Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/388498
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 28 SEPTEMBER 2014 Opinion 25 midlife crisis utterly to foresee this eventuality. It just assumed that the party with the most seats would automati- cally also have the most votes, as is meant to be. From the outset, then, it was a document rooted in the political realities of its own day, incapable of even conceiving that those realities might one day change. This same flawed worldview has left its paw-prints all over our Constitution. For instance, it defines us as a Catholic country because that is how Malta saw itself in 1964… and also – more worryingly – because the age that produced it was characterised by fierce clashes between the Church and the Labour Party. Article 2 proclaims the 'Roman Apostolic Catholic Religion' as the 'religion of Malta', and accords it the 'right and duty to teach right from wrong'. Under the micro- scope, however, this turns out to be an uneasy compromise forged by the overweening influence of Archbishop Michael Gonzi over Borg Olivier… and the overriding fear of Mintoff and his celebrated 'six points'. At no point was any considera- tion given to how uncomfortably this same article would sit, against the backdrop of a Malta which de- fied its supposedly official Catholic religion by voting yes to divorce in 2011. But back to the 1987 amendment. The second flaw is that the change that was supposed to rectify this error, somehow managed to make the same mistake again. The brokers of that amendment only looked at the realities of their own day – i.e., two monolithic par- ties occupying both sides of the House, indefinitely – and failed to predict a situation when three or more parties might get elected to parliament. The net result is that the elector- ate has been blackmailed in every election since 1992. You've all heard the drill before: if a third party gets elected, the Constitu- tional mechanism won't kick in, and we could be left with 1981 happening all over again. In a nutshell, then, the grand achievement of this grand bargain was to simply defer the problem to a permanent future. So long as it doesn't happen in this elec- tion (1987)… and so long as the resulting tinkering works out to both parties' advantage in the long term… well, the rest can go to hell. Exactly how anyone can rec- oncile this with Borg Olivier's earlier dream of a Constitution which 'safeguards the rights and freedoms of the individuals composing the nation' is anyone's guess. Meanwhile, the amendment itself does not even resolve the issue. It simply whitewashes over it. Even with the 1987 amendment in place, the same 'perverse' result can still materialise. Only this time, the Constitution can create special, magic seats – the exact number needed to have a one-seat majority, every single time! – and simply hand them over to the party that needs them. But we still have a system which is spectacularly prone to gerry- mandering, and in which a shock- ing number of votes gets wasted in each election. The amendment doesn't mend that at all. You can almost pick out any problem area at random and find the same underlying pattern. As we all saw in the recent case of Mr Justice Farrugia Sacco – and before him Tonio Depasquale – the exist- ing Constitutional mechanism for the removal of judges just doesn't work. Without even going into the merits of whether the above-men- tioned judges should have been removed or not, we can already see how a giant spanner has been jammed into the works: a judge can only be removed by a two-thirds majority in parliament; and that can only happen when the two par- ties agree… which in this scenario means never. In this particular case, how- ever, the intrinsic irony becomes spectacular. The whole point of the 'two-thirds majority' business was to protect the independence of the judiciary. Yet in practice, indi- vidual judges are still appointed directly by the justice minister, and can still be spared impeachment by a decision taken by a political party. Their rise or fall is therefore dictated by purely political forces. How on earth, then, can anyone in his right mind describe Malta's judiciary as 'outside political influ- ence'? Elsewhere, politicians proved unable to anticipate a future in any way different from their own present… so they bequeathed to us a neutrality clause which still refers (indirectly) to the Soviet Union. Yes, that's right, the same USSR which officially ceased to exist two years after that clause was inserted into the Constitu- tion… All it would take to correct this particular mistake is a minor re-wording of half a phrase… yet for this we need negotiation and horse-trading between the same two parties that have consistently placed their own self-interest above that of the entire country for 50 whole years. So when the cookie crumbles, it is all well and good to sit back and talk about Constitutional reform like it's one of the things you'd like to do "when you're older". But if experience is anything to go by, it either won't happen at all… or, worse still, it will happen in such a way as to crystallise our own, short-sighted political realities into a document that future gen- erations will find hard to change... and even then, only to ensure that the interests of the same two par- ties responsible for all this mess continue to be paramount forever. Much simpler, then, to do what individuals do when experienc- ing a midlife crisis. Never mind reforming the Constitution, and creating a fairer society for all, or anything like that. Buy a sports car, start up a rock and roll band, and to hell with everything… You can almost pick out any problem area at random and find the same underlying pattern. As we all saw in the recent case of Mr Justice Farrugia Sacco – and before him Tonio Depasquale – the existing Constitutional mechanism for the removal of judges just doesn't work