This is a time when political neck movements are strained, looking backwards and forward. Why did the general election result turn out the way it did? What support staff will the Government put in place and will it deliver on its promises?
Financial accountability is essential if the people are to be satisfied that politics is not tied to pre-election deals with big business
The more important stuff lies ahead but it is early days yet. For various reasons, it is inevitable that many will be examining the recent past.
Foremost, the Nationalist Party. It has looked ahead, setting time frames for the election of a new leadership, which will most likely be made up of old hands.
But it has also set up a committee to dissect the reasons, as perceived by its members, of why it lost the election so massively.
Strangely, the commission is to report after the leadership elections are held, so it will not affect them.
Simon Busuttil, for one, must be thankful for that. He is widely expected to succeed Lawrence Gonzi despite the failure of his short term as deputy leader.
He will escape any comment the analytical committee might make, although he should be held to blame more for his bragging than for reality – he came on the scene late in the day.
Given the size of Labour’s victory, had he come earlier he would probably have made little difference. But the time factor is a saving card in his favour.
The Labour Party, while savouring its success, will be more inclined to look forward.
First task is to put in place a political management team.
That is part and parcel of the trend recommended by Austin Gatt years ago and faithfully practised by successive Nationalist governments. (Incidentally, the former bull in a china shop morphs into a scapegoat among Nationalists speaking frankly.)
Labour can hardly be expected to ignore the fact that it inherited a Nationalist bureaucracy and not change it with its own appointees.
In contrast, meritocracy must be a yardstick when it comes to filling permanent positions in the civil service and the rest of the public sector.
Labour will be looking ahead to see how it can set about implementing its demanding programme. It has promised to retain what is good in the Nationalist legacy.
Still, it has to look at its own promises, which include more than the challenging commitment to have in place a new energy generating set-up within two years.
The size of the turn-out of the general election, for instance, has fed expectations to gargantuan proportions as the queues forming up outside the offices of a number of key ministers indicate.
That accounts in outline for the political parties. What should the people be looking at? The future, certainly: they will hold the Labour Administration to account well beyond Joseph Muscat’s efforts to unify Government and Opposition where that is possible, to help end the debilitating tribal divisions that curse our country.
Yet, the past matters, too, so that we can learn from it and press the political class as a whole to make changes before the next general election. Five areas come immediately to mind.
One is financial accountability. The main parties must say how they are financed. Labour has said that it will publish its accounts in the forthcoming general conference. The Nationalist Party’s position is still vague.
Such accountability is essential if the people are to be satisfied that politics is not tied to pre-election deals with big business. Corrupt practice can easily become a child of the time under any government.
A related second is legislation to specifically say what financing is permissible and what is not. There was much talk by the then Government before the election but no real action whatsoever.
The third area, which starts by looking back, is the electoral system. As Joseph Brincat expressively wrote in yesterday’s The Sunday Times and Andrè Zammit put in a letter to this newspaper, the system is patched up and still not satisfactory.
The link between valid votes cast and the quota required to earn a seat from them should be as clear as possible and fair.
The best approach, I continue to hold, is to turn Malta and Gozo into one electoral district, as is done for the election of members of the European Parliament. Other models better than the existing one also exist.
The fourth area requiring early action is the enactment of an effective Whistleblower’s Act. Don’t expect a lot from it. But we have so little to go by when so much is required.
The final sector demanding a huge revamp is state broadcasting, which, in the run-up to the general election, was scandalously biased.
The Government will lay out its proposed action in the President’s Speech. How much will the above five key areas, which cost no money to implement, feature in it?