The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

We all know that before the 2013 election Joseph Muscat promised good governance, pledging to make it a pillar on which he said Labour would run the country. And now we all know that he is making a big mess of it, and doing exactly the opposite. The thought of good governance was thrown out the window as soon as Muscat sat behind a desk at Castille for the first time, along with meritocracy, transparency and the lot.

Simon Busuttil and the Nationalist Party are now promising good governance too, should the PN return to power.

The document unveiled on Sunday hits the nail right on the head in all the aspects that have so far proven to be Labour’s complete failure. It is based on all the wrongs that the Labour government has committed in just two years and nine months and, frankly speaking, the PN happens to be right on all counts.

It is, however, a tall order, but it is certainly a step in the right direction for a party that needs to regain the people’s trust. The document presented Sunday is the basis on which the PN will build its electoral programme when the time comes, simply because it lays the foundations for what a government should be and how it should act.

It was not an easy exercise for the PN, but the Labour government has helped it tremendously with its actions. Most of the proposals made are derived from mistakes that have been committed by Labour, individually or as a government. The use of one’s car for public purposes, the recruitment of one’s business partners, the appointment of relatives in government-paid jobs, the way the social media is used, jobs given as positions of trust, the use of public property, travelling with spouses and children during official trips, government officials working with the Labour’s TV and radio stations – these and more instances have happened under Labour, and the PN has used them to come up with a document that targets such malpractices, unethical behaviour and lowering of standards right at the core.

But the PN has gone beyond that too. It has made suggestions on the way Presidents are elected, to allow for a wider consensus on such an important nomination; it has once again promised to have a PM’s question time, a proposal that was made by the Gonzi government as part of negotiations on a deal that was however never reached, and which PM Muscat seems to be afraid to implement; it has also – and this is a matter about which the undersigned has written several times – proposed the removal of parliamentary privilege in cases where MPs make defamatory statements about people outside the House.

Two other promises would be a feather in the PN’s cap – if they are eventually implemented. PBS has once again become the government’s mouthpiece and defender, and given that it is financed by public money, this is scandalous. It is also of great concern that the Department of Information, which is also publicly financed, is used more and more to attack the Opposition. If PBS really becomes representative of society at large and if the DOI really makes a distinction between the government and the political party in government then we would have really made an important step forward.

It is, all in all, a document that encompasses all that Labour has been doing wrong and what the Nationalist Party will attempt to fix if and when elected.

But, of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.