Last week was rich in political ironies, and I am not referring to the aftermath of the local council elections. Two developments occurred among others, highlighting the fundamental problem of the current administration - that of credibility.
Over the years, successive PN governments, headed by Eddie Fenech Adami and by Lawrence Gonzi, were too liberal with undertakings that turned out to be hollow, if one wants to put it mildly.
When as a government you describe things differently from how they really are (and on purpose I am being diplomatic here), you may gain some short-term advantages.
Indeed, if you're lucky the advantages might remain on line till it doesn't matter any more to anybody one way or the other... but it ain't necessarily so. There is usually a likelihood that unpleasant matters will still come to a head, prematurely or not, if the advantages prospected fail to materialise, if they are less significant than they were touted to be, if they were fake, and/or if the overall situation turns sour.
For instance, most of the political problems facing the Blair and Bush administrations result from the widespread perception that the respective governments had not told the truth about the invasion of Iraq. If the invasion turned out to be an unqualified success, then probably this matter would never have cropped up. But once Iraq developed into a bloody quagmire, the political processes that led to it came under scrutiny.
Cut down to our scale, we saw something similar happen last week. On two separate fronts, people got provender for rumination that should disturb those who routinely describe the criticisms made by Labour spokesmen as opposition for its own sake.
On the Tal-Qroqq hospital, Labour has consistently over the years denounced the overspending and lack of planning that characterised the whole project under PN management. In the past years, we had stated that the overall cost of the project was touching Lm250 million and rising.
For saying this, we were denounced by the government and its media supporters. They claimed this was another Labour "invention" since Dr Gonzi had managed to cap spending for the whole project in his "final" agreement some two years back with Skanska. The final bill would be far less than Lm250 million.
Then last week, the Parliamentary Secretary for Finance, Tonio Fenech, took the wife of the Texas governor who was visiting Malta on a tour of the Tal-Qroqq hospital.
He coyly remarked that the Lm250 million spent by the government on the project was money well spent, since if the project would have a lifespan of 50 years, then the total outlay would "only" amount to an annual disbursement of Lm5 million.
If Mr Fenech and his Prime Minister believe they can get away with this kind of legerdemain, they are misjudging the mood of the people. Not least the mood of those middle-income families that have been required in recent times to pay higher taxes while experiencing a clear deterioration in their quality of life.
Actually, Mr Fenech's admission that the Tal-Qroqq facility will cost Lm250 million is outdated news. The real spend for the project will be higher than Lm250 million and is still rising as you read this.
Turn now to the debacle over hunting and trapping. Repeatedly, Prime Minister Gonzi and the PN insisted they had negotiated a deal under Malta's accession treaty with the EU to allow certain forms of spring hunting. They decried Labour's claims that there was no deal at all and that with Malta's membership of the EU, the whole matter became subject to the EU's environmental protection laws.
You may agree or disagree with hunting and trapping in general. You may agree or disagree with spring hunting on its own. However, most citizens, no matter what their views are about this issue, would assume that the government is telling them the truth about the situation. Here, the Gonzi administration had been most assertive in its declarations. Yes, they had negotiated and got a deal with the EU on spring hunting.
Last week, during a plenary session of the European Parliament, EU Commissioner Stavros Dimas stood up and unambiguously declared that not true, there had been no negotiations between the Malta government and the EU on spring hunting. Nor had any deal been struck under the terms of the accession agreement. Consequently, Malta needed to observe in full the terms of the Union's Birds Directive.
The contradiction between what the Gonzi administration, and the Prime Minister personally, have been declaring and the position publicly adopted by the Commission could hardly have been so glaring. If Mr Dimas is correct - and Labour knew right along that this is the case - there is no other conclusion possible but that the government has been telling untruths.
The damage to the public's belief in the government's trustworthiness has been enormous. It well exceeds, in my view, the political damage caused by the local election results.
Governments need to enhance or at least to preserve their credibility if they are to stay the course as a viable moving force. For people might be prepared to accept that their government is feeble, ineffective, incompetent, even arrogant. In the end, they will find it impossible to accept that, on top of all this, "their" government is quite prepared to feed them untruths.