Remember the doom-and-gloom warnings just four months ago of impending financial meltdown should Labour be returned to power? Remember the financial gurus, economic boffins and tech wizards lining up to solemnly shake their non-partisan heads at the disaster that awaited us if Muscat was reconfirmed?

That investors were preparing to pull out and potential ones were focusing on other countries instead? That iGambling – sorry, iGaming – would vanish as quickly as it had come? That Malta’s tattered reputation post-Panama and Pilatus would have the world recoiling in distaste, washing its hands of our besmirched financial systems?

Well, our economic outlook has just been upgraded, GDP growth remains high, and apparently we could be heading for a surplus and the start of debt reduction. Government finally has the funds to settle long-standing claims. Everyone and their aunt agree that we are riding a wave of financial largesse and economic health that are the envy of the world – or so Prime Minister Muscat told the UN.

Is Muscat right or not? Were the Panama/Pilatus-fuelled fears just electoral hot air, or was there substance to them? Is Malta’s prosperity and economic outlook truly solid, or is it more like the bubble we were warned of?

The economic Cassandras who had fanned all those dire predictions owe it to the rest of us financially challenged hoi-polloi to explain this embarrassing lack of disaster. Voters, and certainly discerning ones, simply cannot be treated so shabbily, with a wink and a shrug and “that’s politics”.

The PN’s pre-Budget document basically endorses the strength of the current economic and financial cycle. It rightly warns about rising income inequality, new forms of poverty and the lack of economic diversity. The Opposition says it is ready to work with government to share the wealth equitably and to plan for the eventual slowdown in the economic cycle.

Joseph Muscat is now the undisputed master of virtual-reality democracy. And his most avid secret admirer could well be Adrian Delia

I can just imagine Prime Minister Muscat and his cabinet scrambling to let the Opposition in on dishing out the goodies brought by means the same Opposition considered foul just a few short months ago.

And anyway, so the problem now is just a cyclical downturn in the distant future, is it? No more déluge après Labour? Panama and reputational risk, you say? Well, the PN’s pre-Budget document gives it a dutiful nod with a paragraph at the bottom of page 35. It wasn’t even mentioned during the launch of the document.

Time to move on, it seems. Hatred has been replaced by positivity all round. Reputation and integrity are so yesterday. Or have we discovered, yet again, that money does not give a fig about such odd values, as long as it can find dark moist places where to securely breed?

Pointing the finger

Two times this week Prime Minister Muscat has made adroit use of his finger. John Bundy, the CEO of PBS, has lost the trust of the PBS board because he seems to think that financial regulations are written in cuneiform. When asked what he intended to do with Bundy, Muscat simply pointed to the board. It’s their responsibility to fire him, he said.

But the board cannot really fire the CEO without the approval of the same minister who foisted the CEO on them in the first place. It seems that the minister has pulled an Egrant and demanded ‘proof’. So now the board has set up an investigation to hunt for the facts that drove them to demand Bundy’s resignation in the first place.

In the meantime Bundy bounces up his office steps every day as if nothing has happened. How much humiliation is the PBS board willing to take before it finally reaches deep into its collective trousers, finds its balls and marches off with them with whatever dignity it still retains?

Then there was the issue of whether or not to cancel the hunting season in the face of the massacre of protected birds.  Muscat again pointed the finger, this time to the Ornis Committee, when it was clear that government could take action itself.

Long before 2013, governments had mastered the exact science of inflating their democratic credentials by passing the buck to ‘independent’ quangos stuffed by its own appointees. But Muscat is transcending even this standard level of democratic sleight of hand.

During the first Labour legislature the taming of the offices of the Police Commissioner, the Field Marshal of the Armed Forces (or whatever he calls himself now), the Attorney General, Mepa and the FIAU all honed Muscat’s skills of dissimulation and deflection to a fine art. He is now the undisputed master of virtual-reality democracy. And his most avid secret admirer could well be Adrian Delia.

The media, as usual, has got it hopelessly wrong. The Prime Minister was not pointing the finger. He was showing one, to the rest of the nation.