After listening to the Finance Minister’s budget speech last week, the reply by Opposition leader Joseph Muscat, and the reply to the reply by the Prime Minister on Wednesday – punctuated with useless press conferences in between – it is time to get down to business.

The budget is no longer an exercise of what has gone up by how many cents and has become more of a long-term planning exercise. In fact, this year, the budget took another twist, and became the first one to be focused on EU fiscal rules, in terms of the deficit and sovereign debt. The last time we had a budget like this was in the Fenech Adami times, post-1998, when Malta reapplied for European Union membership and was promptly told that it had to adhere to the debt and deficit criteria before the bloc would consider reactivating our application.

The House will begin to debate the budget speech on Monday, with morning and evening marathon sittings, five days a week. That discussion will be brought to a close on 14 December, after which a final vote will be taken.

Throughout, the Opposition will propose amendments to the budget allocations. Going on past experience, some of these will be frivolous, but it is a tool used by the Opposition benches to seek clarification on certain issues, or to draw attention to certain sectors which might be ‘lacking’.

But overall, the budget debate is a huge exercise in the implementation of democracy and of drafting a plan for the year ahead and beyond. As we have said in past leading articles, the place for discussing the budget is in parliament, and through direct questions to the leaders from the media, following their speeches.

Silly stand up or sit down press conferences repeating the same rhetoric or original speech mantra are unwelcome by citizens as a whole. This year, things went one further, with the introduction of terribly boring and dreary Budget 2012 on Facebook and the equally loathe attempt by the PL to counter the digital ‘assault’ on the senses through Therealbudget.com. It is totally overboard and apart from soothing the political addiction of those who continue to play the national sport as a matter of life and death, most people were absolutely sick to the eyeballs.

But the discussion is back in the forum it belongs to, the highest institution of the land – the House of Representatives. One hopes there will be exhaustive and productive discussions and submissions worthy of note from both sides. After that, the House will rise for Christmas recess and we can all get back to some form of normality and spend quality time with family and friends. We had better make the most of it. 2012 is going to be a tough year. We weathered 2011 well, despite all the bungling by the government; it was solid where it counted in protecting our finances. Whether we can withstand the firestorm which is brewing over Europe in the coming year, we have yet to see. One hopes that the ‘shock absorber’ budget will do enough to protect us and allow our economy to continue to grow – albeit at a slower rate.

One thing is certain, we have to lose more of our bad habits and adopt more Nordic European ones if we are to flourish. God willing.