them that he was "once proud to be part of the PN' in a now forgotten era under Fenech Adami.

But even this tack - while making a welcome change from what was otherwise a flat monotone throughout - ultimately tells us more about the PN than about Labour. And this is another reason why I feel that - when the chips are down - this particular round has to go to the PN... even if only just.