The government has given the trade unions a fortnight to come up with proposals on how the public and national holidays issue is to be resolved. Whatever the proposals, says government, the target of increasing productivity must be met.

Clearly, there is nothing wrong with government attempting to defuse a situation by giving time for heads to cool, for union leaders to climb down to earth from Monday's self-generated protest euphoria.

But it would be a grave mistake for the Prime Minister to climb down from what he stated on the matter, particularly at this juncture in the legislature.

The holidays measure is a step in the right direction. Yet on its own it is not going to increase competitiveness, make the economy grow and create jobs. It is the tip of the iceberg of the required structural, legal and most of all cultural reforms in entrepreneurship and industrial relations. Politically, the measure was for the most part symbolic, a gesture of some substance, but not much. It signalled a decision by the Prime Minister and the government that they are going to look beyond Grand Harbour, stare global economic reality in the face and decide accordingly.

Precisely for this reason, backing off on this issue to keep the trade unions quiet would send exactly the wrong political message. For all those who will be dealing with the government – not just unions – it would mean that government is not there to govern but to be haggled with. As the Italians say, l’appetito vien mangiando. If government can be made to retreat on a relatively insignificant issue like the holiday one, it can be made to do so even more quickly when harder nuts are put on the table to be cracked.

This country no longer has a “big” issue looming on the national horizon. The fights for democracy of the eighties and for European membership of the nineties and beyond are over. As a result, for the first time since 1987, this is a “normal” government which has to do its job, just its job. There is no need for it to constantly look over its shoulder, to compromise or not ruffle feathers because of electoral considerations dictated by the “big” issue.

This government should only have one principle – to take the decisions which have been postponed for years. Whether it fails to be reelected as a result is secondary. What this country requires now and in the future is infinitely more important than who runs the next government. After all, one of the most convincing reasons for being in Europe is precisely to have a built-in protection against bad government.

Obviously, I know of no political party with a masochistic bent. By definition, a political party exists to win elections, not lose them. And one would expect the PN to do its utmost to justify its existence. Yet ultimately, this is not a time to put politics above government.

Although they are related and frequently intersect, politics and government are not the same thing. Politics is a skill, an instinctive knack for persuading, listening, communicating, for creating consensus among men and women who hold opposing yet genuine views. Government, on the other hand, is about knowing what the country needs, about taking the right decisions and painstakingly following them through the elaborate labyrinth of administration. As the art of the possible, politics makes democratic government work. But it is not government.

The media, myself included, with its instinct for the “story”, the scandal, the argument and the visually enticing investigation repeatedly gives the mistaken impression that that is all there is to running the country. For the media, surfing politics is interesting, getting to grips with and understanding government is a bore.

This is not an argument against the media chasing and investigating stories about politics and government. As I make a living doing precisely that, it would be hypocritical of me to make such an argument. A democratic government without media scrutiny is a contradiction in terms.

Yet one of the worst things that a government can do is to define its mission by what the media says about it. Government by media is no government at all. It is as much of a perversion of democracy as media by government or opposition, which is exactly what the party-owned media, our homegrown mutant monster, has come to amount to.

The resolution of the national and public holidays issue cannot be guided by the amount of noise that union leaders and their media make. Government must take a long-term view, beyond the noise and towards what it must do next.