The fact that some Arriva buses are running on schedule and that some early corrections will be done to the badly planned routes that were created does not absolve the utter chaos that has enveloped Malta ever since 3 July when the new service was brought in, to the accompaniment of fireworks and ministerial bluster.

This is a government that is not content to govern, but must continually come up with projects and initiatives. It sets the target all by itself. So when it fails so signally, it can’t just blame the drivers who did not turn up. It cannot blame the Opposition for falling flat on its face.

Even if it gets it right in the end, and we still have to see that, it has ruined the holiday of so many tourists by making them stand for many hours in the sun waiting for a bus that never arrived; it has ruined many working days for so many Maltese who use the bus to go to work.

There are some who actually laugh and say the Maltese gemgem is never so strong as it is in summer. With hindsight, this was a disaster just waiting to happen: there was never any chance of getting it right by bringing it all on in one big bang.

Let’s go back even more: the jury is still out on this public relations disaster. I had been practically alone, for a long time, in foreseeing this would not come right on the night: I was told my pessimism had got the better of me and one key planner even bet me I would eat my words.

And yet the government acts as though it is not collegially responsible for this mishap, and as if it is just Austin Gatt’s problem. Then we had the hurried changes done to an already misunderstood route system even before Arriva got its house in order, got the buses to run on time, got all gaps in the schedule filled up, and got the people to understand the mechanics of the new system. So instead of a hybrid system which was Valletta-centric and Mater Dei-centric on top of each other, we get an entire new system that was not allowed to work with the old Valletta-centric system and the not-so-old Mater Dei-centric system on top of it.

This side of the fence, it does not seem the government is holding some sort of internal inquest on what and where it went wrong. You see, this is a government that does not inquire when a minister makes a mess of things. Ministerial co-responsibility is there to stop any minister from answering uncomfortable questions and to defend mistakes even when they are patently wrong. It’s every minister doing his thing and others assume the minister is right and his detractors wrong. The fact that this is a small Cabinet makes things even worse − because no one can look over his colleagues’ shoulders and probably no post-mortems are held.

The above does not just hold as regards Arriva. I had to visit the Mater Dei Emergency Department again this week and for all government statements, you have to be there to see the chaos, the people waiting, the overworked nurses and doctors, the sick on stretchers in corridors, the lack of privacy, the confusion where mistakes can be (and are) made, the state-of-the-art hospital with a primitive emergency department almost comparable to that of Misurata if not Benghazi.

The government pulls out all the stops on its spin machine but the people who for one reason or another have to go there find themselves faced with a completely different reality. For all the coloured brochures and pamphlets that pop into our letterboxes, the experience is not something easily forgotten when one is suffering pain.

There is this dissonance between where we would like to be and where we actually are, where the government claims we will be and the daily grind of things that are far from right.

For a long time we had a waste disposal problem, but that is now being corrected, what with the rehabilitation of Magħtab and with the separation of waste. I know many will say we are not there yet, but things are moving. For a long time all our sewage went out to sea: it is now treated and the bathing quality of the sea is much better as a result.

On other issues, we are still a long way from acceptable standards. The quality of our roads is abysmal, and we are talking of the roads we use every day, not the beautiful roads we use maybe once or twice a year on our way to Gozo. The Ċirkewwa area is still the shambles it has been for the past decade or so.

We commiserate with Cyprus, our neighbour in the Med, for its tragedy and the impact of the recent explosion but our electricity supply is still dependent on a much-abused power station that spews black clouds into the atmosphere and which should be closed down but not yet, not until we get alternative energy from either Sicily or the much-maligned BWSC power station extension.

In other words, on some issues we are indeed getting there, slowly and with hiccups. But on others we are still a long way off. All the government’s spin cannot mask these gaps between our aspirations and our reality.

To be even fairer, this ingrained mediocrity and lack of proper accountability is not reserved to the government side of things. There is an alarming gap between what is promised and what is delivered in most areas of private enterprise where after-sales service is something unheard of, where different salesmen promise different things but then cannot be found to be accountable, where costs keep going up and the consumer has to pay and nowhere to get redress.

And then there is Air Malta. I keep reverting to this issue week after week not because there have been any developments but precisely because there seem to have been no development at all.

The Air Malta disaster (for disaster it is, with all those losses) is a huge government failure, considering it is owned by the government, which for long years has interfered in its running and the nuts and bolts issues (and also with who gets freebies). Compared to the Air Malta disaster, the Arriva one is a storm in a teacup. The workers with jobs at stake, the entire tourist industry, the country as a whole is agog to hear what the government plan for the survival of the airline is, and has been waiting to hear ever since last December.

Whether external consultants draw up the plan, or whether expatriates brought in from abroad take the decisions, the ultimate decision will be, and has to be, made by the government itself.

The government seems to comfort itself with claiming it was its policies that kept Malta out of recession and with no sign of increasing unemployment that other countries have witnessed. That is all too true, but it is equally true that things can go bad in a matter of weeks, and that the Commission has been asking for a correction for years now without getting any.

Last Tuesday I heard with dismay the Finance Minister trying to explain the euro crisis in Parliament much as one would speak to a child (if it’s any consolation, the speeches by the Opposition were even worse). I shudder to think that our representative around the ECOFIN table have such shallow ideas and so little time to focus and to learn and decide on the issues at stake.

It is the mistakes committed by such people who sit around the Cabinet table that, time and again, impact on our daily lives.

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