People of all political colours are rightly disturbed by how we seem to being fed with more and more misleading and incorrect information by politicians in power when they interpret official statistics and figures relating to the national economy. Matters are even worse when the Prime Minister of our country attempts to deceive us all for the benefit of a short round of staged applause on junk television.

This is no time for Brazil nuts. On the contrary, Malta needs to reassess its economic and financial objectives by way of injecting into the economy strategic new ideas and measures that would attract real foreign investment and create real opportunities of employment. The political game of playing about with figures has been taken so far out into the realms of fantasy and half-truths by this government that it has now resulted in an inevitably sheer and unprecedented drop in credibility.

The examples are many and varied, but suffice it to refer to the now infamous claim of 20,000 new jobs when the government’s own official statistics have shown all along that this figure is a far cry from the reality as far as most people, whether statisticians or not, are aware. The method used to produce this hallucinatory figure has been discredited by all those who firmly believe that the nation’s accounts and economic records should not only be scientifically and precisely kept, but also protected from political dilution.

While it may seem so easy for government ministers and ruling party spokesmen to force-feed the public with unrealistic figures and half-baked conclusions, given the hold they command on national broadcasting (illegal and unconstitutional) and on the so-called independent media sources (unfair), the truth is that their credibility has dwindled so drastically that they are now sounding hollow and at times even comically unimpressive.

Unemployment has been raising its ugly head once again, so much so that the number of jobless people has risen for the seventh month running (around five per cent). It does so despite the discomforting rise in both part-time and precarious employment. Here again, the government has been caught to be playing with figures as well as the truth.

For a government junior minister to recently claim, on yet another manipulative TVM programme run by friends of the administration, that “there are people who simply prefer to have part-time jobs so that they can have more free time” is insulting and offensive to the thousands of people, young and not so young, who have been waiting years for a job. The idea that people on the dole are there only because “they do not want to work” or are “too lazy” is just an insensitive politician’s way of sledge-hammering his way out of an acute situation.

The spectre of precarious employment is today a bitter reality in most of conservative-ruled Europe, no less in Malta and Gozo. It is the direct result of failed investment and employment strategies. Thousands of people are being made to work in conditions that go back several decades to pre-union days, for peanuts, not necessarily the Brazilian category. And why? Because they either agree to accept them or else someone else does, and in these times of harsh austerity, as opposed to an environment blessed with a healthier, progressive mentality of growth and creativity, few can afford to refuse.

Unions, other constituted bodies, the Church and sundry other organisations, including of course the Labour-led movement of moderates and progressives, have condemned the government’s obvious collusion with the local perpetrators of precarious employment. While it has paid lip service to the need of avoiding it, it has also rather too willingly insisted the numbers involved are “insignificant.”

Again, not only is this playing with figures, but also blatantly hypocritical, considering the proven fact that government itself has either resorted to providing precarious employment or else chosen to turning a blind eye to precarious job contracts given by its own companies, agencies and companies awarded government contracts.

This has to stop. The alternative is, first and foremost, a true reflection of the economic and employment situation by the honest and straightforward reading and presentation of figures and statistics. A clean slate would no doubt then help any new government to reappraise its methods and strategies and, in the process, regenerate the national economy by fuelling it with growth and creativity in place of the murkiness and falsity that prevail at this moment in time.

Government has to lead by example.

 

Joe Mizzi, MP is Shadow Minister for Energy, Resources & Oil Exploration