Out of every 5 people finding work, only one goes into the public sector, Finance Minister Edward Scicluna said, highlighting an error made by the National Statistics Office earlier this month.

"I was right to criticise that employment statistics," he said. The Opposition had condemned the Minister for doing so at the time, however the NSO later admitted and corrected their mistake. The mistake concerned the sectors seeing an increase in employment.

The Finance Minister was attending a pre-budget public consultation meeting at the Inspire complex in Marsascala, with the theme; "Creating opportunities not dependencies". This was the third and final pre-budget consultation meeting.

The government's plan is nothing short of its electoral programme, he said. "The government's first budget involved choosing the measures that targeted economic growth", he said. "Nothing can be built without a growing economy".

"When we took office, the decisions we took began to turn the wheel. Every now and again we do make mistakes, but that is far better than not making any decisions at all. As a results we can see how our economy has grown. We are far better than most European economies," he added.

"Everyone here in this room pays tax. Every single thing you buy has a tax, and thus you deserve to see that your money is being spent well. A third of government income goes towards social affairs. Will this be cut? Of course not, but we will ensure that these funds go towards those truly in need".

"Is having young people playing video games all day a good way for them to spend their life? No, we need to create certain measures and schemes to change this," he said.

The government wants to create more opportunities and not dependencies, he added. "We are speaking about youth's not people who are genuinely sick, through creating scholastic and work-related incentives".

"The world is currently very competitive, with prices being great for consumers but difficult for operators. We need to attract investors. He mentioned the construction sector doing well, and shops hiring more full-time workers".

The Minister mentioned that the government does have a problem with funds. Citing the medical sector as an example, and medicines in particular he said; "We need to invest in order to ensure that we are not wasting funds when it comes to medicine. We are talking about an €80 million cost for the medicines government provides, yet we don't have a system to calculate distribution. This is something we will invest on in order to ratify this.

"There's also waste when it comes to inventory and storage. With regards to medicines, it's easy for medicines to go past their sell by date".

"This year income tax will fall by 4 percentage points, he said.  When it comes to creating such measures, we need to suffer in other sectors. We need to try and cut costs to utilise all possible funds".

He spoke about pensions, and an ever encroaching problem. Currently, the number of elderly persons in Malta is on the rise, and as such pensions in the future will start to suffer. He mentioned that a world bank expert has been called to help with the situation.

The minister spoke about the iGaming sector, mentioning that other countries in the EU try and stop Malta at every turn by making small changes to EU legislation to try and counter every small advantage Malta has.