The Government has told us, apparently repeatedly, that there are glaring inefficiencies in the processes concerned with the issue of passports and ID Cards and consequently it was necessary, nay imperative, for Super Minister Manwel Mallia to have yet another burden piled upon his magnificent shoulders.
Lucky for us he had his load lightened by having justice taken away, lest he collapsed under the strain. Equally happily, he was spared the tension of having to cope with the fallout from the arraignment of Labour's favourite son, after the previous Commissioner's decision was swiftly countermanded by the new one.
It is typical, of course, that the usual screechers about civil liberties and privacy, who were so strident back in the day, have suddenly found themselves with other things to occupy their mouths. The fact that at the press of a button, the most detailed of profiles of each and every one of us will be available to Big Brother, to use George's nickname for Governments, seems to worry them not one jot.
The fact that said button will reside within the Ministry responsible for the Police, the Catering Corps, the Fun Cruise Division, the Red Army, and Public Broadcasting seems to trouble the suddenly-reticent liberals not at all, their masks and placards having been put back away neatly into the toy cupboard.
No-one, except for the PN, but they're still living in the past, not having learnt the lesson that the role of the Opposition is to hide away and let the Government do what it likes with our lives, seems even slightly perturbed by this regression from data compartmentalisation and "need to know".
The Government, the reasoning seems to be, has its reasons and there's an end to it, no more discussion needed.
The enormous flaw in that argument is that the "reason" we were given is that there are glaring inefficiencies in the ID card and Passport departments. Anyone who has renewed these documents knows that this is poppycock, these are perhaps amongst the most efficient departments of Government.
And how, pray, does adding in every source of information known to man go towards making a process more efficient? Experience tells us that the opposite will be the case.
Consequently, increased efficiency - quite apart frm the fact that it wasn't broken so there was no need to fix it in the first place - is not the flag that Government is really saluting, for all that this is the one that has been run up the flagpole.
When false flags are raised, eyebrows should do likewise, because the next bits of bunting to decorate the landscape might well be, for instance, compulsory DNA recording and strict Internet monitoring.
It's not as if our new Best Best Buddies don't have experience in the latter and we already know how Control Freakery is an integral part of Labour's management philosophy.