The government’s much-vaunted transparency could not be clearer than as presented this week.

When the government, with some bravado and the usual spin, released the documents relating to energy provision, one would have expected some details to have been covered up. But certainly not the result: entire pages blacked up, one document entirely blacked up.

It was the anti-thesis of transparency, an act of defiance, an insult to the intelligence of the nation.

It is of little relevance that the government states and repeats that the documents relating to the MIA privatisation and others were not published at all. We are supposed to have gone beyond all that and the perpetrators of that have long been kicked out of office.

This is a microcosm of what is wrong with this government: it pays lip-service to the high and noble principles, in this case the principle of transparency, but then fails completely in implementing them.

Or else it promises with one hand but then the other hand intrudes and renders vain the effort of the first hand.

It shows the government, or at least some part of it, would want to do the right thing but then something gets in the workings and renders vain all the effort. At least the Nationalist government did not fall in this trap: it said the contracts would not be published and that was that.

One accepts that commercial details must be left out, but then blocking out an entire document defeats the whole purpose of the exercise.

This whole futile exercise derives from something one would hardly find in other countries. Ever since it was claimed, in midst campaign of 2013, that huge bribes were being taken on oil procurement, the whole issue has been bedeviled.

One must remind readers that the accusations regarding bribes in oil procurement are still being examined in court and have not yet been proved and the culprits punished.

Regardless of this truth, the allegation has entered the mainstream of the national consciousness that today one hardly finds anyone who doubts that there is corruption in oil procurement especially where fuel oil is involved.

Then came the present government commitment to switch over from Heavy Fuel Oil, which is like tar and which is toxic (although it can be treated) to gas.

This commitment was admirable but its implementation is now late by about two years.

Then came the questions regarding the ship containing gas and its presence in the middle of Marsaxlokk Bay and what could happen in case of an extreme storm, which so far has not happened.

As a result, as Minister Konrad Mizzi told Parliament this week, that Malta now has multiple sources of energy instead of depending on just one source – the BWSC plant, the gas plant, the Interconnector, and also the many photovoltaic panels on so many roofs.

All this is fine, give and take a couple of million arguments and diatribes, so why, oh why, did government fall into this trap all of its making, that of promising to come clean and reveal the documents and then to have heart-change and black out most of them?