It is true there is a substantial difference between what the government says is the state of the economy, what people feel, what the constituted bodies state and what the Opposition says. The government tries to highlight all the less dark edges and make them sound like they were silver linings, which may perhaps contribute to the feeling felt by many that the government must be really desperate to take this line. Nevertheless, it is equally clear that the economy is far more resilient than many doom merchants would have it: the jobs are there and most of us can testify that from the people we know around us, most do not have to wait long before a job turns up. In certain sectors the jobs are there, but no one seems interested enough, or desperate enough, to take them.

Nevertheless, by all accounts, the growth of the economy is sluggish if at all. While Malta is tackling its well-known and almost intractable deficit and public debt problems, it is registering one of the lowest growth rates in the EU. Clearly, it is only through growth that the State can earn more revenue. Conversely, if growth declines, the State forks out more money on social benefits without receiving more revenue, thus making its precarious deficit problem even worse.

It is not enough for the government to try and reach its deficit targets merely by increasing taxes, charges, maximising revenue and so on. This has now been going on for long years and the country has been bled dry, yet the figures still hardly add up, since economic activity is being smothered with taxes, charges and regulations.

Nor can the government, like the Fenech Adami one in 1995 and the Sant administration in 1997 tried to do, kick-start the economy by injecting more government funds into public projects or through tax breaks, nor, like the Mintoff one in the 1970s and the Fenech Adami one in 1989, can you kick-start the economy by pushing up the minimum wage, hence starting a consumer boom, and giving the perception of affluence, only to see most of these increased wages fly out of the country with the increased imports of consumer goods.

Clearly, it should be the government’s primary duty now (and always) to go for the best growth it can push the country towards. Shirking this duty, for political or other reasons, will only mean that come the next election it will have nothing to show for its years in power. That is what the people put the government there for.

This government has already done more than its predecessors to ensure growth by tackling the long-delayed problems of the companies with government shareholding, by making those of them that had persistent deficit problems, such as the dockyard, Air Malta, PBS and Gozo Channel and the like, to come up with a business plan which aimed to stop the haemorrhage and to stop the need for continuous government subsidies. The fact that it is currently moving to hive off all the non-strategic government holdings (including Sea Malta) is the best news to hit these islands in many years. The government has no business being in private business: this is the most basic principle, practically the only way in which economic growth can be achieved. Our local economy is still constrained by a low birth rate, very low female participation, huge and increasing costs due to our insular situation (another area which the government must make it its priority to tackle) and a workforce that has strong and wide pockets of illiteracy and low skills. But over and above all this, the government must give back to the private sector what is rightfully its own: the government must restrict itself to government. It is only the private sector that can take up the challenges to grow, that can maximise growth such as no government can. The only way in which growth can be attained is through giving the private sector free rein (while ensuring that the socially needy receive help in a vastly changing social climate). This is the experience of so many economies that came out of communism and it’s a wonder that here we are still learning the lessons other countries, like the Baltics, or Hungary, the Czechs etc learnt years ago.

The General Workers Union now seems to be on the warpath to try and stop the government from doing just that: handing over what should belong to the private sector to the private sector. It wants the government to take on all those that could become redundant when its previously publicly owned companies are sold to the private sector.

In a way it is fortified by the examples of such companies as Kalaxlokk, the dockyards themselves, and others where an early retirement scheme was drawn up and those who neither wanted to retire early nor were needed in the new configuration were absorbed in government service. Whatever the government’s reasons for doing so, it is clear that if this were to happen now then the government may as well decide not to privatise anything at all seeing that it will still get lumped with excess workers. Nor would that be right and just: because workers in the private sector do not have an accommodating government to help them when their company goes under. This would aggravate the ongoing division of the Maltese workforce into the privileged, who somehow are employed by the government or the government’s many companies, and whose job is thus secure and is a lifetime job, while the others, those in the private sector, do not have any such safety net. It would mean that the pressure on the government to keep employing more and more people (a pressure that increases considerably on the eve of elections) will be more or less permanent. It means that the government would be spending money it collects from taxes to keep in place an iniquitous and unfair system and that such people, moreover in loss-making enterprises, are kept in clover by means of our taxes.

It is definitely the government’s duty to stick to this path, unfalteringly. If the union, or other unions, decide (wrongly even on economic policy grounds) to fight it, then so be it: let the fight commence and be fought to the end.

But the fight must not be personalised, as has been the case over the past days. Nor must the fight be linked to the coming elections inside the union. Nor must the fight be turned into a partisan battle. Nor should the union be demonised. On the other hand, let not the union try another 20 August 2000 ploy right in the middle of the tourist season with accompanying shenanigans at the airport, then on the Marsa road, and then at the Law Courts. Five years have elapsed and things have changed. If the government has to push through all the union’s might to bring about growth to the country, then so be it. It is a battle worth fighting once the union has chosen to play it this way. It is a battle for growth.