The Commissioner for Standards George Hyzler has had to respond and defend himself from an onslaught by Glenn Bedingfield. Glenn Bedingfield was criticising George Hyzler for finding that Carmelo Abela breached ethics rules when he used public funds to take out full-page ads for personal propaganda.
Glenn Bedingfield accused George Hyzler of hypocrisy. ‘He overspent in his own chauffeurs,’ Glenn Bedingfield charged. The commissioner said he only had one driver who is paid less than his counterparts in other government offices who work half his hours.
George Hyzler is not answering parliamentary questions,’ Glenn Bedingfield said. George Hyzler documented his responses. Glenn Bedingfield accused George Hyzler of employing many people on the basis of trust. But the commissioner said his staff had been redeployed from other offices or hired after a public call. Glenn Bedingfield said someone in George Hyzler’s staff was in the shadow of corruption. But George Hyzler denied this. The commissioner also denied leaks from his office.
Glenn Bedingfield also accused George Hyzler of partisan bias. George Hyzler used to be a PN parliamentarian and junior minister in the past though he was chosen for his present post by cross-party consensus.
There’s nothing wrong with criticising the commissioner for standards if one disagrees with their decisions. I know I have. I didn’t like his decision to allow Joseph Muscat to keep to himself the identity of the person who paid for his family’s First-Class trip to Dubai in Christmas 2019. No one is too important for criticism.
Glenn Bedingfield was perfectly entitled to disagree with George Hyzler’s findings on Carmelo Abela and would have been in his right to criticise his decision. But that’s not what Glenn Bedingfield did. What Glenn Bedingfield did was to try to discredit George Hyzler. With a combination of lies, innuendo, exaggerations, and misrepresentations he wanted to disqualify George Hyzler from having an opinion worth listening to or taking a decision worth respecting.
All this, peppered with the “nazzjonalist” accusation, means that at least for supporters of the Labour Party and for the unforgivably indifferent, a finding by George Hyzler against a Labour Party MP can be entirely overlooked.
That is not legitimate criticism. It’s an assault on the institutional role George Hyzler occupies. And what role is that?
It is supremely ironic that George Hyzler is not a government official. He is an official of parliament. He reports to Glenn Bedingfield (an MP, and, what should be particularly significant, the whip of the majority party) and provides him with information about any misconduct by members of the government.
If things worked the way they should Glenn Bedingfield would be at the prime minister’s door insisting that Carmelo Abela is fired immediately to protect the parliamentary group from contagion because of the over-spending minister.
They say we have a Westminster parliament. The term “whip” comes from Westminster as does, indeed, the model of a Commissioner and a Committee for Standards in Public Life. But it’s a model we only replicate at the superficial level.
Instead of whipping his party MPs into shape, Glenn Bedingfield whips the parliamentary official that reports to him and provides him with the information needed to make sure MPs stay on the straight and narrow.
The government writes reports to international monitoring agencies to tell them how we are improving the rule of law and standards in public life by setting up this and that commission. What they don’t tell them about is Glenn Bedingfield’s bullying and attempts at intimidating George Hyzler which I suspect change nothing. What does change is Glenn Bedingfield speaking to this audience and telling them to applaud the Minister who steals their money and ignore the official that exposes him. Għax nazzjonalist. Jaqq.