Minister Karmenu Abela is doing the right thing when he holds back from sweeping under the carpet problems in the management of the police corps. I listened to his explanations during a One Radio programme regarding how police corps issues have been developing. He was excellent.

It now seems quite clear that in a country like ours, the advice that used to be given to a political party about to take over the administration of the island was simply fallacious. Just remove leaders at the top of the police structure and put in your own nominees. Or: Keep all the people you find in their positions and allow them to slowly improve matters.

The police corps finds itself too loaded with old habits and attitudes, as inherited from the past. They no longer fit our present. Yet they remain an integral part of how police leaders at upper and medium levels react to circumstances. They’re shaped by the tugs and pulls of political partisanship, sometimes in their worst version, but the problem goes beyond this.

Which might be why widespread professional improvement has been allowed to take a backseat for too long, both for induction purposes, as well as to improve professional performance post-entry into the corps.

Overall, the organization has remained too oldfashioned. Attempts to reform and update, would immediately provoke a tsunami of antipathies, all against.

I was apprehensive when I heard that Karmenu Abela was named minister of police. I told myself: he’s been given too early a very tough ministerial assignment. I don’t think so any more.

***

Poverty

The time has come for a serious and comprehensive report to be prepared about poverty in Malta. No doubt the government is succeeding in rolling the wave back: relative and absolute poverty is no longer on the advance, as is still happening in many parts of Europe. The government should be applauded for this.

Nevertheless, do we really have all the different strands of the ongoing challenge under control? For as it happens, the conditions under which poverty is experienced vary from country to country.

Here, we probably still go along with outmoded definitions of what constitutes poverty.

Above all, when we clamour against the abuses that are committed against existing state benefits and taxation systems, we refer mostly to the abuses of the poor. What the rich do, rarely gets mentioned.

***

Migrants

We have at present official structures that as never before, give support to the demands of Maltese emigrants.

Yet on the other hand, their voice hardly resonates or is taken into account like it was in previous decades. Why?

The answer that seems to make most sense refers to the change of generations. Among Maltese emigrants to the US, Canada or Australia, for instance, many have died who after leaving Maltese shores, still kept proclaiming their Maltese identity. Their children and the children of their children can still indicate their origin, but it plays no central role in their lives. They have become integrated with society in the country where Maltese parents gave them birth.