Walk through any street and look around you. At most times of the day you will be surprised by the number of people dashing around going about their daily work. The look on their faces says it all, concentration, worry too, the urge to get on with things.

It is also true that one finds quite a few people passing the time of day, particularly in the main squares and streets and even more so in Valletta. Especially people who in this crazy country of ours have been paid to take early retirement and who now do nothing except frequent the same haunts. And pensioners as well.

Otherwise, it is people rushing around on their work. We may not notice such daily, humdrum, scenes but they are essential. For this is the surest sign that Malta has the ability to protect itself from the world recession and eventually come out of recession if and when it hits us, through work. The more we work, the sooner we will recover from recession.

This is the message that the country expects its government to give it in tomorrow’s Budget Speech. It is through our work that we can beat the tsunamis, which, after threatening banks and financial systems, now threaten entire countries.

The past weeks have seen the country’s government engaged in a battle of statements with the constituted bodies and the rest of the country in what is called preparation to the budget. As this paper complained last week, it was most unwise of the government to lump in discussions about energy prices with the real budget details, as the two issues got so interconnected that no one can make head or tail of the whole picture.

So let’s start from bread and butter issues, from the work of the people.

It is clear to any observer that work ethic has now become the religion of the Maltese. There are still the privileged few (government employees, who else?) who do not have to worry about their jobs. There are too many skivers as well, social parasites who take social assistance and then work on the side.

It is not that we want to canonise the people who do work. OK, so they may cut corners with VAT receipts (who doesn’t?) and Income Tax. But they take their work seriously, far more seriously than many think. And they do strive to deliver a good job and to improve. The capacity to learn and to try and improve is many times greater than the ultimate product, for which one blames lack of proper cultural and educational training for life at work.

Over the past weeks, we have heard about job losses and factory relocations, how the coming recession in the UK may lead to fewer tourists visiting Malta, and mostly that the higher rates of electricity will not only be harder on consumers, especially the lower middle and working classes but also on the factories and enterprises in Malta, possibly pushing others to relocate to places where the cost of work is lower.

Let us rephrase here what this paper has been saying all along: aligning the prices at the pump and at the meter to the real cost of oil as we purchase it is the right policy. Contrary to what some are saying, it is very harmful if the government were to once again arrogate to itself the power to vary the price at the pump and the meter for in the end we will still end up paying for what others get cheap. That’s no power the government should have: its power should only be restricted to ensuring the poor do not have hardship piled on them.

On the contrary, we should be grasping the opportunity that this (temporary) blip downwards in oil prices to see better how we, as country, as families, as individuals, can stop our wasteful ways and start, really start to cut down on energy consumption, how to be energy conscious in our purchases and in our lifestyles…

Maybe too a recession may drive more of our women and those not working into the work stream. All evidence around us shows jobs on offer in abundance and job mobility galore and employers who cannot find enough staff. If not enough women feel impelled to go out to work, where we are at the bottom of the European league, there must be something wrong with our people. Maybe too there are not enough flexible opportunities for young mothers with babies. The fact that the number of people who work keeps increasing even in times of stress shows how resilient our economy is – and also how many of those who lose their jobs succeed in finding another one. The national strategy should be one to push more and more resources into the job market.

So too the prospect of more job losses and industry relocations must not scare us (and the apocalyptic tones used by some media has lost its scaremongering potential by now) as more and more of our people start to realize that we must always aim to graduate upwards and offer higher value-added work.

This cannot come without training, training, training – and one sees continual evidence of a national effort at improving oneself, learning new technologies, adapting to new methods of doing things, even new ways of industrial relations from national loss-making industries to concerns built around modern concepts.

Yes, it is true – there is so much that still needs to be done and mainly it is the government’s fault that after so much time still so much needs to be done – from bone-rattling roads to a health system that actually works; and some present day emphasis (such as the almost punitive law enforcement focused mainly on parking as against speeding or drunk driving) is plain crazy but the message the country requires from its leaders today is that together we can do it – when ‘it’ means facing up to a worldwide recession and even improving on our levels and quality of life by grasping the opportunities as they come and being flexible enough to take on bigger countries and win.