It was announced yesterday that politician Michael Falzon – the lawyer and not the architect – has been appointed by the government to lead policy-making on the development of new fireworks factories.

We have come to expect no less, or rather no more, of this government than a series of wrong-headed appointments which fly in the face of correctness, common sense and the much-vaunted merit of which so much was said until polling day. But this appointment is not an iced bun for Michael Falzon. It is worse than that. Like the constitution of the Police Board entirely –with the exception of its chairman – of friends and cronies of the Police minister, a failed Labour candidate and the wife of a successful one, having Dr Falzon lead policy on fireworks factories erodes public trust in the system.

By this I do not mean that Michael Falzon is an untrustworthy chap. On the contrary, I think he is rather decent. His support for the Labour Party is not a rational choice or the result of a spiteful and envious nature, as it is with so many, but comes from having been raised by a diehard Mintoffian father. Despite all that I like him and think him harmless and unlike his fellows in the party, free of malice, but then I must declare we grew up in the same immediate neighbourhood as contemporaries – not that he ever played in the street with the rest of us because his parents were strict about that sort of thing and thought studying was more important. He has done well for himself largely thanks to that determination.

Yet this is not about being nice and not malicious, is it – this is about being impartial. Dr Falzon is not the right person to lead policy-making on fireworks factories because he is the lawyer to those who make fireworks, the Malta Pyrotechnics Association. He is also a fireworks fanatic himself. The feast of Stella Maris in Sliema must be one of Malta’s quietest and most uneventful – I lived there for 21 years a stone’s throw from the church and never noticed it – largely because the sort of people who live there are not the kind to have the slightest interest in or enthusiasm for feasts. But Michael, as he was back then, was forever in the work/storeroom behind the church, one of very few parishioners, largely from the narrow streets leading down to the xatt, who bothered taking any interest at all in the fireworks and decoration. He’s not interested in and knowledgeable about fireworks because he’s the legal adviser to those who make them. It’s the other way round: he’s their legal advisor because he was one of them already and shares their passion.

So how impartial can he be when making policy, how dispassionate? I don’t think he can be impartial and dispassionate at all, and even if, by some extraordinary level of self-control, he can be that way, the perception is always going to be that he favours those who make fireworks because he is both their lawyer and in love with fireworks himself.

There is, of course, another reason why he cannot be considered impartial and why public trust in the process is undermined by his role in this. Michael Falzon is a Labour MP. He is therefore subject to all the political pressures of his party and to all the demands of his constituents and a concern for re-election. The ‘political pressure’ angle is exacerbated by something we tend to forget – that the prime minister himself has a lifestyle based to some significant extent on income from the sale of fireworks chemicals. He is the only child of a father whose business is the importation and sale of chemicals which are sold to fireworks manufacturers, and who used to make fireworks himself in Lija.

This is not an ideal situation in the context of making policy on firework factories. The prime minister, because of his situation and that of his father, should seek to distance himself from the process as much as possible, make it as transparent as possible, and also as impartial as he possibly can. Instead, by appointing Michael Falzon to head the process, he has done the opposite. And it doesn’t help that other such groups set up to revise planning policy are headed by planning authority officials, but this one is headed by a member of the lobby group with the primary stakeholder interest.