As problematic ministers like Manuel Mallia and Godfrey Farrugia take over the news, those from whom we really should be hearing more – the finance minister, the minister for Europe and the prime minister himself – are disappearing into the background. Even the tourism minister has vanished.
Is this a good thing? Well, ordinarily it would be, in the sense that it means they’re keeping out of trouble unlike the two mentioned earlier. But with this government, you get the uneasy feeling that – as with children – the background silence means more trouble than the sort of trouble that comes with noise. One feels the need to go and find them and discover what they’re up to, because whatever it is, it can’t be good.
A fellow columnist with this newspaper, Martin Scicluna, is disappointed with the performance of the prime minister and his government, even though he told the country to vote Labour and still doesn’t regret it. His was a straightforward column and I couldn’t agree with him more, except on three crucial counts which change the basis of everything, which means that if you factor that in, I can’t really agree with him at all.
The first is that Scicluna still thinks he was right to vote those people into government even though he can see quite clearly that they’re not up to it and that their performance has been well below the required standard. The second is that he thinks this rotten performance is the result of youth and inexperience, when it is actually the result of incompetence that was visible beforehand to those not pole-axed by blind hope. And the third is that he believes the solution for the prime minister would be to seek more advice from those members of his cabinet who “do have some experience of governing”. Scicluna then cites, as most unfortunate examples which defeat his argument completely and which do nothing for his credibility, those he has in mind: Leo Brincat, Karmenu Vella, Evarist Bartolo...it pains me to go on.
What sort of experience of government did that lot have? It is perfectly obvious that Mr Scicluna was never at the receiving end of that less-than-wonderful experience. It is precisely because those individuals were so appallingly incompetent in government then that they are so appallingly incompetent now.
They did a bad job then – Karmenu Vella has a track record that goes right back to the 1970s and Leo Brincat to the early 1980s – and their qualities, such as they were, have not improved with age. Rather the opposite, because they seem completely out of their depth and a total loss as to what to do in a very changed world that bears no resemblance at all to the one in which they had even their most recent experience of government.
Let’s take Leo Brincat, for one. His most recent “experience of government” was as the stopper who filled the gap when Lino Spiteri resigned as Prime Minister Sant’s finance minister. He was in charge of the chaotic, Through-the-Looking-Glass shift from valued added tax to something called CET. The prolonged nightmare brought the economy to a grinding halt. Unemployment soared overnight. Nobody was buying or selling anything. Public meetings to describe the brilliant new system only added to the confusion, with – for example – confectioners asking how CET applied to pasti and how they should calculate it for the stuff they bought to make those pasti.
Looking back, it was a black comedy. But we don’t really want to look back. We want to move forward. Put starkly, a bunch of people voted in a bunch of duds, and they can’t bring themselves to admit it. Instead they are hoping for the best, because now they refuse to see that given the raw material and the personal characteristics and abilities, even the best will be relentlessly below par. The mature thing to do would be to simply admit to a profound error of judgement. On the scale of human error, voting for people who weren’t quite what you thought isn’t as bad as some other things that spring to mind right now.