A few needed stitches in time

You have told me that the questions to which you gave the most popular answers in these columns were about, first, cats and, second, reforming the Constitution. The Public Administration Act, now at the Committee stage in Parliament, resolves some issues of governance in ways that do not seem to go very well with the kind of ideas that you put forward about the Constitution. Would you be unhappy if the Act goes through Parliament with only slight amendments?

The proposed law might well be nicknamed 'The Charter of the Civil Servant'. Surprisingly, it has not proven so far to be a cat thrown among the pigeons - even though Anġlu Farrugia made some quite feline noises when declaring last July that the opposition would vote against it.

Its gestation has taken very much longer than the proverbial length of an elephant's pregnancy; indeed, a mother elephant would have been in its eleventh pregnancy since the first draft that I saw. Yet I must confess that I am still foxed by some features of the Bill.

I cannot understand, for instance, what it says about "agencies". The term 'agency' is defined as being "a body listed in the fourth schedule". All government agencies are supposed to be listed in that schedule, but actually there are only two: the Management Efficiency Unit and the Office of the Attorney General. Yet the provisions of the nine paragraphs dealing with 'agencies' hardly seem to be appropriate to these two.

It seems that the bodies that I used to think of as being agencies, according to the meaning of the word in ordinary English, are not agencies at all according to the law; they are "government entities" - defined as any organisation that is neither a government department nor a commercial partnership, but in which government has a controlling interest.

The Bill empowers the Prime Minister "subject to any other law governing a government entity" to make the provisions of the law as formulated for government departments to be applicable also to authorities, foundations, boards, councils, commissions, etc. (Presumably this includes 'entities' ranging from the Malta Environment and Planning Authority to the University of Malta).

I admit that I find the real significance of these provisions as difficult to fathom as one reader claimed to find the expression of my views in this "double-Dutch-catechism format", as he put in rather pungently.

I have been an addict of Franz Kafka ever since I was a teenager and have always been fascinated by the language of bureaucracy. I could not help being entranced by the new basic law of the Maltese civil service being drafted in an enigmatic style worthy indeed of the Sphinx.

Apart from the obscurity with regard to the bodies to which the Act will be made applicable according to the free will, if not the whims, of the Prime Minister, what is your assessment of the merits of this law - the professed aim of which is to turn the public service into a meritocracy?

I fully agree with the judgment expressed by Alan Deidun last Sunday in this paper. I found it a trifle strange that it was in a column that deals with environmental matters that I found such a rare if not unique excellent comment on a law so decisive for the whole administration of our nation.

Deidun devoted a paragraph to highlighting why the Act was filling a long-felt void very well in most respects. He then went on to point out that it was very regressive by reassigning to the minister responsibilities that had been correctly attributed to the permanent public officers after 1987. The minister will now no longer even be obliged to give his directives in writing when intervening in matters that should normally be settled by the responsible civil servants.

Another regressive step is the re-establishment of centralised control when it had been until now a pivot of the Public Service reform exercise to ensure more delegation and devolution, in the interests of accountability at all levels.

The Public Administration Act had originally been expected to be the crowning act of the 20-year-long reform process. Its main intent had been double: on one hand, shrinking the boundaries of the service through the establishment of agencies empowered to operate in more business-like modes than is proper to government departments.

Instead, the present Act has placed a dunce's cap on top of the process. It has apparently reversed the philosophy that was at the roots of the reform, the beginnings of which many associate with the name of Joseph V. Tabone, at the time considered Canada's bountiful gift to Malta at the dawn of the Fenech Adami era.

Do you think the situation is irredeemable?

Until now, only a few articles have gone through the Committee stage. So far, the opposition has not shown itself prepared to propose the amendments so that the Bill is minimally reshaped back into the instrument that would clinch the civil service reform.

Whether they did so or not would be clearest evidence of whether there is more continuity with the style of the Mintoff era or with the ideals of the Third way or New Labour.

But if the government itself introduced the amendments, it would be saving itself from spoiling a hard-won achievement by a final gesture of negligence. I would not be altogether surprised if it turns out that the astute Chris Said already has the necessary surgical transplants up his sleeve.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.