Muscat denies any ‘ongoing discussions’ with Franco Debono

Opposition leader Joseph Muscat this morning denied that the Labour Party held discussions with Nationalist MP Franco Debono on the motions the Opposition presented on justice and home affairs.

Interviewed on One Radio by PBS journalist Sergio Mallia, Muscat said: "We didn't have any discussions with Franco Debono. We are worried about the home affairs and it is our agenda to address these problems. This has nothing to do with Debono."

Debono himself had been very critical of the justice and home affairs, an insistence that eventually led to the creation of two separate ministries.

Referring to the re-opening of the Nicholas Azzopardi inquiry - the man who was injured and later succumbed to his injuries while under police custody - and the ongoing inquiries of other cases that had involved direct police action, Muscat said it was worrying that serious questions were being raised. 

"Such questions cloud the police's work and such inquiries should not take forever to be concluded," he said.

Last week, Caritas presented its study, 'A Minimum Budget for a Decent Living'. In one of its recommendations, Caritas suggested that the minimum wage should increase from around €150 to €180 per week.

Muscat said that while he agreed that the minimum wage should increase, yet it should be part of a whole process.

"It's useless increasing the minimum wage if the costs go up as well. Before the minimum wage is increased, one should first start reducing costs. But nothing would have changed if the minimum wage is increased and workers are then employed on a self-employed basis," he said.

Muscat insisted that one of the problems to address poverty in Malta, was to eliminate precarious work.

"Government should serve as an example to help eliminate precarity, by setting obligations and prerequisites when awarding tenders. It should guarantee that workers employed with the winning bidder have adequate salaries and their work contract is just," Muscat said.

He added that he was satisfied to see that suggestions in the Caritas report were also based on the living wage - a concept pushed forward by Muscat himself.

Answering questions on the bird hunting and trapping controversy, Muscat said that a Labour government would make sure that "Maltese hunters and trappers would getting nothing less or nothing more than their European counterparts".

The Opposition leader also said that he was receiving several letters from "scared" workers informing him of an ongoing scaremongering campaign in various sectors, telling workers that if a Labour government is elected, they would lose their jobs.

He also said that there was an ongoing petition at Enemalta's Delimara power station, where workers "were being forced to sign a petition or else they would end up in the human resource's bad books".

Speaking on the budget cuts, Muscat said government wouldn't have been forced to reduce its spending by €40 million if it had been "honest" from the beginning.

"We had told government that the budget was unrealistic and that it deceived the taxpayer. Government hadn't been honest with the public. Then, after the European Commission told it to reduce the government's cost, the finance ministry came out insisting that government was 'preparing' for a difficult year," Muscat said.

"You know what's ironic? That government carried its cuts in the education and health sector, yet no cuts were registered in the budget for the building of the new parliament and the roofless theatre."

Muscat added that he had been "shocked" by statements made by Health Minister Joe Cassar that he had returned €7.2 million because the funds had been "extra".

Reacting to the doctors' accord signed in 2007 between the health department, under then Health Minister Louis Deguara, Muscat said collective agreements should not be signed on the eve of a general election.

Criticism on the agreement was raised this week after Deguara described it as "flawed" and said that "orders from above" had forced him to sign the doctors' accord.