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maltatoday | SUNDAY • 15 DECEMBER 2024 4 INTERVIEW Rebecca Buttigieg: 'We changed this country's social tapestry in just 10 years' Rebecca Buttigieg believes the Labour government still has fire in its belly to continue carrying out social reforms as it has done over the past 10 years. The parliamentary secretary for equal- ity and reforms says the government's bold reform to regularise cannabis use is still a works in progress. She says there is an ongoing evaluation of the cannabis reform and government is studying the possibility of allowing us- ers to smoke inside the associations to minimise the need of people to smoke outdoors, which is illegal. She also tells me that next year she will be publishing a White Paper on euthana- sia, which was an electoral pledge. I sit down with Buttigieg in her Val- letta office which has a playpen inside it for when her seven-month-old baby ac- companies her to work. In the small talk before the interview gets underway, we discuss the difficulties of juggling family life and work. Later in the interview she tells me her experience with motherhood has opened her eyes to certain issues she was unaware of. "In parliament we do not have a breast- feeding room," she says when I ask about the effectiveness of the higher number of women MPs in the aftermath of the gender parity mechanism used in the last election. "This is an issue that wom- en MPs would raise and we are putting pressure." Pressed on how effective women MPs have been, Buttigieg says today there are many more women chairing parliamen- tary committees than there were before but she believes it is still too early to gauge the impact of the mechanism. "We have to see in the next election whether peo- ple will vote for women; whether women will be able to reach the 40% threshold without the mechanism being used." Just out of the 16 days of activism against domestic violence, I ask Buttigieg about the phenomenon. She says Mal- tese society is still too patriarchal and more needs to be done at a cultural and educational level. "As a government we have implement- ed most of the recommendations pro- posed by the Valenzia Report but we still have a lot more to do because it is never enough," she tells me. On electronic tagging, the parliamenta- ry debate on the law that will make its in- troduction possible will continue in Jan- uary but she is careful not to commit on a timeframe for eventual implementation. "As soon as possible… but we also have to be sure that we have the resources to implement the system because it would be irresponsible to give victims a false sense of safety," she says. Parliamentary Secretary Rebecca Buttigieg is one of the younger Cabinet members and responsible for reforms. She sits down with Kurt Sansone to discuss abortion, cannabis use, euthanasia and the mechanism that ensures more women make it to parliament at election time.