Last week, following the 6,501st death on a FIFA World Cup building site in Qatar, the world was aghast at the utter cold-bloodedness of the Qatari sport minister. He considered this normal that a person dies and was angry at the questioner for asking about the death during the World Cup.

We, in Malta, seem to be suffering from the same sense of lack of empathy and insensitivity when it comes to loss of lives in our country.

During the last three or four years, many opinion makers, including myself, have written about deaths on our roads, deaths on our building sites and industrial parks, deaths in our prisons, deaths on the migrant boats being pushed out of our territorial waters to die, the murder of a black person allegedly by members of our armed forces, the brutal murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia and violence in Paceville and in Buġibba.

Nobody, however, has deemed it fit to join the dots and to analyse why Malta’s government does not seem to place value on people’s deaths.

Each time a death occurs on our roads there is a flurry of articles about this. A death on a building site such as the recent one in Corradino opens the floodgates on this particular subject and so on.

We tend to argue for improvements, punishments, more care, greater accountability on each occasion. The latest subject connected with deaths of innocent people is the ongoing controversy about the planned introduction of free abortion from conception until the ninth month of pregnancy for reasons such as “mental health”, as yet undefined, or the general health risks to the mother.

Once again, we all discuss abortion on its own just as we discussed road deaths on their own or the boat people on their own.

Each time we are all greatly disturbed by the lack of enforcement and the lack of interest to make changes by our authorities. We always get words of sadness and condolences by the authorities but, as soon as another event occurs, the first is soon forgotten. It is time to stop shedding crocodile tears and find our moral compass once more.

Why are our authorities, whether civil servants, armed forces and the police, who are in charge of enforcement to prevent deaths or the politicians who can change the laws to ensure that no more unnecessary deaths occur so callous and uncaring?

Is there a callous and persistent policy to denigrate the value of life in Malta? Punishments for killing a person, whether it is a foetus, a migrant at sea, a black man on a country lane, a prisoner in a cell, a wife of a brutal husband, a housewife in her kitchen as her house is demolished, a motorcyclist on a dark street at night, a victim of a drunken or drugged car driver or a slave worker on a building site, are never increased. Our government has consistently shown greater interest in the national economy than the national moral health.

The proposed abortion law is just another example of their callousness. Pretending to care for a woman’s mental health they are proposing to allow the killing of an innocent foetus throughout all the pregnancy on the advice of any one doctor. Many immigrant healthcare workers from countries with other moral principles will make it very easy to find a foreign-born doctor willing to sign an abortion diagnosis for risks to the mother’s health.

Overcrowding of our roads by persons used to driving on the right or who received driving licences allegedly upon orders from a minister continue to place Maltese pedestrians and drivers at constant daily risks. Speed limits are ignored. No random drug or alcohol tests are taken at the exits of Paceville every evening. The courts always take years to start trials for persons causing deaths on the roads, allowing these to continue driving.

Our government has shown greater interest in the national economy than the national moral health- John Vassallo

What about the cowboys who, after buying a digger or a crane, get permits to construct or demolish buildings using untrained foreign slave labour imported to work below minimum wages without architects, engineers or state authorities on site? What about the lack of police protection for battered wives and women being stalked, beaten and even killed?

Is this a European country in the 21st century? Yes, it is but is different from most other European countries because its leaders have no morals at all.

They just do not care about human life, about women’s protection, about the equality of the unborn child with all other citizens, about the rights of migrants at seas, about people living next to building sites. They just do not care as long as the wheels of the economy, oiled by a growing foreign debt, continue to turn.

The Joseph Muscat government was singled out by an inquiry board for enabling a culture of impunity in the lead up to journalist Caruana Galizia’s assassination. Yet, as long as the present culture of callousness is allowed by out prime minister to continue, the number of deaths now already in their hundreds on the roads, in prisons, in building sites and on boats of migrants at sea will increase and will be a much worse condemnation.

Do we have to go on for more months or years before we reach breaking point and a new public inquiry by retired judges issues another condemnation of Robert Abela? Yes, another condemnation because, as legal adviser to the cabinet of Muscat and as protégé of the latter, he bears the same guilt the inquiry pronounced last time.

I beg the authorities to take a nation-wide approach to end this lack of moral compass that we are all being lulled into. This should begin at primary school with classes in civics and the sanctity of life, in discipline and obedience to the law and should be ingrained to an independent civil service, armed forces and police so that politicians and cowboy entrepreneurs in all economic sectors are reined in.

This will reduce unnecessary deaths to the absolute minimum which, in a perfect world, should be zero or thereabouts. Instead, we are going in the opposite direction at full speed without safety belts and under the influence of the euphoria of economic greed.

John Vassallo is a former ambassador to the EU.