Edward Zammit Lewis has just been reconfirmed as minister of governance. You may remember he believes he did nothing wrong when, despite being an MP, he exchanged some 700 WhatsApp messages with Yorgen Fenech from January to October 2019 – after it was on everyone’s lips that Fenech owned the secret company 17 Black. So what Zammit Lewis believes is necessary for good governance is bound to be fascinating.

Recently, Zammit Lewis presented a draft law to regularise staff employed by the government as persons of trust. That’s anyone engaged directly from outside the public service to act as consultants and staff in the private secretariat of a minister or parliamentary secretary.

One catch in the draft law: persons of trust shall not be deemed to be public officers or employees, bound by the usual standards of behaviour of public servants. Would that include being able to work simultaneously for the private sector? That’s what Alex Muscat, now junior minister, did for a period while deputy chief of staff at the Office of the Prime Minister. Testifying at the Caruana Galizia inquiry, he justified his work for Nexia BT by saying he was a person of trust, not a public servant.

Glenn Bedingfield MP spelled out one consequence of the draft law: he proposed that persons of trust should be permitted, unlike senior public servants, to take part in public political discussion. Such as, one supposes, calling protestors ‘whores’, as Tony Zarb, government consultant, once did; or speculating about the coming end of a journalist, as Bedingfield’s own blog once did about Daphne Caruana Galizia, some months before her assassination.

Here’s a puzzle. If the government and its backbenchers now feel the need to stipulate that persons of trust not be considered public officials, where does that leave the excuses previously given by the likes of Muscat and Bedingfield?

At the public inquiry, they asserted they already had that right, being persons of trust. Now, the government is proposing to give persons of trust that right. So didn’t Muscat and Bedingfield have that right, after all?

I think we should be told what this government thinks. We already know what any government with a sense of state and decorum thinks.

Zammit Lewis distinguishes between ‘persons of trust’ and ‘positions of trust’, the latter being filled by people already in the public service and who would continue to be bound by the rules governing public servants even while serving on a political trust basis. Pre-2013, this distinction was not made. A person of trust, once recruited, was bound by the code of behaviour expected of public servants.

Why is this change being proposed? The PN governments bound persons of trust by the same rules as public servants in the same position. Labour is proposing a radical change of public service ethos. It blurs even further the boundary between the government and ruling party. It diminishes the sense of state.

The draft law is in response to a recommendation by the Venice Commission. But the commission expressly stated: “Only activities directly related to the exercise of power should be considered as a valid exception from the general system of appointments in the public service.” In short, the number of persons of trust should be minimal, appointed only to positions that combine a political agenda, technical expertise  and practical experience in execution.

One response to this expectation was given by Mario Cutajar, the head of the civil service. Speaking to this newspaper in 2019, he said he wasn’t concerned about the recruitment of 700 persons of trust (up to that time). One had to allow for ‘Maltese culture’.

The government claims Malta is an exception. Actually, it wants to build a state of exception- Ranier Fsadni

Zammit Lewis echoed this when he said that the last PN government had 600 persons of trust on the public payroll. He should tell us how he’s defining ‘persons of trust’ in coming up with this figure and whether he’s comparing like with like.

I’ve spoken to several people involved in PN governments from 1987 to 2013. Even after taking into account the recruitment of staff for the EU Secretariat, MEUSAC, etc. – necessary for EU negotiations and, later, membership – that ball-park figure doesn’t make sense to them, unless some cunning definitions are being used.

If you compare numbers of staff permitted for ministerial secretariats, you will come up with official figures similar (marginally more) to those today. But are these numbers meaningful?

Joseph Muscat broke the rules by recruiting more advisers than he was permitted. Between 2017 and 2019, the family ministry employed nearly 90 persons without a public call.

What about ministries under Nationalist governments? Let the information come to light. Not just raw numbers but roles too.

What’s at stake here? It’s not just the money, even though that’s nothing to sneeze at with a cabinet that’s the third largest in the EU (the largest in proportionate terms). Each minister is allowed a staff complement of 19 and each junior minister a complement of 11 (and that’s if they adhere to the rules).

What’s even more critical is the ethos of government. The Venice Commission speaks on behalf of all modern accountable governments when it says the number of persons of trust should be minimal.

In the UK, there’s a fuss being made because the number of special advisers (persons of trust) employed by the Tory government has gone up to a whopping 109 – of whom 44 work for the prime minister while most cabinet ministers only get two. Anyone other than a political adviser is recruited by a public call. Hell is breaking loose because the Tory government employed three persons of trust to senior roles in the anti-COVID-19 strategy (to positions that aren’t remunerated).

Two issues, therefore, are at stake in the draft bill on persons of trust. One is whether, for all the talk of longstanding “Maltese culture”, what we’re seeing is a retrograde development, not even a mirroring of the culture but a turning back of the clock to undo the regulations issued in the early 1990s.

Second, it’s not a matter of the public culture we have but the one we need to be governed well. The government claims Malta is an exception. Actually, it wants to build a state of exception.

After the mess of private agendas hijacking the public interest, you’d think it would have learned its lesson. Instead, it purports to lecture us on good governance.

We pay tribute to Oliver Friggieri for highlighting our political tribalism while our government proposes to enshrine it in law.

ranierfsadni@europe.com

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