By: Gal Kovač / Nova24TV
A round table of the Assembly for the Republic took place with the meaningful title: Why we are AGAINST. Žiga Turk, Janez Remškar, Ph.D., and Aleš Hojs presented the reasons why voters should vote AGAINST every question in the upcoming referendums. Thus, it is also possible to vote in preliminary voting, which will end tomorrow (Thursday) at 7 p.m.
Dr Žiga Turk spoke first. He revealed the main purpose of amending the RTV Broadcasting Act, which is the express beheading of the current leadership. Then Dr Janez Remškar spoke, who warned that the amendment to the law on long-term care, adopted by the government of Robert Golob, is unacceptable, as it cancels everything that the original version of the law brought to the elderly. At the end, Aleš Hojs also spoke, who characterised the changes to the law on the government, which will drastically increase the number of ministries, only as a way to divide “chairs”.
As former minister Žiga Turk said, the amendment to the RTV Act has two essential problems. The first problem is that the law was adopted following an emergency procedure, which is reserved in Slovenian legislation for laws that address emergency situations, or otherwise, in the case of wars and natural disasters. Since, of course, the operation of RTV does not fall into any of these categories, it is clear that the emergency procedure was wrong.
He then focused on the substantive part of the law, where he sees the problem that the supporters of the law pretend that its essence is in the content and not in the fact that it simply wants to remove people who have been given mandates by law, simply because they are not the current authorities. “The substantively unconstitutional law was passed illegally because the political majority wants to establish a consensus in the media, so that no one warns about the adoption of unconstitutional laws that are passed illegally. I want the law to be rejected, for the current leadership to stay and, after things have calmed down, to demonstrate what public RTV should be like, which is impartial, plural, and high-quality,” he wrote on Twitter at the round table.
Janez Remškar: The government’s slogan “for a safe old age” is a lie
The next speaker was Dr Janez Remškar, who explained that the European Union has been warning Slovenia for a decade that the treatment of the elderly is inadequately regulated, especially in the area of excessive institutionalisation. Its reduction was also the purpose of the adoption of the Act on long-term care, which was then amended by the government of Robert Golob, so that, at least on paper, it delayed the implementation of the law by two years, but in fact only transferred the budget funds intended for long-term care to items, intended to deal with illegal migrants.
“With this law, we will finally end the ordeal of everyone who are in nursing homes and who have inadequate care, and also those who want and have the possibility of care at home. In short, we will realise what Europe has been warning us about for almost ten years,” Remškar told public RTV.
Aleš Hojs: It is about chairs, not needs
Aleš Hojs stated that the essential reason for the vote AGAINST was that it was not about any kind of reorganisation of the work of the government, but about meeting the personnel needs of the government. At the same time, he reminded that the proposed number of ministries is drastically higher than those abroad, that it is illogical and that it will not contribute to the better functioning of the government. “They do not want new ministries because of actual needs, but to hand out seats to those whom the voters said no to,” said Hojs, and with this, the former interior minister aimed primarily at failed political projects that operated under the auspices of the previous government of the KUL coalition.
Yesterday, however, the social-civil sphere also presented its opposition to the changes to the Government Act. The latter opposes it mainly from the point of view of nature conservation, as the new law will have drastically negative consequences for nature conservation. You can read more about this in the article entitled: A crowd of Slovenian environmentalists against Golob’s subjugation of the energy sector – that is why they are calling for a vote against the Government Act in the referendum!