Budget 2014 is definitely behind us now. The media event, that is. The meticulous and less glamorous exercise of sound fiscal planning barely made it on stage before it was quickly ushered out to make way for more glitzy things under the marquee in St George’s Square.

That gave the government an early advantage. The Opposition’s complaints that the budgetary exercise missed out on important detail – the devil’s favourite hangout – could be easily pooh-poohed as more examples of “negativity”: totally out of place in the cheery and sunny place that is Joseph Muscat’s Malta.

Searching for a roadmap

I have news for them: sooner or later, you pay the price for inadequate planning. This budget was just that. Highly adapted to sound-bites and billboards, it does not provide direction, it overlooks risks and does not give even a passing glance to the future. Social policy– the policy that protects the most vulnerable members of our society – is one area that has suffered this kind of neglect

And to think that, before March, we were given the impression that, once in office, Labour would hit the ground running. That didn’t seem too far-fetched: doesn’t a quarter of a century in Opposition give you enough time to observe, evaluate and consult so that you know what to do, once you have the responsibility? Instead, rather than a government that can assertively say what it plans to do because it knows what needs to be done, we have promises of papers white and green, roadmaps and consultations. The “roadmap” turns out to be a roadmap to have a roadmap – of sorts.

Drifting without a rudder

Read the budget speech. Leaf through the pages with their many figures. Put simply, the Government has no social policy. What is worse, as if this lack was not bad enough, is that Minister Coleiro Preca has decided to pull the plug on a number of important strategies and policies that had been launched in previous years and that were gaining momentum.

One such initiative to come to a premature end was the Children’s Policy. A document had been produced, with the support of experts and the contributions from a national consultation exercise. In Opposition, Coleiro Preca complained that the government was dragging its feet. “Children cannot wait,” she memorably asserted.

Now a government minister, it seems that things can be taken at a more leisurely pace. The policy has been shelved. Why? Your guess is as good as mine, because no official explanation has been given. Perhaps the government is becoming sensitive to the claim that, apart from selling passports, it can come up with nothing that the previous government had not bequeathed to it. So maybe we can hope for the Children’s Policy to be back, re-packaged and with Minister Coleiro Preca claiming ownership.

Sound the trumpets

There was a time, not so very long ago, when Labour would regularly quote figures in respect of people at risk of poverty, sometimes conveniently dropping the “at risk” altogether to make the situation sound more ominous. Once elected you’d have thought that fighting poverty would have been an important objective of a shiny, brand-new social policy.

Since taking office, Labour has launched a strategy to fight poverty – twice. The big event came to the accompaniment of violins and an art competition. That, unsurprisingly, didn’t do much for the poor and vulnerable. We will soon have the third launch of the same strategy, as soon as we reach the stage of publishing a Green Paper, which, in substance, is a very preliminary consultation paper without any commitment to any course of action, which may develop into a White Paper and finally an actual strategy. So it is with no surprise that the announcement of this Green Paper has not been accompanied with allocated funding for follow-up actions. The government is well aware that the finalisation of the strategy will take it to mid legislature and implementation will take much longer than that.

Crying game no more

So in the absence of new strategies, Budget 2014 has been presented in a social policy vacuum, making of the announced initiatives a set of disjointed measures. Forget the glitz and look at line votes which are the only thing that matters. The budget for supplementary assistance, an important source of support for many vulnerable people, has been reduced. So has the budget for invalidity pensions. The Out of Home Care Strategy for vulnerable children announced in 2012 and subsequently adopted by the new Labour government has been unreasonably delayed with its commencement postponed to 2014, when it should have been in place by the end of this year. Housing schemes have been withdrawn, or at least put on hold, with those intended to help people fix dangerous structures being re-announced months later, albeit under a new name.

Having for years approached the social sector with the attitude of an agony aunt or the producer of a weepy TV show with heart-wrenching stories of the less fortunate, Labour has now been called to govern. In the meantime, the vulnerable still wait.