Acknowledging that you have a problem, they say, is the first step toward recovery.  But at the current rate at which we are progressing, it seems the government acolytes and the Joseph Muscat cheerleaders are going to be addicted to excuses and falsehoods for life.

Yesterday’s report by none other than the Council of Europe’s Group of States against Corruption (GRECO) on Malta, which is published every five years, makes for some pretty grim reading indeed.

The government has had the report in hand since Tuesday of last week and appeared reticent to publish what it knew was yet another damning indictment on the state of the country’s rule of law.

The Council of Europe requires a member state’s permission to publish reports on those same member states, and Malta had little choice, really and truly, but to consent to its publication, lest it was to be bundled with the only other two countries that had likewise refused: Belarus and Hungary.

As such, the government published, but ahead of publication yesterday, the government news and social media apologists were already busy spreading the word that the GRECO report was merely a collection of age-old grievances and problems the country’s rule of law of facing.

Well, yes and no.  There are all the problems that are well known, some of which are being addressed at the behest of the Venice Commission, others because different European Union regulatory bodies have come down hard on Malta.

Truth be told, this legacy situation that the incoming Labour administration inherited when it came into office in 2013 was very much to its liking.  It was in March 2013, after all, that the administration set about, both blatantly and surreptitiously, to capture, deconstruct and rebuild every aspect of the state that it could, and formed them its own likeness. 

Yes, many of these ailments have been afflicting the country for years, even decades on end.  That, however, is no justification for the way in which the current administration has leveraged those systems to its own advantage.

And GRECO was quite categorical in much of its criticisms, and in fact pointed out several situations of the current government’s own making. This was, after all, a five-year review

GRECO was merely the latest authoritative body to have weighed in on the situation in Malta, and weigh in it certainly did.  Its gruesome appraisal of Malta is being reported at length in today’s issue.

These newest scathing indictments should come as no surprise, coming as it does hot on the heels of so many others of a similar, if not identical ilk.

We have had the European Parliament’s PANA Committee, its TAX3 Committee on financial crimes, its Rule of Law Monitoring Group and a raft of individual MEPs crying foul over the state of affairs in Malta, and in particular since 2013.

We have had recent pronouncements from some of the country’s greatest legal minds on the state of the country’s state of the rule of law.  We have had the Panama Papers exposing some of our leading politicians’ and state employees’ financial machinations.

And while it may be easy enough to blame those meddling foreigners and the supposedly treasonous opposition and independent media for fighting for change on so many levels, it is not quite so easy when we have people of the legalistic calibre former European Court of Human Rights Judge Giovanni Bonello and the Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Malta Professor Kevin Aquilina saying there is something wrong with the way in which the systems has been leveraged from political exigencies.

The government might just get away with blaming the media, MEPs and the opposition for bringing matters to the pass they have reached, but the situation is only of its own self-serving making.

The Venice Commission, the FIAU, the MFSA, GRECO, Moneyval, the CoE, the EU, the EP – it’s a veritable alphabet soup of regulatory bodies that have come down on the government’s bad behaviour.

But like a teenager who blames everyone else, or who thinks the world is conspiring against him, the government had better own up to and acknowledge its problems, or be destined to repeat them time and time again, until push eventually comes to shove.

And, while there are many ways in which that can happen, we certainly do not want any of them to come to pass.