Ever since the election, a steady stream of mainly Labour supporters have moved in to occupy most posts in the ministries, the quangos, the agencies and anywhere else where the government holds sway and where the rules of the Civil Service will permit – and they permit a lot, a lot.

I would go back and date what has happened from the announcement of such a wide Cabinet.

As far as I can see, few if any have made a proper analysis of the new Cabinet. Mostly, we tend to focus on the names and the faces, but I would rather examine the posts, the ministerial responsibilities.

Summarising, I think that there was no real need to have such a big Cabinet except that the new prime minister was acutely conscious of what Lawrence Gonzi brought upon his head when he opted for a small Cabinet and, more importantly, kept some people out. So rather than keeping people out, Dr Muscat widened and widened the Cabinet to its present size.

Even so, however, with all the rather vacuous names some ministerial portfolios were given, ironically some key ministries still have far too wide a remit. The examples I can think of are the finance ministry, which also includes the Treasury (in many countries the two are kept separate), and the Ministry of the Interior, which, against Labour’s strictures in the past, includes both the police and the Law Courts, albeit with a parliamentary secretary.

Then each of these ministers and parliamentary secretaries were invaded by people who wanted to join. Many people just have no idea how strong and impossible it has been to stem the surge. People who have little claim to any post (parliamentary replies have shown some or many of them were not working, possibly have no qualifications) besieged the new ministers and demanded, ordered would be a better word, that they be given a job.

I have no doubt the same must have happened under the Nationalist administration, though perhaps in a minor key and perhaps, just perhaps, with a better approach to ministerial responsibility.

In the present case, as far as I know, there is a sort of Castille clearing house where all new appointments are vetted. Or else the ministers are inventing this to justify not handing out a job to all who claim it.

This is no way to run the country.

I add, and in no way to strike a balance, as if it’s any consolation, the way the Shadow Cabinet was chosen is equally bad and possibly even worse.

For in the PN case, not only was everyone, but everyone, given a sort of shadow ministerial responsibility, but also the key figures in the Gonzi Cabinet got to keep the same shadow ministerial responsibility they had.

So apart from anything the Report on the Defeat had to say, only Lawrence Gonzi has taken the rap, apart from those like Austin Gatt and Dolores Cristina who have resigned from politics.

The justification for this seems to hinge on the Muscat Cabinet, in that each minister is now shadowed by his counterpart and who better to shadow than the person who had ministerial responsibility for that post?

The only exception I could find is Mario de Marco who has been moved away from shadowing the posts he held.

Choosing the ministers is a prime ministerial prerogative and Dr Muscat has shown he can walk away from appointing someone to a post just because he has been shadowing it. But I also note he could do that to relatively minor figures while the main people in Cabinet got the post they had been shadowing.

In particular: will Dr Busuttil, if and when he becomes prime minister, feel strong enough to move people like Tonio Fenech, Giovanna Debono, George Pullicino, etc from the posts they were shadowing and from the same posts in which they were ministers?

Of course, since this is what is happening now, the accent and the focus are on the Labour crowd that has muscled in the ministries and posts of responsibility.

If any think the flow has lost its strength, I can assure them there are still many, many still clamouring for admittance and raising hell about it. Even with such a widened Cabinet not everyone (and that’s an understatement) have been placated with a job.

I do not know what went on in 2008, though I have my own idea, but right now I can see no call for applications, no minimum standards set, and simply no sense in the recruitment except mostly cronyism.

As a result, people who may be better qualified and better suited are being left by the wayside since they will not push or shove or shout. And, obviously, people with less Labour qualifications are also skipped. In Nationalist times, Malta suddenly sprouted thousands of people who all claimed they were at Tal-Barrani.

Even assuming, though there is no real reason for that, and after all this is precisely what was not promised in the election campaign, that one has to have Labour-leaning persuasions to be given a posting, it is by now more than clear that Labour-leaning persons with better qualifications are being elbowed out by those who clamour or push more.

The accent in this administration is that it will hear what the people have to say, which translated might mean that it will give people what they want. The Muscat government does not want to end up like the Gonzi one and its analysis of the Gonzi defeat is almost like the PN report.

Hence many of the staffers that have been taken on by the ministries will end up in a customer care role. The PN government did have customer care officers but they ended up not being listened to, not being able to deliver, not being able in many cases to speak to their minister. This only merits a footnote in the PN report. Nor, as far as I can see, is the report clear on the responsibility of the people who were ministers and who are shadowing the same ministries now.

My question is now that those who are in have obtained what they wanted, will they be able to hear, listen and act on behalf of those who seek their help, or was their real intention only to get a cushy job for themselves?

Again I say: this is no way to run a country.

But then this is a polarized country with, up to before the last election, one half of the country not really seeing things the same way the other half does. All the talk about national reconciliation in the campaign has now disappeared like snow in the sun. Many think these words were just spin for the campaign with no intention to put them in practice and with the sole aim to get lukewarm Nationalists to cross over and vote Labour. Maybe, however, for all the noble intentions, once they came to the ‘proof of the facts’, the surge by Labour partisans was unstoppable. Taghna lkoll became really Taghna lkoll.

Now if it were just a question of running the ministries and making them functional, one could perhaps argue that this is all a consequence of the democratic right of the victor in a free election.

The last man who tried to do things differently was Alfred Sant and he ended up disappointing more Labour supporters than pleasing the rest of the country. This time round, things are being done very differently and the whole government apparatus has been shorn of its previous heads and given new ones. It has been argued this has undermined the functioning of the government itself in that there has been little to no handover and weak continuity. At the same time, and it’s true, the new government has mainly enshrined continuity in policies and programmes. So we have continuity in policies and discontinuity in people.

If governing was just a question of doing up the roads, running the health service, ensuring social assistance and housing, etc it’s probably all well and good to have people representing the will of the majority running the show.

But there are areas such as the country’s economy, or the way the country presents itself, or the way the country enshrines its culture and ethos where the contribution of one and all is needed and just to run the show with party stalwarts is hugely counterproductive.

The Opposition can only watch and learn: watch to see what is being done, learn about what it did wrong in the past years, learn from this government’s mistakes and plan and commit itself to avoiding them.

As it is, the coming months will see the country, for all its government euphoria, coming round to tackle the Excessive Deficit Procedure and it will not be an easy task at all. Blaming the past government cuts ice here in Malta but cuts no ice in Brussels. The horde, which flooded the ministries on the wave of expansionism and ‘the best economy in the EU’, will have to find out a way to cut the deficit without hurting the people who put it there.

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