We’ve been poked with some fresh revelation of wrongdoing or bad governance practically every week of the last 10 years. The best way to inure us all to corruption is to dose us with some of it every day of our lives. Eventually, every poison sinks in the background of the long collapse of our existence.

Last week’s revelations by this newspaper promised to be no different. Even Robert Abela called them “recycled” though his meaning was different. He meant to say that this was all stuff we already knew, a repackaged story, a dinner we’ve eaten before. In that way, the prime minister wanted us to understand him to mean, we should ignore it because the reporters giving us the information were cheating us, selling us something we’ve bought already.

Abela was exploiting the familiarity and the predictability of it all. We all understood, before this newspaper gave us the details, that this sort of thing was going on.

I take you back to the first day of Joseph Muscat as Malta’s prime minister. His election candidates were still peering through the Perspex wondering if they made it to parliament. None of them had yet got a call to run a government ministry.

On that first day in Castille, Muscat decapitated the public service, firing nearly all euphemistically-called permanent secretaries and replaced them with people who owed their careers to him.

Within weeks, all major and most middle-ranking positions of influence in Malta’s administration were filled by handpicked cronies, sycophants and hangers on. Because that’s bad in itself – it is unfair, inefficient and unconstitutional – the focus of objections stayed on the identity of the appointees. At first, we focused less on the purpose of their selection.

Whether it’s to give public contracts to party funders, carve out public land for a pittance to loyalists, grant development permits that ruin the national landscape, or whether it is to pay disability pensions to the able-bodied or a driving licence to the incompetent, the purpose of capturing the public service is clear. It is a utilitarian programme of recruiting as many people as possible to the corrupt cult of Muscat and his heir, Abela.

The details of how they discriminated against every single 18-year-old who trained to drive and waited their turn for the test like a chump are identical to the way they discriminated against every chump living in the shadow of some tower erected by Silvio Debono or Joseph Portelli.

They discriminated against every chump who bore their suffering stoically while Silvio Grixti’s constituents got undeserved disability benefits.

They discriminated against every hard-working labourer barely making ends meet by giving hundreds of people like Melvyn Theuma (the self-confessed middleman in the Daphne Caruana Galizia murder) a salary to do bugger all.

In that way, in the fact that the driving licences scandal does not shock us because it is but the repetition of a pattern of systemic abuse of power and corruption, yes, I suppose, the story is recycled.

Corruption has become the religion of the State- Manuel Delia

It wasn’t recycled by the brave and meticulous reporters of Times of Malta. It was recycled by Muscat and Abela who applied a pattern of favouritism, cronyism, clientelism and corruption through every department of the State they captured.

Abela went further this week.

He declared, with no ambiguity that could have lent itself to optimistic reading between the lines, that he thought that what Times of Malta exposed was not a shocking scandal. It is just how things should be. He would disagree, Abela said, with anyone who would say that politics should be done differently.

That was a truly Orwellian moment, the third-act denouement when the pigs boldly declare that reality is the opposite of the aspirations proclaimed before the revolution. Ten years ago, Labour came to power decrying the cronyism of the Nationalists. Malta belongs to all of us, they screamed. Those who do not fight corruption are themselves corrupt, thundered  Muscat. You may still work with us even if you disagree with us, he said.

How far they’ve come.

The prime minister now warns 18-year-old voters that they must find a minister to fix their driving test for them. Because that’s the way politics is done in Malta and the prime minister said he would disagree with any other way.

I don’t think that’s a recycled development of news. I think Abela has never been so explicit. When he came to office, stumbling over the rubble of the collapse of  Muscat, he said he would guarantee the rule of law and hand down good governance.

How far he’s come.

Out of the window he throws the law that establishes the rules on who gets a driving licence (or a disability pension, or a development permit, or a public sector job, or an army promotion and so on). In place of the rule of that law comes the rule of his customer care officers whose criteria of choice is whether the candidate is or might be persuaded to become a Labour voter.

Out of the window the governing principles of fairness, of first come first served, of non-discrimination, of objective testing.

Out of the window equality before the law. Consider how Abela never spoke in defence of the Transport Malta officials being prosecuted for this scandal but only in defence of the Labour Party officials and ministers who solicited them and pressured them into these crimes.

Abela has decided. He is convinced no scandal will be the last scandal of his government. Corruption has become the religion of the State. He believes no change is possible. He thinks the rest of the farm animals are ready for their fate. After all, he and his pigs are more equal than the rest of us chumps.