Towards the end of July, the Prime Minister presented the pre-budget document entitled Families Growing Stronger. As indicated by the title, this year’s budget will be addressing the needs of Maltese families.
Four years ago, the Prime Minister declared that he intended to work on three main objectives: the economy, education and the environment.
The Prime Minister kept his promise. Year after year, one could see different budgets addressing different aspects of these three pillars.
In fact a few weeks ago, Malta reached its financial objectives as planned when the EU Commission confirmed that the country is ready to join the Eurozone.
This pre-budget document is the result of a number of consultation meetings that the Prime Minister has had with members of the public – families that represent Maltese society across the board. The people who attended these meetings at Castille are members of associations, organisations and constituted bodies and also individuals who share one common interest: how government should spend the taxpayers’ money and the millions in funding that Malta has managed to obtain from the European Union.
It is evident that this is part of a plan that our Prime Minister has for our country. There was a budget to address fiscal and economic development, a budget addressed to women and now one addressing the family. This is a budget where the family can reap the fruits resulting from the hard work carried out in previous years.
The whole document shows that the Nationalist Government is taking its work very seriously. In the meantime, the more the PN Government achieves, the more the Malta Labour Party continues with its mud-slinging campaign. Even if the allegations are unfounded, they believe that some of them will stick.
However, Government continues with its work painstakingly, listening and consulting, to ensure that the people’s message gets through.
To say that the Nationalist Party always puts the family at the centre of its policies may sound like a bit of a cliché, but that is how it is, and in this document the Government is practicing what it preaches by putting forward over 200 proposals so that Maltese families will be given the opportunity to grow stronger.
The proposals in the pre-budget document Families Growing Stronger address the needs of children, young people, students, male and female employees, housewives, the self-employed, couples, people with disabilities, parents, widows, pensioners and the elderly. In this document, Gozo is also being viewed as a region with its particular needs. Thus this document ensures that every aspect of family life is included.
In this short space, it is impossible to go into detail about all the proposals. However, I would like to mention a few. Looking at what is being proposed for children, we find the plans for building new schools and the strengthening of educational programmes, including IT training. There are also plans to fight obesity in children and the empowerment of the children’s advocate. This is a practical example of how the Nationalist Government is ensuring that all children succeed in life.
In the last few years Government has also taken various steps and initiatives to encourage women to return to or to stay in the labour market.
In this pre-budget document we also find a number of proposals that address women favourably. Among these proposals are a revision of maternity benefits, further incentives to introduce family-friendly measures at the place of work, incentives on income tax and further favourable proposals for those who opt to use child-care centres.
There are also proposals addressing women who work in a family business and who are benefiting from incentives introduced in last year’s budget.
It is being proposed that women working in the family business will be given the opportunity to pay arrears of national insurance contributions so that they will benefit from a full pension on reaching retirement age.
Other incentives focus on those women who would like to set up their own business.
There are also proposals addressing the environment, health issues and leisure for the whole family.
The document addresses other very important issues. The needs of widows are also being addressed. An example of this is the revision of the tax currently payable on the transfer of the matrimonial home.
The pre-budget document also considers giving full pension rights to all widows with dependent children up to the age of 21, irrespective of the amount they earn through their employment.
I would have liked to go into more detail as all the proposals somehow address different aspects of the family. Maltese society is made up of different individuals and different forms of families and they all have different needs.
In the pre-budget document Families Growing Stronger, the PN in government is actually addressing these needs – the needs that we feel and encounter every day – as it truly and strongly believes that having strong families should be the basis for a strong growing investment.
Michelle Mallia is president of the Nationalist Party Women’s Movement