Although it is no doubt stressful for governments to sit through inquiries into their conducts, examining administrative decisions and failings and seeking to learn from them for the benefit of future occurrences should be a key consequence of the separation of powers and the growth of the national experience.
It should be within the discretion of the legislative branch, acting independently of the government (and therefore also with the initiative of the parliamentary opposition) to launch inquiries to receive evidence and conduct hearings in a public forum to focus on specific occurrences. Interested members of the public and organisations should not
only be able to make evidential submissions as is the case with most inquiries but also listen to oral evidence given by other parties.
Public inquiries should be automatically opened in cases of multiple deaths, such as public transport crashes or mass murders.
Conclusions of the inquiry should in principle be public, with regulations to allow prosecutors and investigators to request that information be redacted to preserve evidence. Inquiries would be expected to make recommendations to improve the quality of government or management of public organisations in the future.
People in an executive office should be obliged to cooperate with public inquiries, including Parliamentary commissions of inquiry. We recall the refusal of Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi to attend meetings and answer questions from fact-finding and investigating commissions of the European Parliament, before and after Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed.
The present Inquiry has touched upon areas that require further study for the country and the administration to learn the appropriate lessons and to recommend to parliament and the government reforms that may help us prevent the repetition of the experience of the last 8 years.
We would ask then for public inquiries into:
- Mafia infiltration in Malta’s economy and public administration
- The Electrogas contract
- The privatisation of the hospitals
- The conduct of institutions after the Panama Papers leak
- The funding of political parties
- The bias in the planning process towards the interests of big business