The first privatisation carried out in Malta was of public works. These began to be devolved to the private sector via tenders or by direct government contract. Gradually the public works department lost most of its personnel and became basically an office which organised projects that were then to be opened to tenders calling for offers.

The process was intended to help government curtail its recurrent expenditures, avoid waste and theft in the management of works, ease the implementation of projects, improve the quality of works, reduce the excessive time taken for the completion of projects that having been launched were never concluded on time, and ensure that greater attention be given to the needs of citizens and families.

All this would happen because a private business needed to be able to compete successfully with other businesses in the same sector and to make a profit if it was to survive. It must therefore be more efficient and serious in its approaches than a government department loaded with a bloated workforce, subject to political interference, clientelism and endemic inefficiencies.

However, all that was envisaged would happen following the privatisation of public works never did.

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PERMITS

The government's proposals for radical changes in the issue and management of building permits were a huge disappointment on two levels: that of what the proposals contained, and that of how they were prepared and presented to the people.

To take the content first: The proposals tilt unreservedly toward the interests of construction developers. They ignore and contradict the need for greater prudence in how land and buildings are being developed. They undermine the possibilites for citizens and courts to resist abuses. They contradict what the government itself has been proclaiming about the protection of the natural and historical environment.

With regard to the presentation then: To the contrary of the public relations skill that the government usually shows when launching new policies, this time it gave a show of wanting everything to be done hurriedly, underhandedly and behind everybody's back, excepted the developers'. The rhetoric about the needs of families caught in the dilemmas of managing their inheritance and property when terminal disease strikes sounded hollow and misguided. All this has served to dull the achievements of a government which has been performing  much better than those who oppose it like to pretend.

What's worst is that an impression, probably justified, has been given that we're back to the 1990's, when the barons of construction were an essential bulwark of the Fenech Adami administration.

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ABORTION AND PRISON

How shameful. A woman who had an abortion by taking medicine that is available for that purpose was given a (suspended) prison sentence. She was reported to the police by the hospital where she ended up when she experienced health complications. All involved in her case were compliant in all they did with the law - doctors, police, lawyers, judges - except for the woman involved, who effectively had exercised her basic rights with regard to her own person.

I too took years to fully see and understand the institutional hypocrisies which have remained with us  up to right now in how we deal with the issue of abortion. But that with all our sense of holiness, whether held privately, publicly confessed or faked, we still tolerate that the act of abortion which a woman decides to go through for herself in her own personal capacity should still be criminalised is an enormous blot on the country, no matter what all the righteous sanhedrins proclaim.