As summer moves into September and begins to draw to a close, the Parliamentary season comes ever closer.  The key appointment in the House’s calendar is the Budget, which will set out the government’s plans for the upcoming year.

While the times of people dreading the day of the Budget, lest there be some form of new taxation introduced, are long gone, this is a Budget which will have more attention to it paid than most in the last few years.

The issues which the country is facing economically have been documented reasonably well over the past few months: Malta is facing significant inflation, government debt is skyrocketing and forcing the government to employ cost-cutting measures to the tune of €200 million, and there are a host of issues facing the national airline Air Malta, to name some.

In many ways, the country’s medium to long term future will hinge on how the government chooses to respond to the problems which the country, like the rest of Europe, is facing now.

A strong response to these problems must be built on a number of significant priorities.  Chief amongst those, in our view, is the fact that where possible the shoulders of the common people should be kept without extra burdens.

That means that first and foremost, the government should within the budget give a firm commitment that fuel and energy subsidies will continue as they are now.  These subsidies are the only reason that Malta’s inflation has remained lower than in other EU countries and removing them, as Energy Minister Miriam Dalli rightly told journalists on Wednesday, will have a significant ripple effect which will drive many families to the brink.

Also significant is that the government should ensure that the full Cost of Living Adjustment is given to all citizens, irrelevant of how much it may be.  This is not the time to change a formula which has been in place for over 30 years, and unions are right to feel aggrieved after no changes were made to the system even if the increases it sometimes provided were minimal.  It’s encouraging in this sense that the Prime Minister has already made his position in favour of this clear.

But of course the energy and fuel subsidies alone will represent a significant financial outlay in a scenario, as mentioned above, where the government is undergoing a cost-cutting exercise.

There has already been significant controversy – and rightly so – because the University of Malta lost €1 million in funding as a result of these same Budget cuts.  There are better ways which the government can employ, and can commit to in the upcoming Budget, in order to cut costs.

Firstly, a full audit of the public sector in order to identify where there is over-employment and therefore where there can be cost-cutting must be carried out.  Likewise, the government needs to look at itself and see how many persons of trust it has employed, and size down where necessary.

The government can also promise to introduce a new framework and set of policies relating to public procurement – very much akin to what was proposed by the Malta Chamber of Commerce a number of months ago.

Those proposals seem to have been ignored by the government, but given how much money is being spent in direct orders – and where perhaps there is overspending as a result – it is high time that the document is dusted off and given another comprehensive look.

Budgets elsewhere will likely have to be cut.  Unfortunately the economic scenario may make that a necessity. But the government needs to be wiser in where it is cutting funds from.  When Energy Minister Miriam Dalli was asked about this on Wednesday she said that the government will continue to invest in the people.  Cutting the budget of the University of Malta doesn’t sound like that to us.

After a number of years of riding the benefits of sky-high economic growth, the ground has suddenly come up far quicker than anyone thought.  This Budget may be a key part in determining whether we land safely and go home in one piece, or whether we land with a bang and are sent home in an envelope.