The Labour government is well into the third month of its life. Not long enough to assess it properly – that will be an ongoing exercise. But long enough to stop calling it new. The general election seems so far away. Its dust has settled. What counts now is performance, the ability and means of the Government to implement its policies in the context of what it has inherited, and of events as they develop.

In accepting the Budget as drafted, the Government also has to contend with an income tax change which is both anti-social and revenue-debilitating

By now the Government should know exactly what was left behind by the previous Administration. If there are parts of it that do not, they had better make sure that the exercise is completed before it is fudged out by its own actions. Many of those actions are constrained by the inheritance. That is particularly so in the public finance sector.

The Government decided to take over, propose and pass the budget for 2013 as drafted by the Nationalist Finance Minister. If that was not necessary as a buffer against further uncertainty I would say it was a foolish step. It will be tough to meet the revised deficit target the Government has set itself, especially in the context of the European Commission’s stance, which is likely to include a demand to reduce public expenditure by some one per cent of GDP.

That will be due to what the Nationalists left behind them. Yet Labour will have to carry the wailing baby. It may be that what the Commission demands will not be enough. It will focus on the expenditure side but there are indications that revenue estimates are overstated, not least in the context of the sad economic state of the eurozone.

It is not going to be an easy first fiscal year for the Government. The Finance Minister must give his portfolio maximum attention. Nothing should eat into that and his focus, not even travels necessitated by membership of EU organs. In accepting the Budget as drafted, the Government also has to contend with an income tax change which is both anti-social and revenue-debilitating.

Still, life has to go on. It is a hard life which will not be eased by too much attention paid by some ministers and parliamentary secretaries to photo opportunities. The Government has to make known what situation it has inherited, and simultaneously it has to concentrate on solving the inherited problems and on seeing how best to implement its electoral programme.

Photo opportunities will not translate into an iota of help in that demanding regard. Also, management style has to be defined. Though it cannot be cast in stone, there are signs that some of the political administrators are too bent on, even obsessed with, micro-management. That is wrong. Political administrators draw up policy and oversee its implementation to make sure the ship is sailing in the policy-set direction. Micro-management is the task of top civil servants and top appointees in the rest of the public sector.

It is also time to start rolling out the Government’s own proposals, even if in some cases they are an update, or a revision, of what the previous government has prepared. One minister doing that is Evarist Bartolo at Education. One of the handful of Labour political administrators with experience in Labour’s short stint in office between 1996 and 1998, he showed in opposition that, within a quasi-consensual position on education objectives, he was prepared to produce well-structured policy on how to get there.

In the middle of the week he produced a major initiative, a National Literacy Strategy for All framework. A literacy gap has been the bane of every education minister I can remember. About one in 10 of our population are illiterate. About a third of our young have a literacy problem. Literacy, nowadays defined to include also digital literacy, is the essential start to a good education, which is itself a necessary condition against the poverty trap that awaits too large a proportion of our people, as annual living conditions surveys by our National Office of Statistics regularly confirm.

There are other areas which require priority focus, not just in education. The Labour electoral programme identified most of these areas. They should start being tackled without delay. The Opposition shadow cabinet, very well crafted by new Opposition Leader Simon Busuttil, will oversee the Government to hold it accountable for its promises. Labour should welcome that, but in the first instance it should have a clear mirror to tell it how well or badly it is doing.

Early days, yet. But – there is no time to waste.