As the new year slowly moves in, and the first two weeks slide away, one tends to take a look back at the year that has just ended. 2004 was year of great change for this island nation. It saw us through to the EU, a new Prime Minister taking office, a new outlook for the future, a new way of doing things.

A bold budget was presented to us – one that tends to urge us to change our mentality. We must turn our attention to pressing matters, introduce reforms and get the

economy going.

We also had the consistency of the Malta Labour Party in its daily forecasting of gloom and doom. Its consistency has confirmed one thought. It is certainly an experienced opposition party, and, its vocation is to keep sitting on the opposition benches.

With the opposition not offering any concrete alternatives, it certainly has a good cv for remaining in opposition.

The new PN government has a massive task ahead in 2005. It must take certain decisions, constantly and regularly, on a variety of issues. The fact that these are probably taken at a greater speed than that to which the Maltese are accustomed is certainly no bed of roses. This Prime Minister was labelled as one incapable of taking decisions. Now they say he has to take more.

The first question is the vacation leave or the public holidays issue. Foreign workers work more than we do, in less time and at a less cost.

Talking to any industry mover, a theme clearly surfaces regularly – that of Malta being uncompetitive. The government took what some would call a few steps towards giving Malta a small edge. Removing four days from the already overloaded calendar of vacation leave is just one of them.

To the employee who thinks intelligently, its better to have four fewer days of leave in 2005, and two days less in 2006, and keep the job, rather than end up with 365 days leave a year instead.

After all, is it not the calendar that dictates the holidays falling on the weekends?

The saviour of Maltese workers, the General Workers Union, thinks otherwise. It promised to rock us all off the boat – the same boat we live on.

It promises to wage war to safeguard workers’ rights. It should instead be safeguarding jobs, forgetting its political role and partnership with the Labour camp.

It does this after four months of time-

wasting negotiations and discussions at the MSCED forum, where they missed the opportunity of getting a social pact going for the benefit of Malta. No, it insisted otherwise, for its own reasons, probably doing its utmost to stop progress on a three-year deal.

I do sometimes wonder if all this pressure is linked to the cargo handling question, where the main beneficiary has been, up to now, the same GWU, and all this bold talk is just a bargaining position and the price to buy, yet again, industrial and political

stability.

Other industry movers comment on the sick leave abuse that regularly goes on, with certificates being churned out by some medical doctors to employees who abuse the system, often phoning in sick on certain days, probably having Mondays and Fridays as their favourites.

This is another area of useless cost to industry and to the government, as it is the government, again – from our taxes – that dishes out social benefits galore. This is not to mention the number of productive days that are lost.

Here all parties should see which employees are doing the damage and which

medical doctors are at fault. Thus we can protect the bona fide employee and the bona fide doctor against those who cause all these problems.

Sick leave is there for sickness, and should be taken to the full if and when really needed, and not just to add more days to one’s annual vacation leave.

This government is determined to get the economy going, although some sectors do not share this vision. We can do it if all pull the same rope, on the same side. This is not a tug-of-war situation.

Browsing through some figures and data during 2004, something that attracted my attention was that in the first nine months of 2004, the value of property that exchanged hands locally rose to Lm304 million, with some 8,100 contracts signed. These are concrete signs that growth is possible, probably in all sectors. But we must all be willing to move faster and better .

Kindly allow me, on a personal note, to express the thanks of my family to all who showed solidarity with us in difficult circumstances, over the festive season, due to the tsunami disaster. Our thoughts go to all the people who were not so lucky, and to the local Thai person who cared so much for our boys.

Robert Arrigo is a Nationalist MP