Parliament has resumed work after the Christmas recess. Its routine work will be overshadowed by the prevailing, enduring economic realities.
Malta is set to approach the next financial year at a time when the economy has been shrinking and public debt has reached meteoric heights. Parliament has resumed work after the Christmas recess. Its routine work will be overshadowed by the prevailing, enduring economic realities.
Malta is set to approach the next financial year at a time when the economy has been shrinking and public debt has reached meteoric heights. The tax burden has never been so oppressive.
The scenario is by no means pretty to behold, with Malta’s leading political parties engaged in close combat all along the line.
Very often, the government and Opposition blame each other and shift the onus of Malta’s misfortunes on to the other side.
The plethora of indictments will not help matters. When rhetoric meets reality, the hot air evaporates ands it is the hard facts that endure. The situation calls for solutions not recriminations.
The incumbent Nationalist administration has been in office from l987, practically without interruption. As much as it can claim merit for positive decisions, it cannot escape blame for the deformities that have since scarred Malta’s economic landscape.
One major deformity is an overloaded bureaucracy, which is, in large parts, inefficient, and propped up by a constellation of quangos that behave like masters of all they survey. These are gobbling up substantial funds for their operations to make good for their inefficiencies. Their dead weight is threatening to break the back of the economy and of the consuming community alike.
Perhaps the situation would not have come to such a pass if all the social partners played their part and worked together.
All ‘if’ statements about the past as well as the future are open to controversy. Today’s reality is not. It hovers like an albatross over all our heads.
Although we may all like to have a say about what is to be done, the ultimate responsibility falls on the people’s elected representatives and, finally, on the government of the day.
We learn geology after the earthquake. Now that the government’s financial plight is public knowledge, the least one would expect is for the government to determine how the patient is and why. It would be suicidal to continue to fly without instruments.
To change the phrase, the flowers must not be allowed to wilt in the garden. So many years of fudging, hedging and dodging, while we all waited for a purposeful plan of action, must seem to one and all as unacceptable. It would be fatal to mistake the smouldering silence in business circles and the electoral forum as acquiescence.
Can’t the university and the constituted bodies representing employers and workers produce from their ranks the right sort of people capable of diagnosing Malta’s ailments and prescribe the most palatable medicine?
Could the contemporary chronic condition of public finance be brought under control without major amputation?
There are ways to alleviate the pain. By mopping up millions of revenue due to the government, by whittling down the constellation of quangos, the government could begin to reduce the deficit.
By attracting foreign investment and revitalizing the tourist sector, the government could open up a path for new growth, tapping new sources of foreign earnings, creating new employment and boosting productivity.
It is incentivization, not taxation to saturation point that activates enterprise
Politics is about ways and means. Confrontation is the enemy of progress, especially so when a nation is at an impasse.
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