The prime minister’s fiery defence of his government’s record, which he keeps doing every Sunday without fail, may please the crowd he faces, made up of party members and the core going back to Mintoff’s time but one wonders if it is doing the trick with the less enthusiastic voters who three years ago switched from the Nationalist Party which had so failed them and gave a chance to Labour after 25 years minus two troubled ones.

There is no real need for anyone to list the scandals that have marked the Muscat administration so far and which have already cost so many resignations.

The crowd may bay every time Dr Muscat attacks the Leader of the Opposition as that is in the nature of a party Sunday morning meeting but a careful listener would testify that the biggest cheer that Dr Muscat got yesterday came when he mentioned his government had increased pensions “for the first time in 25 years”. Maybe that shows the proportion of pensioners in the crowd.

Dr Muscat rather skimped on the scandals associated with the former PN administration, although his henchmen soon filled that up in comments to the news services.

That administration paid for all this by not getting elected and by suffering the biggest defeat in Maltese political history. Be that as it may, we are talking about 25 years and already in just under three years this administration has accumulated quite a record.

And wasn’t this administration elected precisely because it promised a cleaner than clean administration and here it is repeating the mistakes of former years and adding new twists?

That is as far as the Sunday morning bickering goes. Beyond this, the country must provide for itself new and higher standards for holders of public office and for the management of the country as a whole.

The events of the past months have provided us with some welcome signs of improvements on the national scale.

Fortunately, or at least so far, we have not seen any sign of the government attempting to suborn the courts as we saw in the 1980s. Now we have also seen very welcome signs of independence of judgement on the part of the Auditor General and the Ombudsman.

We are seeing, for all its defects, a lively and uninhibited press and mass media, a welcome sight considering that just over three years ago, there were calls to nobble the press. For all its defects, we see more lively comment in programmes on television. We would however welcome a more independent Broadcasting Authority.

Ultimately, the technological advance that has given us smart phones, online news, blogs and whatnot has made news more instantaneous, more free, less hindered and tied down by officialdom. People now have access to a multitude of news sources, an infinite variety of interpretations and opinions. We may decry, for instance, the racist and xenophobic comments that spread around social media sites, but if the choice is between all this free comment and strict enforcement of the law, we would unhesitatingly choose free comment over strict enforcement.

Anyway, the prime minister is of course free to fill airtime every Sunday with long lists of his government’s achievements (which are many) but these words will not remove the stench that is coming from the government machine. It was clear last week Dr Muscat was not at all happy to see Michael Falzon go and surely this was not what he would have wished to do. He had better set about - what was the word used in the DOI press release last week? – re-engineering his entire administration. Now that would be a sensible approach.