Prime Minister Joseph Muscat appeals for respect towards police officers

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat appealed for respect towards police officers following the incident involving Simon Schembri, the police constable run over by a 17-year-old earlier this week.

Speaking at a public services conference yesterday morning, Muscat expressed his solidarity with Schembri, referring to him as a person who he “knew personally” and who “loves his work.”

“This must be a wake-up call for everyone,” he said. “We need to stop and reflect on the respect that society shows to those providing services; that policeman or woman, for example, who wakes up every morning to do his or her duty. They deserve respect; civil respect is a sign of a strong society.”

Muscat said that the autonomy of public services had increased. “Each month I am informed on how my ministers are performing,” he said. “Now the public services are telling politicians just how much there is to do and what needs to be done. These are the standards entering into the public services.”

A reduction in bureaucracy was also at the forefront of Principal Permanent Secretary Mario Cutajar’s speech. He addressed the conference prior to Muscat.

Cutajar stressed that decreasing bureaucracy did not alter accountability. “Accountability remains at the centre of everything we do,” he said, “no matter how much we reduce bureaucracy.”

He said that that when the country’s situation with regard to public services had been analysed back in 2013, leadership was found to be the “primary problem.”

“Everyone used to give up when making use of government services,” he said. “In the beginning, we saw that the main problem within the public services was leadership, so we invested in it.”

He accused the administration prior to 2013 of leading a centralised public service, “which was being told how to hire people.” He said that in the past, the public services had a ‘traditional culture’, which “had symptoms of a machine that sends messages from the top to the bottom without hearing what those at the bottom, the people doing the work, have to say.”

“We want the public service itself to come up with ideas and run things,” he said.

Cutajar said: “We started the decentralisation of the service.”