The government’s pre-budget document, all 178 pages of it, has now been published and accessible to the public at large for almost a month. The usual constituted bodies have made their (usual) comments, which somehow are mostly positive at this stage, but turn negative on the eve of Budget Day when push comes to shove.

But the public at large, lost in the torpor of the summer heat, family holidays and festi, does not seem to have given it more than a brief glance.

At the very worst, then, some might have subscribed to the misguided idea that all this document contains is the news that government has some small change left in the kitty and is asking for advice on to how to spend it. Shall it be cutting down on the departure taxes? Or increasing subsidies to people at the lower end of the social spectrum to help them cope with the increase in oil prices?

At the very core of this or whatever government’s macro-plan for the economy, some non-negotiable targets stand out:

There must be no let up in the government’s struggle to bring about the planned reduction of the deficit in public finance. The Maltese economy seems on target so far and a huge improvement has been registered since those bad, bad days of 1998, but no looming election must distract the government from this task. This will also eventually mean lower public debt figures and lower debt servicing charges as well.

Nor can there be any delay, postponement or obstacle on the way leading Malta to the euro. Joining the euro is the next big task for Malta and is highly beneficial all round, yet it is by no means a foregone conclusion. In particular, Malta’s inflation rate continues to be above the EU average rate and, notwithstanding the optimism expressed by the government over the past week, and considering that one of the criteria with which the Maltese economy will be judged by May next year will not be Malta’s inflation average compared to the EU-25’s, but compared to the best three EU member States, which includes, for instance, Poland with its huge coal supplies. Even so, considering too that the largest of the EU new member States keep postponing joining the euro, one has to consider whether the ECB will allow Malta to join the euro in 2008 all on its own.

At the same time, the Maltese economy will increasingly face the effects of globalisation, especially with regard to the price of oil and the competitiveness of the various sectors of the Maltese economy.

The pre-budget document does outline most of these macro-economic aims but it then seems to gloss over others. Some have already commented that, as regards tourism, while admitting the failure to reach the established target of 50,000 more tourists a year, the document fails miserably to say how this will be addressed. It gives the impression that the government does not really know the way forward, at least in this regard.

It is spot on when it insists on more training opportunities to enable more and more Maltese to acquire the skills needed by tomorrow’s industry, especially in, but not only, the IT sector. Efforts to attract more industries to relocate to Malta will only succeed if they find enough human resources here to fill the newly-created jobs.

As from next year, the government will thankfully spend less on capital expenditure for the new hospital. It must resist the temptation to swing all the excess capital expenditure to building and then re-building new roads. More than a fair share should be dedicated to education but here again, as against the practice followed by governments since 1996, the accent should be more on training and achieving better results than on building new schools. The same must be said of the ETC and other efforts to try and get unemployed people and people who have stopped working, back to work after re-training. For all the money that is being spent, both on education and retraining, not enough results are emerging.

There is still a huge segment of the population that even now thinks the government owes it a living and which still expects the government to provide for it from cradle to grave. Apart from the ongoing work being done to rethink the social security structure and the pension system, the government must commit itself to sell off all that which does not really belong to it, from public corporations to companies operating commercially but owned by the State, and so on. The government has no business to be there at all and the soonest it is out of these segments, the better.

At the same time, the government’s efforts to cut down on the wastage of public funds and to make the best use of what is has must not be abandoned. There are still huge savings to be made with regard to some public bodies – specific authorities going on huge spending sprees come to mind – if the government were to put its foot down. And the government is still sitting on assets, primarily land and buildings, that it does not need and which it can profitably sell.

And finally, yes, if there is still money left, the government must see how it can use this money to stimulate the economy and to give the much-squeezed citizens a breather, not for any electoral reasons, but because the country has earned a breather after all these years of unrelenting austerity. Obviously, people will here come up with their pet ideas, such as the hated departure taxes, but the government is right to insist on social solidarity and very right to try and come up with a system to alleviate the impact of the high oil prices on the lower social classes. As long, that is, as that will not mean creating the 2006 version of free medicine and free hospitals that have seen the creation of such a huge unstoppable behemoth that threatened, and still threatens, to upset all our economic planning.