Strange as it may seem, a nation once celebrated for its irrepressible optimism now appears to be obsessed with decline. Malta's list of complaints seems endless. Real wages are falling. White-collar jobs are no longer secure. The nation's infrastructure is collapsing. The national deficit is soaring. The health system is deteriorating. The towns and villages are unsafe. The schools are failing. The gap between rich and poor is widening.

There are many today who believe that the authorities are not keen on fighting corruption seriously enough. It is generally enough if a certain number of inquiries and some prosecutions with regard to corruption are carried out. It is almost a miracle if the big fish is caught on charges of corruption.

Indeed, it is the average honest, tax-paying and law-abiding Maltese citizen who is continually falling victim to a growing number of flawed, mismanaged or outright bad policies that the government keeps coming up with.

Much of the concern about our economic decline is really about the socioeconomic implications of increased social inequality. The real challenge facing Maltese society is not reversing economic decline; it is addressing the social implications of the new economy. This rise in social inequality poses a unique challenge: how to reinvent, in a radically new economic environment, the government's commitment to economic opportunity and social equality. Ideally, economic growth must be domestically financed, sustainable over the long term and sufficient to increase the incomes of all Maltese.

It would be wrong, however, to equate rising social inequality with economic decline. Quite the contrary, increased inequality is really the result of new kinds of economic growth-the long-awaited shift to the information economy. Indeed, if there is anything remarkable about the transformation of the Maltese economy and its attendant impacts on social status, it is how poorly prepared the nation was and still is to deal with it.

We must redefine a number of present government policies that are not delivering or not sufficiently reaching the aims that they set out to achieve. Nowhere is this requirement to redefine past and retained practices more pressing than in the field of education. Education has been Malta's ladder of opportunity, the tool that has allowed one generation after another to climb higher. Until today.

The nature of work has changed, but the nature of education hasn't. The greatest step that Malta can take to reconnect economic growth and social equity is to reconfigure education so that, once again, the learning that goes on in school matches the emerging needs of the economy.

On another front, job-related benefits and social services must be redesigned to deal with greater personal economic instability and the growing reluctance of businesses and companies to bear social costs.

The main cause for arriving at this state of affairs concerns, to a large extent, maladministration. The fact that the bureaucracy is not accountable gives rise to this maladministration. The government administers through various departments and offices to meet the aspirations and requirements of the people in all spheres of life, and these governmental institutions are intended to be a tool for the upliftment of the people.

Yet, the government remains blind to the fact that such maladministration affects the national economy and the thousands of citizens whom it is supposed to administer and serve. Maladministration has come to affect the nation's progress and the welfare of the masses. The government must initiate the necessary and appropriate reforms to ensure that such maladministration does not occur.

Besides bad apples, there are also bad barrels, that is, faulty arrangements, institutions, systems, organisations, processes and procedures that overcome personal integrity.

We are surrounded by institutionalised maladministration. It is all there: inaccurate information and reporting; waste, abuse and fraud; risky reliance on private contractors and local agencies; disappearing records; inaccurate progress reports; outright and rampant corruption; poor oversight; inability to trace results for money spent; project underperformance or non-performance; decisions made without regard to recipients' capabilities; and the unconcern for spending other people's money.

The government is indifferent to all this. Administration is a matter of getting things done that people want done. Its blemishes eventually become more discernible, and its consequences become more practical and crucial.

One cannot simply point to maladministration as the sole cause of everything that is going wrong. There are other blameworthy factors, such as poor policymaking, setting impossible tasks, making bad decisions in the circumstances, failing to provide sufficient support and resources, permitting immunity from all responsibility and accountability, indifference to complaints and failure to adequately examine possible outcomes before embarking on action.

A common feature of these wrongdoings is the extent to which policy development gets separated from the realities of the country. In the worst cases, policy is developed by small groups of like-minded people at Castille who share the same set of assumptions and fail to test those assumptions outside the group. The group often assumes that there is only one way of doing things. They often have little understanding of how people on the receiving end of the policy will behave or react.

Those who have expressed doubts or argued otherwise have increasingly seen their careers blighted and been characterised as blockers of change.

The populace, in the meantime, continues to be mired in the government's maladministration, wrongdoing and corruption. We definitely don't have the best government that our votes can elect.

It is time for the revival of the tenets of good governance.

Dr Mark Said is a lawyer