The Prime Minister had some good news for the Maltese people last week.

Opening the Nationalist Party’s general council meeting on Friday, Dr Lawrence Gonzi said that the European Commission’s technical experts have given the green light to Malta’s European Union 2007-2013 budget proposals.

Malta was the first country to submit its proposals to make use of the EUR 855 million that the country will receive in the seven-year period, and Malta was the first country to be given the thumbs up by the EC.

Of course, this is just the first step in the implementation of the projects that the government has in mind. Tender calls will now have to be issued, analysed and awarded before the actual work is carried out; so in real terms it will take quite a while before the benefits of such an endorsement are seen.

But, on the other hand, it is extremely positive for Malta to have had the foresight to submit its plans for approval as early as it could because, as things happened, it was the first country to be granted EC approval. And now we can also be the first to implement projects approved. After all, 2007 is already midway through.

It shows that the government machinery was set in motion quickly once the European Union had agreed on its budget for the seven-year period starting this year, and this worked in our favour.

It will be recalled that European leaders had struggled to come to terms on the EU’s budget all through 2005. It was the first time that the EU was discussing a budget since its expansion to 25 member states a year earlier, and the hurdles encountered had taken so long to overcome. There were at times fears that no agreement would have been reached, which would have been a second blow after what had happened in the French and Dutch “no” in referenda on the EU Constitution.

The June 2005 summit had ended up in a total failure as a bitter Franco-British feud over agricultural subsidies and the UK’s annual EUR4.3 billion rebate was not resolved in spite of long talks and the intervention of the Luxembourg presidency. Six months later, the summit, now under the British presidency, was heading towards another flop before British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced, at 3am on the Saturday (the summit normally ends on a Friday evening) that “we have an agreement on the financial perspectives”.

It had then been announced that Malta would have received EUR 805 million over the seven years starting in 2007, but this was later adjusted to reach EUR 855.

Since that eventful night, and perhaps even before that, the Maltese government has been working hard to come up with a list of “to-do” things and make the best possible use of the money that the country will be receiving. Government departments, authorities and agencies, often accused of too much bureaucracy and of time-wasting, this time played their part well and took an active part in the drawing up of the list of projects and ideas put forward by the government.

By submitting its proposals early, the government made sure that Malta would be on the fast track for approval, and we are now reaping the result of this endeavour.

What we now hope for is that the government will continue working fast. Now that we know what we are going to do with the money and that our ideas have been approved by the EC, the government should immediately state where the money will be spent and start issuing calls for tenders.

We have no doubt that the government has every intention of doing this. The general election is close and the government will be doing everything in its power to carry out projects before it sets the date.