7 May 2007

On the side of the citizens

I’m publishing a summary of a speech I gave to Italia dei Valori’s National Planning Meeting in Rome on 5 May.

“The party conferences are important, but only as long as they deal with concrete issues, discussing the priorities of the country, and are basically referring to the citizens.
“On the side of the citizens” is the slogan that Italia dei Valori has chosen to go with its political action.
The distance that today separates the voters from the parties is an abyss. The task of politics is to close up this distance that unfortunately, is growing bigger over time.
The formulae, the groupings, the new formations, the alchemies on electoral laws are not politics. They are a self-referencing exercise, a way of avoiding the real problems of the country to deflect the attention of the public.
The electoral law that is currently in place is a real expropriation of the role of the citizens. The party secretaries and not the voting public, have chosen the members of the Lower and Upper Houses.
This law should have been cancelled immediately. That didn’t happen. And if for a series of circumstances, we go back to the vote tomorrow, once more we will have a Parliament that does not mirror the country.
A Parliament that is in fact de-legitimized, an expression of the party secretaries. One reason for the decadence of the country is the partitocrazia that has occupied every possible position in the institutions, even the voting booth.
In Parliament there are 25 convicts. I believe that they are a very bad example for a nation in which you need a clean criminal record to be a school caretaker or a police officer. The new election law must make sure that such people are not eligible.
Since the elections, we have not had the strength, or perhaps the will, to immediately eliminate the previous government’s “ad personam” laws on justice.
It was a promise made to the voters who instead have had to endure even the law on pardons, voted through in great haste and during the summer period, as though it were Parliament’s absolute priority, while most of the Italians didn’t want it.
The position on justice was one of the principal points of our election campaign, of Italia dei Valori and of the Unione. A year and a half after the elections, we can say that up until now we have been playing around.
Let’s hope that we can recover in the continuation of this legislature by supply the magistracy with the means and the resources that they absolutely need and by reaffirming the certainty of the penalty of which every trace has been lost, and by abolishing the “ad personam” laws
The privatizations have not worked. I believe that economists and politicians agree on this.
It’s not an accident that in the past year there has been discussion concerning Autostrade and Telecom Italia more in financial terms than in industrial ones. These are two cases in which the State, granting the concessions, has not set down ‘a priori’ rules that protect the citizens and the market.
For Telecom, separating the telephone backbone from the services, for Autostrade, the connection between an increase in toll charges and the true investments in the network that had been agreed.
All this has been aggravated by the presence of the Chinese boxes that allow financiers without patrimony to become owners of the companies, by the possibility to buy companies by plunging them into debt, by the presence of the conflict of interests, in which the buyer and seller are the same person in two different Boards of Directors.
The reform of the Stock Exchange is an emergency which has to be tackled if we want Italian and foreign investors to come back.
The concessionaires of public goods must always remember that the one conceding the activities is the State and that their role is one of service, above all to the users and then the one of dividends and stock options.
The government, definitely as regards my Ministry, will act in such a way as to protect the citizen-users, to make sure the agreements are respected, and if necessary, to bring in improvements. Straight away or later.
In fact we can’t just stay and watch. If regulatory measures don’t work or are not there, we have to change them, create them. The State exists even for this.
In Italy, work is ever more dangerous and precarious. Italia dei Valori is committing itself from this moment, with a proposal to modify the Biagi law, to change things.
The Biagi law has been casually applied by many companies who have misused it. They have transferred the entrepreneurial risk onto the workers.
It’s not possible that there are companies with 70/80% of precarious workers and with most of the “project work” invented to get round the law.
We will propose a limit of 10% on the use of precarious workers in the companies and a greater rate of pay for the precarious workers, for the same activity, in relation to the pay of the permanent workers.
The slaughter going on in the building sites is an internal war to which we have to give maximum visibility and to tackle as a crime, even closing down those companies that put their workers in conditions of maximum risk. Today the compensation payments to the families of those who have died at work are laughable. And on this point as well, Italia dei Valori is committed to changing the situation.
Italia dei Valori has been fighting for the reduction of the cost of politics and for the efficiency of the Public Administration. And it will continue to do so. The costs of politics must go down. In some cases it’s even a matter of decency.
In fact it’s not possible to ask citizens to make sacrifices and to impose new taxes if the parliamentarians have salaries that are the highest in Europe. It’s not possible to talk of increasing the pension age with members of the Lower House that get the right to a pension after 2 and a half years.
It’s a question of credibility of politics. Information in Italy has been defined as “semi-free”
Certainly there are problems of concentration, of conflict of interests and of public financing. Without independent information it’s not possible to talk of complete democracy.
The current TV duopoly prevents the development of a real debate and blocks the advertising market. A really serious situation if you consider that the leader of the opposition controls the private TV channels.
This is an anomaly that the current majority promised to tackle immediately and on which we all, including Italia dei Valori, are waiting for true responses and not warm flannels.
Finally, it is our intention to abolish public financing of newspapers. This will mean a saving for the citizens and information that flows slightly more freely.
“On the side of the citizens” must not be a slogan, but a continuous visible political action, in contact with people.
This is why we have started two initiatives with the support of the IdV structures throughout the territory: one for Citizen Health and one for Freedom of Information.
They are initiatives that start in Milan and that will travel to the main cities of Italy, with stands, surveys and online interaction through our site and through my Blog.”

Posted by Antonio Di Pietro in Politics