It was, more or less, around this time of the year. And it happened, more or less, in the same area where today the Nationalist Party will hold its first mass meeting of the campaign.
Ten years ago, it was in Fgura’s main street. Today, it will be in Zabbar’s main street.
Ten years ago it was mostly the same kind of weather we had this past week – cold, overcast, with more than just a threat of rain.
It was one of the first mass meetings before the 9 March referendum on EU membership. That, as I have written elsewhere, was a most formidable challenge, for it put to the Maltese electorate something it had no experience of – EU membership.
The predictions were, right until the very end, dire.
Anyway, on that Sunday afternoon in Fgura, Eddie was speaking. His speech that day was not one of his best.
But then, at the very end, he switched his tone: “My friends,” he said, “today we have gathered here in the cold and it even rained during this mass meeting. But soon, spring will be with us, and it will be a New Spring for Malta.”
I remember the roar from the largely lethargic crowd that greeted these words. The crowd understood its statesman was offering it a real vision and the meeting ended with galvanized people going back home. The New Spring went on to become one very significant strand that attracted people to the EU accession.
Whatever that New Spring consisted of was never really quantified or spelt out in detail.
Today, 10 years later, our country is being called upon to verify, to check, if the New Spring promised 10 years ago has in effect materialized.
On the one hand, as the government never tires of telling us, much has been done to improve the quality of life, which is why we joined the European Union. On the other hand, Labour is continually reminding us how far we are from really enjoying a better quality of life.
The Nationalist Party, with Eddie at its head, mostly played on the money factor – how EU membership would get us funds from the EU. At the end, he was right. At the Copenhagen summit in December 2002, Malta got quite a good amount of EU funding.
Actually, we now know, that Malta got reduced pre-accession funding because of the 1996 freezing of Malta’s application. Even so, it emerged as the country that used the funds to the best of its ability.
Then came the 2004-2006 funding period and the 2007-2013 funding period, which still has some more time to run. In both these funding periods Malta qualified as an Objective One area, that is, with the most poor of EU regions.
It is significant that Malta is no longer an Objective One area, both because recent accessions have lowered the EU average and also because the Maltese economy grew and has outgrown the benchmark.
The coming EU Council on 7 and 8 February will hopefully determine how much funds will come Malta’s way in the next funding period.
Have we utilized these funds wisely? That is the fundamental question the country is being asked to reply to. I argue that a very significant part of today’s dissatisfaction with our present has to do with misplaced emphasis and decisions that today do not look any more as the right strategic decisions that should have been taken.
Take two strategic decisions.
A very high proportion of EU funds have been spent on roads. We now have some high quality roads, but they are in the less travelled areas whereas the knotty nodes have remained the chaos in which they have always been.
Additionally, all these road works have given a new lease of life to construction companies who employ a lot of people and the dearth of construction work was pushing them to the wires.
The second strategic decision was to build Mater Dei Hospital. This has had a very convoluted history: it started life as an auxiliary hospital, leased out to a Milan religious organisation (San Raffaele). It soon became the largest construction site in Europe. Then, the Sant administration, on the strength of a two-page report, decided it should be Malta’s main hospital, and rightly so. But no decision was taken, either by Dr Sant or by the Fenech Adami administration to enlarge it to cope with Malta’s expanded population and new medical needs.
There are arguments for and against, and anyway it is all academic today. But I can list so many hospitals, for instance in the UK, that did not have to be green field, but which function quite well out of buildings from other times.
We can go on and on. The social security budget has been allowed to expand with no real effort to bring it under check. And everyone has been having an easy time.
Now, at the end of this 10-year span, the chickens are coming home to roost. The deficit has been brought down, no mean achievement, but government debt is still too high.
The Standard & Poor’s downgrade came like a bolt of lightning in the midst of the election campaign. Seen from close up, it does not really matter: local investors hold the bulk of government debt and the government sources foreign funds very sparsely. But it would be a fool to reason like this: the reasoning behind the downgrade reads like a riot act on what is going wrong in the Maltese economy. The debt figure is still too high, and one has to factor in the extra-government debt, such as Enemalta’s, which this government repeatedly and speciously tries to ring fence out of the debt figure.
The downgrade came on top of other indicators over the past months that showed Malta slipping on such matters as the competitiveness index, the female component of the working population, the proportion of school leavers who go on to tertiary education. In these and similar indicators, progress has been made but it is still not enough: Malta still languishes at the bottom of the European pile. Other countries are moving ahead.
Then there is Enemalta and energy provision. This election has been hijacked by the PL proposal and PN’s counter-reaction. I think the PN strategy has been buoyed by this unexpected gift and it keeps hammering at the inconsistencies, the unknowns, the things that can get unstuck, the imponderables and the many unknowns. When PL people complain that PN has not come up with proposals, and when they hurry on to the next set of proposals such as on childcare, that shows that the PN barbs are hitting home.
The debate has been given an unexpected fillip in an article by a former manager at Enemalta, John Pace, blaming Austin Gatt for not proceeding with a gas plan. Knowing Mr Pace and his family for many long years, I can vouch for the honesty and the seriousness of the person. Yet I also perceive in his words the situation at Enemalta pre-Austin Gatt when the technical people ran the show and their revulsion when Austin Gatt, rightly or wrongly, brought in what he called professional managers. That amalgam never fitted.
PL however have clutched at the Pace article and its ramifications to keep afloat their proposal and to shoot down Austin Gatt.
But that’s not the real issue: read the S&P report (http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2013-01-17/news/standard-and-poors-long-term-rating-on-malta-lowered-to-bbb-outlook-stable-706052098/)
and you can see that S&P says nothing about the PL proposal or anything in that direction, nor on changing over to gas, but solely to get Enemalta’s finances under proper control.
Nor will you find, in that document, any argument about increasing the spending power of the Maltese, as is being promised on all PL billboards as if more money in the pocket leads to more spending power. On the contrary, as any macro-economist can say, increasing consumer spending is the worst advice to give to any government in this time of crisis.
Ten years after the New Spring, the country expresses dissatisfaction with the progress registered so far. So many wrong decisions have been taken and it is only fair that those responsible are made to pay for them. But the direction to take lies in a completely opposite direction: if we want to edge up the EU ladder and get to the fair fields promised in 2003, we must simply push harder, rather than ease up.
But that’s not a message that the peddlers of easy solutions will come up with.
[email protected]