Gozo Bishop Anton Teuma did not mince his words.

In a homily during the feast of Our Lady of Loreto in Ghajnsielem, he criticised people who get paid without turning up for their job, or just visiting the office to sign and leave, saying that this kind of deceit is not acceptable.

These workers, he charged, are paid for a job they do not do. While he was careful in the way he exposed this abuse and did not mention specifics, it is thought that he was referring to people who accept jobs given by the government for which they get paid “for nothing” while having also a second job.

The National Statistics Office data shows that a significant 35 per cent of full-time workers in Gozo hold a job with the government, almost double the 20 per cent of Maltese full-time workers in the public sector.

What the Gozo bishop said is not a new phenomenon. It has been happening for many years. But it is apparent that these days it is happening too often. What the bishop denounced is yet another example of a kind of culture that has become prevalent in the islands in the last decade – the culture where anything goes, where no-one gets punished for wrongdoing, and where vote-catching practices are the order of the day.

When Bishop Teuma said what he did, the story regarding people getting social benefits for ailments they did not have had not yet broken. When Bishop Teuma lambasted people for receiving a salary for a job they did not do, the extent of the scandal regarding public money that is being handed out to people who did not deserve it had not yet been known.

Both are a form of stealing, and both should be stopped. But it is not only the small fish that should be punished for their shortcomings. The big fish should be brought to book too.

The thing is, as Bishop Teuma said, people in the lower rungs justify their behaviour by saying that people above them do the same thing without being castigated. What the bishop is saying, not so subtly, is that people in top positions are giving the wrong example and that they should be held accountable.

The problem is that we have seen it happening too often under the Labour government in the last 10 years that people in the wrong get away with not even a slap on the wrist. Sometimes they are not even investigated and, if by some sort of miracle they are, there are no real repercussions.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, we used to be told that we should accept what became a “new normal”. That was a crisis situation which we had to deal with from a health point of view.

Unfortunately, the culture of impunity has also become a new normal. But this is certainly not to be accepted. Sadly, very few people are fighting against it. Most are going with the flow. If everybody else is doing it, then let’s do it too, is what most people argue.

This was what Bishop Teuma was referring to. What he said should spur many more into resisting and fighting against what is wrong.