Finance Minister Tonio Fenech has handed over documents to a TV presenter to substantiate claims he made on Labour candidate Edward Scicluna’s comments on students’ allowances and healthcare during Monday’s TVHemm, screened on PBS.

These documents were uploaded on Facebook by presenter Norman Vella.

During the one-to-one debate between Mr Fenech and Prof. Scicluna, Mr Vella asked the minister to substantiate his (the minister’s) claims that the professor had made on free education and free healthcare.

Mr Fenech claimed that in a paper Prof. Scicluna had written on behalf of the Malta Federation of Industry, the economist had said that stipends should be reduced, something Prof. Scicluna categorically denied during Monday’s programme.

Mr Fenech also raised the economist’s doubts on whether healthcare should remain free Prof. Scicluna made in a programme back in 2008 and reservations on the timing of Malta’s euro adoption in a newspaper interview on 22 October, 2006.

Here, Prof Scicluna intervened to challenge the minister to present any proof of his claims. He continued to deny Mr Fenech's claims all throughout the programme, as one can see from link below.

Some time after the programme, a ministry official presented documents requested by the TVHemm presenter, which were uploaded on the programme’s Facebook page this afternoon.

The documents which Mr Fenech presented bas "proof" include the report compiled by Prof. Scicluna for the FOI, and the two interviews mentioned.

The FOI report Mr Fenech was referring to was the 2006-2010 Pre-Budget Document: ‘A Better Quality of Life’, which Prof. Scicluna had drawn up.

In it, Prof. Scicluna wrote, under the headline Tertiary education and student allowances: “Unlike the Dutch disease, this clearly unsustainable scheme has no precedent in other countries.

“As with any unsustainable programme, even though the problem could be foreseen way back in the early 90s, time tends to exacerbate the problem and bring it into sharp focus.

“Malta has reached that stage now. While proportionately (as per cent of GDP or per cent of government expenditure) it devotes its average share to education, more than half that amount is given to students as allowance, with little or no strings attached.

“It can be shown that if it is considered as a social programme then it happens to be a very regressive one. It is a very unproductive use of scarce resources, since it tends to divert them away from high yield investment, as with education proper, into  conspicuous consumption (cars, mobiles and entertainment). Since tertiary education has been shown to give high returns to its recipients there is no reason why the person involved should not share in their personal investment by getting a soft loan.”

The interviews referred to by the minister on TVHemm last Monday were given by Prof. Scicluna to TVM programme in 2008 and an English language newspaper in 2006. In them, Prof. Scicluna, according to Mr Fenech, had strongly indicated his ideas against total free healthcare and free education.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhOPLKuQ7uU – link to programme

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9YmLrYozQmubzVNOVVsemlQMDQ/edit - link to FOI document prepared by Prof. Scicluna

www.facebook.com/tvhemm