Opposition leader Simon Busuttil said this morning that the government's credibility was in freefall and the PN would counter it with honest politics.
"The PN needs to win the general election not because Labour is dishonest, but because the Nationalist Party is honest," Dr Busuttil said.
Today, he said, marked the 28th anniversary of the Tal-Barrani incidents. Circumstances had changed since then, he said, but the PN had a duty to ensure that any steps backwards and any actions which did not take place in a normal democracy, were immediately stopped.
Dr Busuttil spoke at the end of a meeting of the PN general council where he insisted that the people should not allow themselves to be bullied or misled by the government and they should stand up for their rights. All had to fight for truth to prevail.
"Stand up for what is right," Dr Busuttil insisted.
He devoted much of his speech to the controversy over the shooting by the driver of Home Affairs Minister Manuel Mallia and insisted once more that the prime minister should shoulder his political responsibility.
The minister responsible for the police was directly responsible to ensure that the public was safe and people did not wave guns and shoot in public, he said.
But people close to Labour now thought they could do whatever they liked, whether that was shooting in public or carrying out works in violation of regulations. And the prime minister was not doing anything about them.
The need for political accountability had become more acute because of the attempted cover-up of the shooting incident - manifestly evident when an official statement, issued two-and-a-half hours after the case, falsely spoke of warning shots fired in the air.
The newspapers had shown how it was the prime minister's own head of communications who had issued that statement. They had also shown how bullet casings had been removed before the inquiry was held, and how an arrest report had been deleted. All these were the hallmarks of a cover-up.
This was obscene and unheard off in a democratic country.
Furthermore, this was not the first cover up, with the records of a car which had blocked the hospital helipad also having been deleted.
One of the consequences of such cases was that people lost confidence in politicians, the government and the mainstream political parties, Dr Busuttil warned. Such a loss of confidence could lead to the creation of extremist parties, even far-right parties.
Dr Busuttil said the PN too needed to ask itself whether the people believed it. It needed to work honestly to regain the people's confidence, especially the confidence of the people whose trust was betrayed by Dr Muscat.
Dr Busuttil said he wanted to make his own proposals. For example, a future PN government wanted to end clientalism and it should be ensured that people would get the services they expected quickly from the public service. People should not depend on ministers for what they were entitled for.
Similarly the PN wanted to stamp out nepotism where people who appeared on political billboards filling top government positions. Parliamentary hearings should be introduced for top government appointments.
The state institutions also needed to be truly independent, rather than having cases such as that involving Helena Dalli, where Mepa, instead of defending the people, had defended the minister. One also remembered how Mepa acted over the mooring of a gas tanker in Marsaxlokk.
Dr Busuttil said the former government had allowed the institutions to work freely, but it should have better entrenched their independence in law.
With regard to standards in public service, the PN would follow up the proposal, made last year, for the appointment of a Commissioner for Standards in Public Life, a measure which this 'indecent government' had not implemented.
The government, Dr Busuttil said, had failed in its most important promises, such as meritocracy, honesty, and openness.
It was telling, Dr Busuttil said, that minister Evarist Bartolo this morning said that the prime minister should be the team's centre forward, not the goalkeeper to keep out Labour's own goals. The problem with that Mr Bartolo said was that this centre forward had already been caught off-side too many times.
The government's credibility was in freefall, Dr Busuttil said, and the PN would counter that with honest politics. The PN needed to win the general election not because Labour was dishonest, but because the PN was honest.
Earlier, Dr Busuttil picked up where he left off in his reply to the Budget speech, saying the events of the past week further showed how the government's masks were slipping.
He said the government had lost its social plot, it did not have economic direction, and it had lost its moral authority.
He hit out at the increase of various taxes, and also highlighted, as he did on Monday, how a number of Labour MPs were making considerable sums of money through various governemnt appointments.
Labour, which had gained so much from the former government's mistake on the honoraria issue, was doing far worse This was political hypocrisy.
Not all Labour MPs were in the same boat. Godfrey Farrugia and Marlene Farrugia refused to be bought. And veteran Joe Debono Grech had declared that while he was consultant for the Gozo minister, he refused to be paid because he was a Labourite and worked for the party and the country.
What did that say about his fellow MPs? Dr Busuttil asked.