When Miriam Pace was killed, buried under the rubble that used to be her home, destroyed by the mindless avarice of the developers digging an infernal hole next to it, the prime minister was under pressure to show he was going to avoid a repetition. In private he spoke with the people who profit from construction. In public, he promised changes when experts he hired tell him what those changes need to be.

The experts reported but we are not allowed to know what they told the prime minister. He assures us he’s implementing their suggestions but we need to take what he says on trust.

That’s not how things should work. In a proper democracy, there would be a permanent committee of cross-party parliamentarians that overseas public safety. Immediately, when news of the fatal accident is out, the committee members convene to start a parliamentary inquiry. They would call in experts to give evidence in public which would be televised.

Their researchers would provide them with dossiers that help them ensure they get all they need out of witnesses, including responsible ministers who will be grilled on the performance of their departments and questioned on whether the government failed in any of its responsibilities in a way that may have allowed the fatality to occur.

Then they will issue a report, publicly, that will determine failings and apportion responsibility. And if they find that improvements to the law could make things better in the future, including by imposing new responsibilities on ministers, they draw up legislation for debate. They will sponsor the bill backed by the engagement of the public that, particularly on pressing matters such as wanting to feel safe under one’s roof, will apply pressure on majorities to adopt those laws.

We have none of that here. Parliament only debates what the prime minister wants it to. Inquiries only happen if the prime minister wants them to.

They last as long as the prime minister wishes and they report only to him. We only ever know what the inquiries find if the prime minister wants us to. And changes to legislation will happen only if the prime minister allows it.

Some people still say our parliament is a daughter of the Westminster model. It has a cheap petit bourgeois socialist version of the ceremonial trappings of Westminster but nothing of its democratic soul. Part of the reason is scale. It is true that in the UK the government is ensconced within parliament. But ministers are a minority even within the parliamentary group that supports them. British prime ministers have to negotiate their way through the expectations of elected representatives like every other democratic leader in the world must.

To get a useful parliament, we need to pay our MPs a full-time salary without the need of the government’s grace- Manuel Delia

But here the prime minister employs the parliamentary majority. Technically, we’re paying through our taxes but they don’t owe their income to us but to the prime minister that appoints them. Most of them are ministers in name and in fact, sworn in the job with a ceremony at the palace for the family album. The rest are running government agencies, ministers in all but name.

The capture of the legislative branch by the executive is now complete. Caeser Robert Abela is now gifting parliamentary seats, abandoning the last vestiges of a system of government by the people. He gets to override a categorical choice made by voters on who their elected representative should be, to appoint instead an MP of his choice.

Let us go back for a moment to the aftermath of the killing of Miriam Pace.

She was entitled to expect that laws and their enforcement would have been in place to keep her safe. When she died, the country was entitled to expect that the administration transparently seeks to determine cause and responsibility, provide whatever compensation is possible, and take initiatives to avoid repetition.

But people expect that sort of thing from any government, even the most dictatorial. The ultimate failure of dictatorships is that they are primarily concerned with misrepresenting reality to ensure they look good, deny anything wrong happened, and quickly turn the page.

In democracies you have safety valves such as the criticism of the independent press. But that’s not enough. You also need institutions independent of the government to kick into action. In this case, for example, the police would investigate criminal responsibility, the prosecutor files charges, and the judge hands down punishment.

But there’s more to a collapsed house than criminal responsibility. There is political responsibility and the need to learn from mistakes and change rules to make things better next time. That’s what having checks and balances in a democracy is all about.

If we had a half-way useful parliament, the prime minister would not be able to imperiously dismiss questions on what experts told him needs to be done to avoid yet another murder by excavator. Because the experts would have been on TV answering questions from a parliamentary committee.

To get a useful parliament, we need to pay our MPs a full-time salary without the need of the government’s grace, give them staff that works for them not the prime minister, and allow them to set their own agenda.

We need ministers to attend parliament to answer questions, not hand down edicts. We need people who write laws to work separately from people who implement them.

Read Repubblika’s suggestions on this on repubblika.org.

We need this. As citizens. We need parliamentarians to protect us from administrative incompetence, negligence, corruption and secrecy that inevitably set in when people in power have no one to stop them. We are entitled to choose representatives who take decisions on our behalf.

We are entitled to a democracy.