The national Budget for 2019 is a series of cosmetic measures that hides the real problems that the country is experiencing, and that is neither a game changer nor an economic plan, PN leader Adrian Delia on Monday evening.

In his reaction to the Budget, Delia said that this Budget would not help those who are unable to afford rent, that it would not help those who are finding property expensive to buy, that it would not help pensioners who aren’t managing to make ends meet, and it would not help those who are facing criminality in their localities.

Delia called it a budget of a government that could not escape from the problems that it had created itself and said that only now was the government starting to admit some of the problems that it had created; problems such as cheap labour, inadequate pensions, traffic, education, and a lack of infrastructure.

The opposition leader said that the Budget was meant to be a plan by the government that has a forward-looking vision, but instead, this Budget was built upon something that, in the smallest country in Europe, is creating ever-increasing pressures that cannot be escaped from; that something being the increase in population.

Speaking on the measures, Delia said that the €2.33 COLA adjustment is already practically eaten away by increases in electricity bills, fuel prices, and the price of bread and dairy products.  He said that there was no indication of an immediate, a mid-term, and certainly not a long-term solution for the difficulties people were facing in the property and rental sector, and in fact, he said, there was a guarantee that these problems would only be accentuated further.

Delia said that the government was recycling information when it came to social housing, and reminded that the country was yet to see one unit open yet.  He said that there were 3,200 people on the waiting list for social housing, and guaranteed that under a PN government, every Maltese would have a roof over their heads.

He commented on the €100 million proposed figure for investment in road infrastructure, saying that it was a big figure, but that the government had not recognised the traffic problem.  “Widening roads is not creating a network, and it is no solution for the 40 to 50 new cars on Malta’s roads every day”, Delia said.

He then took aim at the government’s proposals for education, saying that there was just one paragraph pertaining to this, which read simply that 16-year-olds had been granted the right to vote, but failed to lay out what there is in mind for Malta’s youths.

What summed up this Budget, Delia said, was a specific paragraph of Minister Scicluna’s speech which referred to the health sector, wherein Scicluna said that the government understood the need for a long-term strategic plan for the sector.  Delia said that only after the government sold Malta and Gozo’s hospitals, and only after they had said that all problems had been solved was that government saying that a long-term strategic plan was needed.  This can be reflected, he said, in every sector.

On the fact that no taxes had been added by the government this year, Delia said that the government didn’t need to add any, because they had already recouped what they needed through the rise in fuel prices, gas prices, and the 80% of consumers that the government was “robbing” through their electricity bills.

The Budget, Delia concluded, tries to tell us to us that Malta is living off its successes; but in reality it confirms to us that everybody’s work is being enjoyed by the few, and not spread to the many.

Asked by The Malta Independent how exactly the Budget was not addressing those in poverty and what concrete solutions the PN would propose to address this poverty, Delia said that there was not a single measure that is proposing how to help those in poverty and how to elevate them and bring them out of poverty.

Delia said that one had to look at the fact that, even though everybody is in employment, those thousands who earn between €700 and €900 a month can barely make ends meet. The first step is at least recognising that if rent in the past four years has doubled, there are thousands that cannot keep up, he added. 

There are thousands that know that they can never become owners of their own home, Delia said.  “This is a new type of poverty”, that goes away from the traditional definition of poverty that refers to those who don’t have a job for example, Delia noted. “There is the problem that in some cases both adults in the family work and cannot live a decent life”, he continued. 

The solutions, he said, should start at seeing how to intervene to see that there are salaries which are not competing with imported cheap labour, that job opportunities which pay well are created, and that we truly fight poverty and not build onto it.

Asked outright whether he thought the Budget was good for the country, Delia said that when one has a Budget which in its very nature does not actually think for the future of the country and is not splitting the government’s claimed successes; one could not call it good for the country.

He said that there were those who were earning a lot of money, which is good and which definitely has to be maintained.  But, he said, one cannot forget the vulnerable, the poor, the elderly, those who cannot support themselves.  He said that the government was run by a socialist party which was anything but socialist; by a worker’s party which thinks the least about the worker.

“It does not mean that there are no good measures; indeed there are and I have no problem saying so”, Delia said, but they are few, cosmetic and an exercise to win votes, he added.  He concluded that one had to take into consideration and plan for the future of the country, and not simply focus on what was immediate.