The pre-budget days having been spent in an interminable round of negotiations focused almost exclusively on the surcharge issue, and the post-budget days having been spent in partisan diatribes, the country has so far not received from its government a coherent, credible and understandable idea of where the government would like to lead the

country.

Instead, by fault or by default, the impression has been conveyed to the country at large of a government without a rudder, buffeted here and there by the gales of world recession, oil price spikes and globalisation, complicated and then made worse by the government’s own mistakes – the budget deficit ballooning to “at least” e200 million, hedging the price of oil when it was at its highest, etc. And then pig-headedly choosing a very high rate of electricity and water prices, blithely forgetting its electoral commitments to cut taxes, thus leading to the widespread conviction held by many – including many of the government’s own supporters – of hard times coming and of an economy in austerity and in tatters.

Which is mostly pure poppycock – the announced rates will not hurt families as much as is being feared, nor will car owners who prefer to keep their old car be unduly hurt (at least not as much as they would be by getting a new car), the standard of living will not suffer any unduly hard bumps, the country’s economy – barring some structural problems in specific areas and the impact of world recession on specific areas of manufacturing and tourism – is still resilient and forward-looking. The government’s finances went haywire only because of the dockyard buyout and the e50 million subsidy on the price of oil.

Most importantly, the government has so far failed to tell the country that it knows where it is going and that neither the country nor its government are like a boat in a stormy sea.

Just to give but one prime example: Malta has been spared the sub-prime crisis (but not the spillover effects into recession and higher unemployment in countries that buy from us or from where our tourists come) because the banks in Malta are both much better and also better regulated than the ones in the US and have not gone for the lend-at-any-cost extremes that started the rot.

Over the coming months, until the recession is over in these countries, Malta and its economy will

suffer through no fault of its own. This is why the country had to adopt the budget stance it did – and this is precisely where the government has so far failed to put across its point of view. All it had to do was to explain the situation, in very simple terms, to the country and the best way of doing this should have been to draw a parallel between how a family manages its money and how the country must

manage its economy.

Any family that wants to thrive knows it cannot exist for a number of years with a recurrent deficit. It knows that the sooner it gets into profit, the

better for all concerned. For the country to argue – as some, even surprisingly economists of note,

opinion writers of fame and respect and people who should know better, have done – that balancing the budget could be postponed almost indefinitely would be the height of irresponsibility. They would not dream of doing that in their own families.

More. The family that wants to thrive knows it must tackle the weak points, the areas where there is an outflow of money, as quickly as possible, well aware of the fact that in some cases this may prove difficult or impossible. Given our EU membership, this was the time to tackle the Drydocks haemorrhage. It was also the time to tackle the oil price haemorrhage – and to tackle the subsidy haemorrhage. No self-respecting society can survive with three big money outflows being allowed to persist unchallenged and unchecked. Otherwise, all the work of the components of that society, be it

country or family, would be mostly in vain.

Yet more. No family that wants to remain a

family can afford a culture of waste. When a

family starts spending beyond its means, as if there’s no tomorrow, that family is doomed. Ditto a country. The only way to curtail waste is to put a monetary tag on it. Make the polluter pay and you cut pollution. Make the wasteful pay and people

suddenly stop wasting.

At the same time, however, a family, a real family, takes care of its weakest members. For all that the budget speech spoke of solidarity, there seems to have been precious little of it in the budget measures. Perhaps this point was not forcefully made by the trade union representatives in the pre-

budget discussions. What is more likely is that the government has not proved to be as sensitive as the much-maligned one in the 1970s, which had to tackle oil spikes and world recession but ensured that the real poor did not suffer the consequences. There is still time for the government to come up with

specific measures to tackle the weakest sectors of society. Of this, more in the coming weeks, when this paper will again speak out against the current widespread social assistance fraud culture.

The economists/opinion writers, etc., referred to above would like to see the government emulating the US government (and, come Tuesday, the EU, although one still has to see whether promises will become reality) and seed the economy through stimulus packages.

In the case of Malta, the tool to do that should be the e800 million of EU funds up to 2013, rather than through again widening the budget deficit or inserting yet another structural deficit-sustaining virus into the economy. Other countries have their specificities, we have our own. More could be gained by reining in waste in government spending than by spending money just to spend money, although extra public works (at last the City Gate issue could possibly be tackled now) would be welcome – as long as it is not deficit-causing weakness.

As for families, one could point to a very interesting article in the Money section of the UK Sunday Times two weeks ago, which spoke of an MP who, thanks to what is known as a comparison website (www.moneysupermarket.com – though it is obviously related to British realities, not Maltese, but why should there not be one here too?), saved no less than £10,000 a year from his expenses. He found he was spending money on things he never even knew about.