Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/803478
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 26 MARCH 2017 15 long as you introduce all the nec- essary checks and balances – you end up with strong governments with clear policy lines, without all the 'dealing' that goes on between parties. By 'culturally alien' I mean that we, as a people, might find it hard to make all the concessions that are necessary for that system to work. That is why I am so in favour of the two-party system, warts and all..." So would his proposed Constitu- tional reform retain the electoral system as is? "No. Our present electoral sys- tem is unfair, there can be no doubt about it. Smaller important parties like Alternattiva Demokra- tika are never really given a look- in. There is a very good argument that if we were working on a sin- gle district instead of 13 - as we do with European elections – the proportion of votes earned by a party like AD would translate into parliamentary representation: de- pending, of course, on how we set the national minimum threshold. That also forms part of the two- party system. What I would be against is a system that leaves us with four or five parties in parlia- ment. It would take us back to the period after the war until the early 1960s: with short-term govern- ments, all the infighting between parties, Mintoff against Boffa, etc. I don't think we're mature enough for that system to work..." The period he mentions dates back to pre-Independence Malta, over 70 years ago. If we were not mature enough then, and we are still not mature enough now... is Scicluna suggesting we will never evolve to that point at all? "I don't think it will ever change, because the truth of the matter is that the government of the day has so much to dish out to all those voters who expect something in return. It's how we are: we're too small, we all know each other. But that is precisely why the checks and balances are so vitally impor- tant. If we knew that the decision- making process is no longer in the hands of one man, but subject to additional tiers of scrutiny by ad- visory bodies... hopefully our sense of dependence on government would lessen." Until that time, the prime min- ister will continue hand-picking all the top public positions in the country. That includes the Police Commissioner, despite the fact that the police has its own inter- nal hierarchy of ranks and promo- tions. Shouldn't that system be ex- tended all the way to the top of the chain of command? Shouldn't the police appoint its own Commis- sioner independently? "When I was advisor to the prime minister on the AFM, I had to willy-nilly be conscious of what the police were doing. The police force is one of Malta's weakest in- stitutions at the moment, and part of the problem has been the inabil- ity to have proper succession for a line of future Commissioners. The AFM, until this administration, was really very good at that. There was always a clear line of succes- sion. Even back in 1996, you knew who the next two commanders were going to be. The police have never had that. It's an endemic problem, but a system which has the imprimatur of a Council of State would make all the differ- ence. At the moment, however, it is one of the weakest areas of our institutional structure..." As with the Constitution, 'police reform' is another of those issues that occasionally crop up but goes nowhere. "When the Fenech Adami ad- ministration came in in 1987, it re- ally failed to confront the issue. It just proved too difficult. There was no real root and branch reform. Attempts were made: I remem- ber when Alfred Sant was Prime Minister, he commissioned a very good report on the state of the po- lice. But it never saw the light of day, and in any case, Sant wasn't in power for very long afterwards..." All this seems to point towards an institutional stalemate. Any such reform – including all the others mentioned earlier – depends on the goodwill of the prime minister of the day. But the prime minister would automatically be diminish- ing his own clout and sphere of in- fluence by introducing checks and balances. From this perspective, it seems almost impossible for any real change to come about. So is there any way (apart, natu- rally, from armed revolution) of forcing these changes through within the current system... even against the government's wishes? "No, there isn't. But again, this is why it was so important to hold the convention on Constitutional reform, which was promised in both parties' manifestos. Yet it died a natural death, and we all know why. The Prime Minister chose Franco Debono to chair the convention; the Nationalists, un- derstandably, would not deal with Debono. That, in our judgement, was a mistake, because it was al- ways going to be a red rag to a bull. This could have been avoided had the Prime Minister chosen a less controversial figure to chair the convention – we had proposed former president George Abela – while Debono could have been made the secretary-general, the factotum responsible for the day- to-day running..." At the risk of asking a mischie- vous question: could it have been done on purpose? Was it Joseph Muscat's way of torpedoing a con- vention he didn't really want? "No, I think the Prime Minis- ter genuinely did want to hold the convention: but it reached a deadlock, and in the end, as tends to happen in such cases, it just be- came too difficult to do. All the same, I wouldn't be surprised if, in the next 10 months, we do get a convention: just to tick one of the boxes, and say it's been done. But then they wouldn't have to act on the results, would they? It's just tragic, really. All the things we are complaining about: the malad- ministration, the poor governance, positions of trust, all the rest of it... it all boils down to our inability to reform the Constitution." Interview Former director-general of the Today Policy Institute MARTIN SCICLUNA argues that the current state of governance and maladministration can only be addressed by comprehensive Constitutional reform crux of the matter