As has become the practice for several years now, the government this week published its pre-budget consultation document; summer reading for the country’s constituted bodies as they prepare for a long autumn of pre-budget discussions and recommendations for the government.

This year, judging from the thrust of the document, the government has placed welfare dependency as a lead issue. It aims to wean people from “living off the state” to find productive employment. This in itself is an excellent point of departure, as there are far too many people on the state’s welfare payroll that have turned receiving an array of state handouts into a full time profession. This situation is clearly unsustainable and it is high time that the sensitive issue, at times more than a little of a political hot potato, is addressed head on.

The document notes that while the state’s different and varying forms of social protection are aimed at helping people through rough patches in life, and are by their very nature time-specific measures, the system can also create “dependency and passivity”. This comes at the risk of unwanted side effects, as the document points out, when people become embedded in the system and are reluctant to enter or re-enter the workforce because the system, as the document puts it, “seems to be guaranteeing them an income”.

Most will agree that this is not only an unwarranted drain on public coffers, but it also creates a certain culture among long-term benefits recipients that deprives them of reaching their potential and becoming productive members of society.

The welfare system is in place for a very good reason, but it is, beyond any shadow of doubt, being exploited. There are multiple ways in which professional benefit seekers abuse the safety net in place for those less fortunate; some are obvious, such as those who register for work and claim unemployment benefits while they are, in actual fact, either employed of self-employed off the books. 

The pre-budget document singles out three and in so doing hints at the direction the government’s thrust is to take.

The first is the practice employed by people who claim to live apart from one another so as to receive separate benefits, which at the end of the day translates into greater payouts from the public coffers, and that of young people claiming the formation of new households so as to be able to claim unemployment benefits. In terms of the latter case, the document points out that such people have no obligations to seek training or education and that they can and do continue to claim benefits for their entire lives.

A second example under the spotlight was the case of long term unemployed people, those who have been unemployed for over two years. As matters stand, such individuals continue to receive social assistance without having to register for work – in the process discouraging them from taking up further education or training to become more employable and instead becoming dependant on the welfare system.

The document also goes into the practice of some young, single unmarried mothers, and fathers too, who left work or their studies to be able to care for their children. Many of these never re-enter the workforce and count their benefits as their permanent income. The document states that it will be the government’s aim to see these young single parents engaged in education or training and not becoming wholly dependent on the welfare system.

This last proposal was the only stated budget proposal in this area, although the government clearly has more cards up its sleeve to be dealt at Budget 2015 time. It hinted that other initiatives are in the pipeline to create “clear incentives for individuals to work and contribute to society and to encourage them to steer away from dependency, while ensuring the attainment of value for money in public expenditure, as well as the long term sustainability of social protection in Malta”.

But in so doing, the government must lead by its own example, for the government and the party in government have been making some dubious use of the public coffers themselves. The government has created the largest Cabinet in Maltese history, and incurred comparative expenses in the millions, and it has grown public service employment by close to 2,000 heads, which will result in millions more in expenditure that needed to be cut and not augmented. The party in government dropped the Australia Hall case instituted against it by the previous administration, only to turn around and sell the disputed property to the private sector, while the party still clings on to properties expropriated from private citizens decades ago that are being used as party clubs.

In the meantime, public debt has increased by €400 million and the deficit is at real risk of breaching the three per cent of gross domestic product level, which will land the country in the EU’s Excessive Deficit Procedure once again. Government expenditure has increased by some €100 million – €60million of which went to salaries and operational expenditure – but it has, on the other hand, proposed postponing local council elections so as to save money.

If the government, and rightly so, wants to curtail the welfare syndrome that so many have fallen into while maintaining its own credibility, it must first put its own house in order and curtail its own state handouts.