The Labour Party is still trying to restrict free speech with the fake story that it wants to “reduce bullying”. We had removed criminal libel under Joseph Muscat’s administration and now they want to introduce it again. Robert Abela failed to get his press reform in, now they are trying to re-introduce criminal libel via the back door.
It was the corrupt scumbag Edward Żammit Lewis who first proposed this law, and now the proposal has been inherited by a Labour Party upstart (elected via the gender-elective mechanism), Naomi Cachia. She says that we have to “balance “online harm with free speech”. In reality, this is what they mean: the astonishing abuse of the law to protect politicians from “being bullied”.
Her announcement that she will be presenting an “anti-bullying law” was diluted with some illusional problem that Labour came up with. The country is mired in rampant criminality and corruption, a housing crisis and serious risks to our public spending and economy, and Naomi Cachia is going to solve our problems by addressing the very immediate and serious problems with parliament’s procedure. She is also going to protect you from being bullied online so that no one can call you names and hurt your feelings, but all the while you will not afford the property, the government is a criminal organisation and you have to leave the country. At least we have LGBT rights, so we are progressive and you are allowed 3 grams of weed, but you can’t buy it, and if you have more you are fined or sent to prison. Progressive left.
I look forward to losing a number of cases in the Maltese courts over these proposed fascist laws only to overturn them later on appeal at the European Human Rights Court.
What a bunch of clowns.
Is this online bullying? https://movies-b26f.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/ravingrabbids.jpg
This is where members of parliament (MPs) installed in their post with the gender-balancing mechanism will come into their own; when putting forward contentious proposals.
In the Westminster system (which Malta copied), MPs represent the constituency they are elected from, something which we often forget in Malta, because, unlike the United Kingdom, which uses titles like ‘the Honourable Representative of Maidenhead’, we simply say things like ‘Onorevoli Clyde Caruana’, as if it is the MP in one’s personal capacity who is honourable, not the seat (constituency) they represent (it should really be ‘Onorovoli tat-Tmien Distrett’).
The reason why Rosianne Cutajar could be booted out from the Labour Parliamentary Group and stay on as an MP is precisely because she is ultimately accountable to her electors, not the political party she sits with in parliament. As an MP, the people hire you in one election and they fire you in the next if they do not like your performance or if someone they prefer comes along. You can vote against your own party or switch party if you believe that is what your constituents would want you to do and what is best for your district.
All this goes out of the window with the gender mechanism. Parliament now has a large group of MPs handpicked by the two political parties to represent, well, those parties. How very convenient to have MPs beholden to their political parties and their leaders directly rather than to voters! What a perfect group of people to do your bidding!
Just to make it clear, having a house of representatives which more closely reflects the demographics of the country is a worthy cause. However, the principle was abused by the Labour and Nationalist parties to grab more power. The obvious thing for them to do was to have more women on their ballots and fewer men. Instead, they subverted the logic of the Westminster system while bloating parliament with a large number of unelected representatives. Now they want to do the same thing for local councils. Shame.