Revision or Compensation - so shouted the crowds that flocked to Valletta on Friday. The way they saw it, or were made to see it, that was how it should be: the government must either revise the electricity rates structure or else compensate the people for the hardship it is inflicting.

But beyond this stark alternative acclaimed in the streets of Valletta, maybe, maybe there is a third alternative.

One must look first at the big picture, as Prime Minister Gonzi (but not Dr Joseph Muscat) did last week. The grand picture is of a world dominated by two crises - a higher price of oil and of food (both see their prices rise in direct correspondence to a better quality of life in the world, especially in the Far East; oil due to diminishing resources and food due to the impossibility of increasing supply in the short to medium term to fill the increasing demand) and the long-foreseen but still so shocking, inevitable crisis sparked off in the US by an economic system that based itself on an ever-increasing national debt and a consumer-based economy fuelled by banks tripping over each other to lend, lend, lend. Or, as Giulio Tremonti (La Paura e la Speranza) put it - as an inverted pyramid with the world economy on top and the American consumer at the bottom. Seen like this, it was inevitable that sooner or later the whole system topples over - which it did.

These two factors, coupled with their ripple effects, are now spreading all over the world, creating a severe recession. Sooner or later the waves will reach Malta, now more than ever in a globalised world and an open economy.

In Malta's case, the first wave to reach us was the higher price of oil and the government's handling of it - to which Friday's protest march referred. The 20 unions and the people at the march would have wanted the government to cushion, delay, mitigate the impact. We are all speaking from tables and graphs, before the actual bills hit the letter box, but all of us, none excepted, can calculate more or less how these rates will hit them. Hence the unanimous cry for the government to do something and stop the wave from hitting us.

The trouble is that if it were to do so the government would be betting with our money, or hedging on the hedge. For months without let-up the government was accused of neglecting to hedge. Then, when it hedged, as it turned out, the hedge took place when oil was at its highest, and it immediately started to go down - government's luck. Now those who would want the government to compensate or to mitigate or delay the full impact of oil prices, would want it to take a bet again, that the current low oil prices will stay low at least as long as the government recoups the EUR 50 million or so it spent to keep the electricity prices at a subsidized level for a whole year.

Of course the higher prices will hurt, like they hurt all over the world, where no government acts the way people in Malta want it to act, the nanny government which cushions all the blows, and where oil prices are higher than here, and winter cold is longer and far worse than here, where travel is far longer, and where public transport costs are prohibitive. It was always an illusion that the government of such a small country could cushion its citizens from the world shocks. And it was also true this nanny State generated a culture of waste, especially of water.

Far more fundamentally, a nanny State, like most nannies, would have kept us, its charges, from an experience which, while painful, is one of the most instructive in life - fear. Fear can be very destructive, but if properly channeled, it can focus the mind, energise the people, give an all-important impetus to seek alternatives, away from easy solutions and readymade escamotages. Remove fear from any education and you generate abuse and slackening all round.

Let's now take a long view of Malta and its economy. For all the governments' boasts, the past years have been years of rather anaemic growth, lower than that of our competitor/partner countries. Much of Malta's potential is still untapped - think of the EU negative record of lowest female participation in the workforce, think of the illiterates still coming out of school years with no skills at all. Our health service has just slipped down a notch. Ditto our place on the competitiveness scale. Our wages have not kept up with inflation, let alone with real growth.

In other words, we need to push for far greater growth than we have had so far. In this year's election campaign, Labour had spoken of a 4 to 6 per cent growth rate (but then failed to substantiate how this was to be achieved apart from a Bugibba 2 and some handholding of the manufacturing sector). Yes, we need to go for growth - and even government finances would benefit greatly from this.

As the first player in the country, the government must lead by example. It has already cut its high employment of the country's work force. It must do more. It must continue to aim at a balanced budget. It must tackle far more energetically the wide social fraud (ho, nothing from Friday's unions march referred to this). It must clean up its act and go for more inward investment, ensure that those enterprises already in Malta remain happily here, undo the knots snarling competitiveness, and deliver what it promised. No, not the cosy atmosphere of a nursery, but a full-bodied courage to face the waves crashing on the shore.

Of course the rates will hurt, so will the car licence fees, and the news of jobs being lost. But there is still slack in the economy and it can take this shock and prosper. The reply must not be another government spin - for the government is inept at this kind of thing. It must be a very simple message: Revision? Compensation? No, growth, full-blast growth. All together.