When the Prime Minister rises tomorrow to read his second Budget Speech, he will undoubtedly spend many words to make the point that the country has kept to the pre-established targets regarding the public deficit.

This will surely be Dr Gonzi’s claim and the feather in his cap. It is also very important for Malta to keep the targets and commitments it makes on an international level because it is also, as seen last week in the International Monetary Fund report on Malta, an aspect that is taken very much into consideration internationally.

Keeping to the pre-established path towards a much-reduced deficit is also very important for Malta’s approach to the euro; adopting the euro will be strategically very important for Malta in the long term.

Keeping to the deficit target thus is one very important measurement and also a sign of the state of health of the economy. There are also, as Dr Gonzi has been saying over the past days, some very significant green shoots which indicate that the restructuring in the private sector is finally delivering, and that the restructuring in the public sector is also working well.

But Dr Gonzi will be facing a country still shocked by the overdue increases in the electricity rates. The government has said a one-time compensation will be given (about which Labour leader Alfred Sant has been busy speculating it will be Lm100 and Lm100 ‘is not enough’). In turn, this compensation may well lead, will inevitably lead, to companies, which cannot cope with the increased wage structures, to collapse and more people will be made redundant.

And, to continue to cut the deficit, the government must somehow find a further Lm30 million. It is precisely here that tomorrow’s Budget Speech will be analysed: where will the government get its Lm30 million from?

Over the past years, this government, and its predecessor, has been firmly in the hands of its Finance mandarins who focus on slashing budgets, and getting the required sums from putting up taxes, VAT rates, etc. This long sequence of years of government increasing its revenue and tax take from the country as a whole, has bled the people dry. Add to that the cost of the higher fuel prices and the people now feel well and truly strangled. To increase the pressure would be suicidal, besides killing all the green shoots the government is boasting about.

What the people want to hear from the government tomorrow is very different: it wants to hear that the government is changing tack, that it will squeeze no more money out of them, and that it will be adopting a business approach, rather than what the Prime Minister’s predecessor used to deride (at Dr Sant) as ‘the accountants’ approach’.

Instead of hearing about slashes and about increased rates and taxes, the people demand a much more pro-active business approach to managing the country. They demand what we will call a Business Malta approach.

Business Malta should be a government initiative that cuts through the red tape and delivers, something that does not take as long to get started as the notorious Malta Enterprise took to be born. Something which hits the road running and which is measured by what it delivers, not over a long period of time, but over the coming year. It should be the government’s biggest gamble, instead of taking Lm30 million from the pockets of the Maltese, it should earn them from its business ventures.

Business Malta, faced with the increased oil price, should make a campaign to make Malta a friendly country for those countries awash with petro-dollars. Malta’s financial services sector, now fully-fledged and respected all over the world, should relentlessly campaign in this direction. Malta lost a golden opportunity when Lebanon collapsed in civil war in the 1980s: let us not repeat that failure.

Business Malta would push far more than Malta Enterprise is doing to attract foreign direct investment, not just in the niche markets, which is OK but takes some doing, but also in the more normal manufacturing markets where Maltese skill and efficiency, flexibility and language abilities can make Malta attractive. Let’s face it, it would be fine if we attract the high-tech pharmaceutical industries but we just do not have all that breed of people who can deal with high-tech. There is a high percentage of people with low literacy and low skills who risk remaining unemployed and a drain on the economy.

Business Malta would also cut the huge amount of red tape that is contributing to make less Maltese work. It would push to get jobs which can be done by women, and then help them taken on a job by creating enough childcare centres and through retraining facilities. It would also slash the red tape where employers need people and cannot find any while there are many refugees, legal or illegal, who would be very willing to work since the Maltese shun certain jobs.

Business Malta would tackle the tourism industry head-on, considering the failure of the past year to deliver the 50,000 increased tourists. It will open wide the gates to low-cost airlines, and force through all those improvements that have been clamoured for and have not yet been delivered.

Business Malta would sit with anybody who can contribute, anybody who can come up with an idea, and help bring that idea to fruition. It would be more pro-active than the banks, but would not be a bank. More pro-active than the government, and yet it will not try and do things, it will facilitate others who do things.

Finally, Business Malta would turn government on its head. It would do away with a government that rests on spin and does not deliver, with a government that creates authorities and then allows them to trip each other up, with a government that causes all that huge amount of friction between ministers and ministers’ domains. It would force the government to deliver, in measurable terms, and to force the whole government to focus on growth, which is not the way it is today, far from it.

This is what the people expect from tomorrow’s Budget Speech. Whether the people will get it is another story. Whether the people will get more of the same is another story. Whether the people will be squeezed dry again and again is another story.