The 2008 budget is more of a pre-election marketing exercise than a strategic plan for our economy in the coming and following years. It fails to address the things that matter most for our country at the moment: restoring the competitiveness of our economy to ensure sustainable growth prospects for the future.

Let us first look at the glitter that characterises next year’s budget. The Prime Minister had presented the Maltese public with a box of colourfully wrapped sweets, which will no doubt pump some calories into the blood of the country, but his boost of energy will not last long. In actual fact, out of every Lm100 absorbed in taxes over the last four years by the government, the latter has handed out Lm9.50 in goodies prior to the forthcoming election. The hunger pangs will soon return because the medium and long-term priorities of the country are not being addressed.

The strategic issues facing our economy were addressed in the most superficial way in this budget. Let us review a few of them. On education the Prime Minister has once again boasted on the amount of money he intends spending on building new schools and refurbishing old ones. He also spoke about administrative changes by calling some existing schools a “cluster of colleges”, as if these measures are going to wipe out the shameful record of Malta having the highest number of unqualified school leavers in the EU.

The Prime Minister wants to rekindle some enthusiasm in an electorate, despondent and bored with the indolence of his administration, by promising a mirage in 2015 in the areas of education, IT, health, tourism and other vital sectors of our economy. He uses buzzwords taken from management literature of the 1990s like “search for excellence” when the hard reality is that our standards in most of these sectors have in fact deteriorated.

This budget tries to pull wool over the eyes of our families, trying to make them forget the way this administration has mismanaged this country for most of the last 20 years and promises heaven on earth in the years to come. How can one, for instance, believe the Prime Minister will reform the health services when the reality faced by our families today is long waiting lists for life-saving medical interventions?

How can one buy into the concept that Malta will soon become a pillar of excellence in the educational field attracting foreign students to study here, when the reality we are facing today is that after two decades of Nationalist administration almost half of our young people are practically unemployable?

How can one trust the Prime Minister when he promises a growing economy and a booming labour market when we have one of the lowest levels of labour participation in the EU, especially among the female population?

And what about his strategy for enhancing our competitiveness? Apart from some palliative measures regarding training of unemployed workers by the ETC, there is next to nothing on measures that will address the skills deficiency of our young people.

Those who were looking for the adoption of best practices made by other countries, like the UK and Germany who faced this problem a decade ago, must have been very disappointed by the absence of any depth in the Prime Minister’s plan in this important area.

The goodies offered by the Prime Minister are more than welcome, even though they will in no way compensate for the pain our families have had to endure in the past few years when the tax burden kept increasing and squeezing the life out of our hard-working population.

But the things that really matter like controlling the high cost of living, improvement in the living standard of pensioners, improvement in our competitiveness in manufacturing and tourism, and raising standards in public health services, were just paid lip service. The hype surrounding the government’s so called “plans” in these areas is hardly credible when one considers that it was this same government that brought about such massive deterioration in these areas.

As long as Dr Gonzi continues to measure the success of his administration by the amount of money he spends on areas like health, education and the infrastructure, we will continue to suffer the effects of complacency. Even if he acknowledged that the amount of spending on its own is not an indicator or improvement in the different areas of public spending, he did next to nothing to prove that he is really serious in addressing the things that matter most to our

families.

www.mangioncharles.com

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Dr Mangion is deputy leader of the Opposition.