When Prime Minister Joseph Muscat rose to speak in the debate over the no confidence motion presented by the Nationalist Party earlier this month he made a statement portraying a very strange definition of transparency.

Without any hint of embarrassment, he said his government would publish all its main contracts by the end of this year, adding, to boot and, obviously, in reply to pressure for the publication of such contracts, that it did not fear transparency. He made the declaration immediately after he admitted that his government clearly needed to work hard on governance issues.

If, as Dr Muscat said, his government does not fear transparency, it should publish public contracts immediately they are signed not when it is most convenient for it to do so or to score political goals, unless, of course, they involve national security issues.

Delaying the publication of contracts to times that suit his government is not what he had promised before the last election. This most serious shortcoming strikes at the very heart of the democratic process, a matter that does not seem to bother the government unduly.

In refusing to publish public contracts at the right time, the government is not only going against what Dr Muscat had declared but he is also directly challenging the expectations of the electorate that is now becoming increasingly more sensitive to accountability and transparency issues.

Dr Muscat acts as if transparency is only justified when his government decrees it to be so, ignoring the country’s clamour for greater openness in government work. Instead of doing what is right, what the people expect the government to do all the time, the Prime Minister is often choosing to equate his stand with shortcomings made by the Nationalist Party when in government. This may go down well with diehard party supporters but is unacceptable to right-thinking people.

He keeps saying his government needs no lessons from the PN. That may very well be so but, other than the PN, there is the electorate out there that sits in judgement over the government. For reasons best known to himself, Dr Muscat appears to be forgetting this or, maybe, he believes that, having won such a huge majority at the election, he is indestructible.

The hardest lesson he can learn is from the electorate, as the PN did to its cost. The party in Opposition has come to terms with its failings in this regard, admitting that it, too, had made serious mistakes. This is how it put it when, in its document on good governance, it commented on the way Labour has lowered governance standards in an extraordinary short time:

“This does not mean that the Nationalist Party is free from blame. In the past, it committed its own mistakes, some of them serious, and paid a heavy electoral price. It is also responsible for having failed to ensure that good governance was sufficiently entrenched in the country as to outlive its own government. It was also slow in introducing certain good governance laws, such as on party financing, that were long overdue.”

The electorate had expected Labour to deliver on good governance.

However, its record on this score is hugely disappointing.

Restoring trust in politics requires more than promises, policy documents, rules and regulations. What is required is a strong moral fibre to withstand temptations to deviate from good democratic principles. Failing to live up to expectations, Labour must work hard on governance issues. Very hard.

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