The electorate voted for change in the March 9 general election in no uncertain manner. Whether Labour’s MPs lead is nine, as it stands, or seven, as the Nationalist Party wants the courts to decide, makes no difference to the number of votes and why they were cast. The astonishing Labour majority was a crushing defeat for a Government which had all the cards in its hands.

What do the Prime Minister and Home Affairs Minister Manuel Mallia intend to do about the national broadcaster, PBS?

The outcome also yelled out clearly that voters wanted change. They wanted Joseph Muscat’s Labour in, as much as they wanted Lawrence Gonzi’s Nationalists out.

The Nationalist Party will be electing a new leadership. The outlook is that it will be made up of Simon Busuttil as leader, Beppe Fenech Adami as deputy leader and Chris Said as general secretary. Other potential contenders, particularly Mario de Marco, are being viciously bad-mouthed.

It will not be a completely new leadership. Busuttil was elected as deputy leader and, going by his own words and thumping on the chest, he was expected to pull the party up by its boot strings. He ingloriously failed.

Said was a member of the Cabinet whose modus operandi and results were so thoroughly punished by the electorate, even if he served well.

The party has appointed a commission to examine why it suffered such a humiliating knock-out. It can save itself time and energy and concentrate on looking forward rather than backwards. All it has to do is re-read the articles penned from within its bowels after the party was flattened by Labour, particularly that by Robert Arrigo.

It has also to add meaning to its surface meekness in inevitably accepting defeat and humbly admit that it was the merit of Muscat and his team that won them the election, more so than the Nationalist Party losing it, as some apologists are saying.

The electorate were captivated by Muscat and what he convincingly declared he stood for. Put simply, he stood for change, a new way of doing things.

His appeal to end tribal division may have sounded politically naïve when he made it to a public nauseated by the totally negative Nationalist campaign. But in time his was the politics of persuasion, drawing to his side not just recast Labour grassroots but also many Nationalist and old Strickland families who detested Mintoffian Labour and used to vote Nationalist.

Muscat promised change through an innovative way of doing politics, and a vast majority of voters showed they wanted change. Now it is up to Muscat to deliver. In his first days he has already demonstrated that, if allowed, he really wants to do away with unnecessary division. How long that will last depends on the two sides.

My feeling is that if Busuttil assumes the PN leadership he will be very reluctant to play ball and instead he will choose militant opposition, openly declared or carefully nuanced, to most of what the Labour Government proposes. Time, as always, will tell.

Meanwhile it is important to speak out to the Prime Minister, rather than letting him do all the running. It will be just as important to criticise him where one disagrees with him and his managing team, offering a criticism different from that of the regrouping Nationalist Opposition, which will find it difficult to propose change of the things done by the Nationalist Government over such a long period of time.

For instance, what do the Prime Minister and Home Affairs Minister Manuel Mallia intend to do about the national broadcaster, PBS? The broadcaster, I hold, was one of the reasons so many people became disgusted with the Nationalist Government.

Its news bulletins and most current affairs programmes were blatantly pro-Nationalist and anti-Labour. They were as bad – worse because of crude attempts to hide the misbehaviour – than the broadcaster had become under the Labour Government before it was defeated in 1987.

How will New Labour want broadcasting to develop? We have plurality in broadcasting, with the national enterprise alongside party and other media. If PBS sticks to its political model and simply substitutes Labour for the Nationalists in insidious broadcasts, we will be no better off than under the Nationalists.

Persistent open or camouflaged propaganda for Labour will be as nauseating as when it promoted the Nationalists.

It is time to take fundamental steps to ensure this does not happen. A close friend of mine with whom I go a long way in journalism and elsewhere reminded me of a model which had been touted in the past, but never acted upon.

News and current affairs, my friend told me, should be hived off from PBS and placed under the Broadcasting Authority, which should be given a new remit. PBS should concentrate on providing entertainment and education for the viewing and listening public.

The proposal has obvious merit. Objective news reporting will ensure that news bulletins would not once again become simply a means of broadcasting Government events, irrespective of their news value content. The Government and the Opposition would be reported only when they have something new to say. That is what news is all about, and not jaded recycling.

Current affairs would be just so, built up and presented in a truly journalistic manner. The participants can be as partisan and controversial as they like. But the moderator would be balanced. Otherwise he would be unceremoniously pulled out and substituted by the Broadcasting Authority.

This would be a major change. Will it make it to the President’s speech at the first session of the new Parliament? I wonder. It would be a reassuring signal of the commitment to change if it did.