This is no longer just the doing of one member of Cabinet and one Chief of Staff.

Comforted by three, not one, massive votes in the House, this is now an act of government.

To be sure, this does not mean that each and every member of the government has an account hidden away in Panama or British Virgin islands. This does not mean that each and every member of Cabinet has been making money over and above the remuneration as a minister.

Having said that, each time that the House gets the annual returns by members of Cabinet and of the House, each time members of the public who maybe are on the minimum wage or on a fixed salary, cannot but be shocked at the facile way some members of Cabinet seem to make money, or the way how money seems to stick to some particular members of Cabinet. Even if no law is broken. But beyond this, what has happened over the past three months has swept away how people look at government as a whole, over and above its component members, over and above its leader as well.

By not taking steps to address the issue of a Cabinet member who has been caught out with a, till then, undeclared company in Panama and a trust in New Zealand, by standing in support of that minister in three, not one, parliamentary votes, the entire Cabinet, the entire Parliamentary Group of the party in government has come to be in solidum with the minister in question.

This has undermined, is undermining, all the good work that many government institutions do to protect the national interest by dissuading people from investing abroad, by persuading them to bring back funds invested elsewhere and even by declaring amnesty after amnesty as an inducement to get them to repatriate their funds from outside Malta.

In a society such as Malta’s, actions have a ripple effect, ever-wider concentric circles with an impact that reaches to all corners of the country. This is what we want to focus upon today. Our society is no better, nor worse, than other societies. It has its law-abiding citizens but also those who if they could, would cut a corner or two. Or more.

And it is here that the Konrad Mizzi act, supported by the entire parliamentary group and by the entire Cabinet, has had its most pernicious effect, one that can be seen in so many examples and at all levels of society.

This is the blatant disregard of the law and of all that the law implies – if not exactly against the law, at the very least the borderline, the shady, where everyone understands the law is being broken in all but the letter.

Look at the cavalier way that people have with regards to building regulations. Look at the cavalier way that people drive on our roads. Somehow, and we do not remember anything that has been done by the authorities, the feeling has been generated and it has spread around like an oil slick, that it does not matter to sail near the outward boundary of the law. And people seem to have come to regard this as almost their right, and no one dares tell them this is wrong. There is a solidarity of the law-breakers such as one finds in Neapolitan villages where the residents turn on the police about to make an arrest and pelt them until they release the miscreant.

For this, we have Konrad Mizzi, and Keith Schembri, to thank, more the former than the latter.

They have showed the Maltese citizens there is something beyond, over and above, the law.