The minister for finance has been reported as having mused that the Maltese economy could do with a less preponderance of construction.

He got his knuckles rapped by his own boss, the prime minister, for his pains, who must have worried that anything less than full support for the construction industry could affect Labour’s poll results.

Yet this is the same Clyde Caruana who in his previous role as head of Jobsplus many times insisted that the Maltese economy needed more workers brought in from abroad. In effect, this ended fitting well with the polices of the latest administrations to relax the controls that were claimed to shackle development.

The result is what we can see around us today and which has been gaining momentum ever since the depredations of Sliema, Marsascala and Bugibba in the past decades.

We can see the results all around us today, not just the tower-cranes but also the mammoth construction work going on everywhere, in town centres and in the peripheries of towns and villages and also, despite so-called controls, in areas supposedly outside the development zones.

On the other hand it is indisputable that many people have grown rich as a result of this spurt of construction, from big companies which benefitted from economies of scale to small families and individuals.

Apart from construction in itself, an entire new industry of plasterers, finishers, indoor design, carpenters, etc has grown up. As long as new residences, new office blocks, etc were being built, these people were doing well. To suggest trimming the construction industry could affect these subsidiary industries.

But apart from the issues of so much construction going on, and the attendant noise, pollution, inconvenience to neighbourhoods, one stark fact remains: Malta is a small island and very limited. People are having to make do with the little space they can lay their hands on and being creative with that.

The world financial crisis of the past decades have brought interest rates down to zero if not to negative territory and many found out that construction gives a better return. But if there is a glut of new buildings and a dearth of buyers, then the return on investments would become smaller and smaller.

These could be among the reasons behind Minister Caruana’s musing. What he could have been musing about was the importance and urgency of developing new economic streams away from construction and its ancillary industries.

But this is easier spoken about than done. Over the past years, successive governments did try to find alternative streams – the aircraft servicing industry brought to Malta companies such as Lufthansa Technik, followed by others but then expansion stopped as international travel was blocked by the pandemic.

Expansion was sought in the medical and pharmaceutical area and some success was registered but again, no expansion has been registered and one would have expected these firms to benefit from the huge search for anti-Covid medicines.

At the other end of the scale there has been, of course, huge expansion in the firms venturing into the financial services sector and this in turn fed into the construction area with the demand for new offices of these companies. Where before there was a dearth of new offices, there is now a glut.

And meanwhile with the grey-listing  of Malta and the widely-expected measures to address issues such as money-laundering, this industry is very much on the defensive and can hardly be expected to take up the slack from the construction sector, apart from being incompatible with it.

One can thus understand Minister Caruana’s dilemma. The old ruse of giving the people hit by job losses a job with the government as was done in the 1980s with the Pioneer Corps just burdens the government with more people on its books after the huge expansion of such people in recent years. And of course many of the people who would be affected by a slowdown in construction would be third-country nationals.

What is really needed is a nationwide pact, maybe including those third-country nationals who have been here for a number of years and have integrated well for whom to leave Malta would disrupt their family lives. There would be nothing automatic in this process but rather a careful sifting of persons as well as offering of help in education and training.

Such a pact would explore areas where future development can be fostered. Successive studies have shown there are wide areas where expansion is hindered because of lack of manpower, of trained people.

This is not something that can be done by the government – on the contrary this is something that the government must keep out of, if we want to learn from past experiences. Maybe the people who can be attracted to such a pact would be interested in setting up of a cooperative and, with some minimal initial funding, move on.

There is much here that is disheartening – the failure of so many cooperative initiatives, the failure of agriculture in a general way, the preponderance of partisan politics to enter everywhere and poison everything.

Yet if we are to have a future and if our children are to have a future there is no other way than to bring construction under rein. And then we will have no alternative but to find new opportunities and openings. We owe it to those who will become the victims in the future.

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