At Vasto I dealt with the costs of politics. I’m publishing the presentation here.

"The costs of politics have been at the centre of discussions in the last few weeks. It’s an important topic, but it’s basically marginal and irrelevant.
The real topic of debate must be not the costs but the quality of politics, the results of politics and the capacity to interpret the needs of the citizens and to apply the programme that has been presented at the elections.
If these points are not achieved, politics can cost even one euro but it’s useless. In the country there is an obvious impatience in relation to the inability of the politicians to get concrete results and their tendency to close up like a hedgehog when faced with new social phenomena.
The citizen’s perception is that the politicians are in a closed circle of an elite to which anything is allowed, quite separate from the life of society, and not to be judged by the magistracy.
It has been written that on coming out of Montecitorio, the deputies prefer not to be recognised and hope to be considered lawyers or officials of the House so as to avoid insults.

What’s the next stage? I have signed Grillo’s proposal for the popular law so as not to have any more convicted parliamentarians, not to have people elected to Parliament for more than two terms of office and the direct preference by the electors. I am the only party leader and the only Minister to have signed.
In the days that followed, Grillo and a million and a half people went out into the streets and squares to give a civil expression to their discontent. They have been criminalized by the parties and by the media of the parties including the RAI and Mediaset. For a month there’s been a lot of nonsense talked about anti-politics, but the real anti-politics is being done by Parliament.
In order to survive, the system needs profound reforms. The costs of the parliamentarians are crumbs in relation to the thousands of useless organisations, the Provinces, the mountain communities, the more than 8,000 towns, the collusion between criminality and local politicians through the use of kick-backs, the roughly four million employees of the State. The public debt is continually increasing, the interest that we pay on the debt every year stops us from having social policies, infrastructure, schools, hospitals, social security and research.
Sooner or later we need to realize this so that we don’t end up in the abyss. There has to be a drastic reduction in spending at the same time as renewed efficiency of the State."