Nationalist MP Eve Borg Bonello said that she wouldn’t be surprised if the gender quota mechanism is removed before its 20-year sunset clause, especially after the results of the last general election.
The gender mechanism was introduced in the last election to allow for a larger participation of women in Parliament, with a sunset clause provision which means that, unless Parliament changes its position, the mechanism expires after 20 years.
The mechanism kicks in if the under-represented sex (historically, in Malta, fewer women have been elected) makes up less than 40% of all the seats in Parliament, with up to 12 candidates of the said under-represented sex possibly being added to the House as a result. However, this only occurs if two parties have been elected into Parliament, and not more.
Following the results of the last election, 12 women were added to the list of MPs, bringing up the total number to a record 79. Borg Bonello was one of these women who benefited from the mechanism.
But she has openly been against the gender-balancing mechanism even before she made it to the House of Representatives. In an interview with The Malta Independent on Sunday, she explains that she holds the same opinion now.
She said that the election results are evidence that the mechanism worked against what it was originally set for and essentially the Maltese voters opted to vote for men knowing that women would have been elected anyway.
A few weeks after the last general election an international monitoring board from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) questioned the impact of the gender-corrective mechanism and said that the mechanism should be revisited before the next election.
The Labour Party had said in its 2022 general election manifesto that it believes that “the principle of strengthening equal participation between the sexes should also be extended on a local basis with a mechanism which is adequate for local councils”.
Whether a gender-corrective mechanism is to be used in June’s local council election is still to be decided. Last week, The Malta Independent on Sunday reported that the government is currently evaluating the situation pertaining to gender representation at local council level with a view of introducing measures which would aim to increase this representation come next June. But no decision has yet been taken.
Borg Bonello is of the opinion that to have more women in Parliament, the position needs to become on a full-time basis.
She said that it’s already hard for MPs to “balance between their career and their position in Parliament from 4-7pm from Monday till Wednesday”. Borg Bonello, who at 18 years of age was the youngest to be elected in 2022, is still a University student, where she is reading law.
Apart from the societal expectations, which also put extra pressure on women, the PN MP said that she also cannot stand being referred to as a female MP. “I never hear my male colleagues being referred to as male MPs,” she said.
Borg Bonello was also asked about her experience as an MP so far, and although she said that the transition was smooth for her because she had always been politically active, she is conscious of the sacrifices she would have to make.
She is aware that, being an MP, she has to be on her best behaviour everywhere and every time. “You are not an MP only when you’re in Parliament, you’re an MP in whatever you do,” she said.
However, after attending a training session organised for the parliamentary association for new MPs, she said that when compared to other countries, locally “we are left at the deep end”.
The MP, once again, tied her argument to the need for MPs to hold a full-time position, as apart from giving MPs more resources to better represent their constituencies, it would “also cut blurred lines… much less tolerance to corruption and to MPs being CEOs of this board and that”.
Borg Bonello said that for her being an MP is a learning curve. “You are constantly reminded of how much you don’t know; be it in our legislative process and how things are done on paper versus in real life but also the humbling moment of when you knock on the door and face problems which, if otherwise, you would not have come across.”
The young MP, who has recently had public cleanliness added to climate change in her shadow portfolio, was also asked about the PN’s aspirations.
She said that the current target is to get good results in the MEP and local council elections. Asked whether the PN should reconsider the position of PN leader Bernard Grech if the party were to get bad results, she said that there is currently no vacancy at leadership level. Moreover, she said that after the last general election there was a democratic process within the PN in which the general council voted and showed its confidence in Grech.
Referring to climate change, Borg Bonello said that she has some upcoming projects, which will be released very soon.
She will also be contacting the Climate Change Authority when it will be set up.
Despite the government declaring a climate emergency back in 2019, she said that the matter is not being taken seriously enough.
“There are a lot of things that could be done and I’ll be speaking of quite a few initiatives in the coming weeks,” she said.
Borg Bonello said that the two biggest polluters in Malta are the transport sector and the energy producing sector. “Sometimes it feels as if on a European level the plan towards climate neutrality doesn’t really cater for small nation states like Malta because at the end of the day emissions from Malta don’t equal the emissions of one company in Germany.”
If the PN is elected to government and she is appointed as minister for climate change, the first thing that Borg Bonello would do would be to give priority to an underground transport system. Before the election, the government had announced plans for such means of transportation, but the idea has since been shelved.
“I truly believe it’s the way forward and it’s quite disappointing that the government spends half a million euro in direct orders to advertise the metro before the election … only to discard the idea. Now two years after, the PM said that the project was no longer a priority and we never heard about it again.”
Another aspect would be clean energy, which should be a priority.
“We should also push the fact that many clean energy solutions are in fact cheaper. The bottom line is that climate action should never be a tax on the poorer sector of society; if anything it should look at how even, the (United Nations) sustainable development goals, and climate action or environment action is tied to good governance and to social mobility and to eliminating poverty and hunger. Climate change should not be taken in a vacuum… it has to be taken into consideration into every single sector of our governance.”