With the government facing a good governance crisis that has grown to near epic proportions, it would do well to take note of rampaging public sentiment and act quickly to clean up its act.

With each passing scandal that has engulfed the government over the last three-odd years, it has employed the exact same modus operandi: it waits while investigations run their course instead of taking the kind of immediate action required of a modern democracy.  So far, a number of Cabinet members have faced a slew of very serious accusations and no one, not even those who were eventually showed the door, was even suspended from duty during those investigations.

It seems that everywhere one looks there is a good governance scandal either exploding or brewing, under the watch of a government that had campaigned so promisingly and so vociferously on a platform of good governance, accountability and transparency – areas in which, despite its platitudes, the government is failing miserably.

Instead, politicians facing very serious accusations are permitted to carry on as though it is business as usual.  And they are allowed to do so as the government either bounces investigations from one institution to another, or hides behind investigations instead of taking the kind of bold and concrete action required when those elected are facing serious allegations of misconduct.

The cases of Ian Borg, Manuel Mallia and Michael Falzon are two glaring examples of this outrageous behaviour.

In other cases, the government appears to simply be waiting until the storm blows over, such as it is apparently doing in the cases of Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri. 

The former has voluntarily subjected himself to two audits – one by a private firm and another by the tax commissioner, while the latter is apparently untouchable in this respect because he was in business before he was appointed as the Prime Minister’s chief of staff.

Neither situation is acceptable.

In the case of Dr Mizzi, the nation is meant to be waiting the results of those audits on his financial affairs with bated breath.  We can wait for those results but the fact of the matter is that no audit would be able to answer, with any degree of certainty, the real questions of the tips of everyone’s tongues: have illicit funds been transferred into that company in Panama?  Certainly not, given the jurisdiction’s closely guarded reputation for financial secrecy.

Short of either firing his two wingmen, the energy minister and his chief of staff - because, let’s face, they are both guilty of either corruption or plain stupidity – the Prime Minister has very few options at his disposal other than to begin seeking to rectify the errors of his ways.

Taking real action on the public’s very real concerns is not a question of merely playing into the hands of the opposition, a continual consideration in this highly politicised country of ours.  This is, in actual fact, one of a government’s core missions.  It is a question of giving the people the good governance that they are demanding, and which this government when it was elected to power.

What the government must do, first and foremost, is heed the opposition leader’s call to launch investigations into all the public contracts negotiated by the accusation-riddled energy and health minister and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff. If those investigations are not already underway, they must be initiated immediately if the government is to remain credible.

Secondly, the government could immediately provide for the swift approval of the standards in public life and public domain bills.  Both proposed bills promise to instil accountability and transparency into the country’s statute books where they are sorely lacking.

After that, the Prime Minister needs to sit down with the opposition’s detailed recent proposals on creating a real good governance framework for the country, earmark what is immediately doable and enter into serious discussions with the other side of the House on getting at least some of those concepts implemented post haste.

It is only with such real, meaningful action that the Prime Minister may be able to begin digging himself out of the very deep hole that he has found himself in, and get on with the business of governing rather than that of damage control.