I wrote this piece yesterday about how the junior minister for IT set up a ‘think tank’ to advise him on information technology policy. The committee includes Brian Tonna’s daughter and Consuelo Scerri Herrera’s daughter whose only apparent qualification is that they’re lawyers, a profession that is at best tangentially relevant.

The committee is set up to give the minister ideas about how to stimulate new and job-creating economic activity. Which, as we emerge slowly and timidly from the Covid lockdown, is a fairly strategic policy area.

I didn’t recognise the chairman of this new think tank. His name is Kearon Bruno and he was introduced in the minister’s statement as an “economist”.

Turns out he has an MSc in Economics from the local university which is some form of preparation I suppose. He graduated from university last year. Let’s look at what this lad learnt from the university of life that has prepared him to teach us how to open up new economic streams to create jobs.

His LinkedIn profile says he was an “assistant” at EY, one of the larger local advisory firms. Everyone has to start from somewhere and one would think ‘assistant’ is a good place to start. It seems he did the work while studying. Conveniently EY’s offices are just across the skate park from the university campus.

He graduated last year but, by some miracle of precocity last January he started teaching economics at university on a part-time basis.

Then in February he got his first job out of school. He’s “policy and strategy adviser” to junior minister Clayton Bartolo. One day he’s a student learning economics. The next day he’s helping our technology minister plot a course out of the biggest financial slump in modern history.

Then there’s something else in the curriculum of Kearon Bruno. He’s veep of the Forum Żgħażagħ Laburisti, the ruling party’s youth wing.

Look, I’m sure Mr Bruno is a smart fellow. And I have no beef with precocity. My first job out of school was press secretary to Eddie Fenech Adami when he was prime minister. But it’s one thing to take dictation to issue a press statement and perhaps add some value to the drafting with a reasonable turn of phrase, and another thing altogether to advise the government on recovery from a massive economic downturn.

It’s like hiring an 11-year-old to work as a marriage counsellor just because they’re showing signs of early puberty.

Kearon Bruno’s CV is just not good enough for such a strategic, technical and advisory role. With his background he would hardly make the grade as a low-level manager in a bank. He’ll be expected to work in the boiler room for a bit of time before he can sit on the board and tell everyone else what they should be doing.

The government needs to re-imagine our economy and they need to do so quickly. They cannot rely on someone whose understanding of how the economy works today is limited to the books they read in college. In the job that Kearon Bruno is currently squatting on, we need the sharpest minds in the country, proper economists with doctorates from the finest colleges in the world, people who have advised other governments of other recovering cities elsewhere and who have results to show for themselves.

Instead we have a rising star of the next generation of Labour politicians, which is what Clayton Bartolo really needs to fuel his own career ambitions. The ‘succession planning’ of the Labour Party, its sophisticated intuition for its self-perpetuation, the careerism of an organisation that no longer has a purpose beyond its own existence, has elbowed out the real vocation of any political party: to produce ideas for change in our country and to mobilise all its resources to improve everyone’s lot.