While there is massive spending that rewards the wasteful as well as to make up past mistakes, negligence, vote buying and nepotism running into millions of Euros, the government is miserly when it comes to education - both with the educators themselves and for the infrastructure necessary for students to really get the education they deserve, ADPD chairperson Sandra Gauci said Saturday.

Addressing a press conference, Gauci said that when one considers the financial estimates found in the 2024 Budget for there seems to be massive expenditure that rewards those who waste - from electricity to fuel, and the level of spending in areas that reduce dependence on imported energy and pollution is a pittance compared to random handouts to one and sundry. Along with this we are all paying dearly from our taxes for the mistakes, negligence, buying of votes and nepotism in the leadership in Airmalta by the PLPN governments, including €92 million as for its early retirement scheme - also contributing, once again from our taxes, to additional debt also increases.

Gauci stated that while accumulating debt for long-term investment and with favorable conditions may make sense, debt to pay a million Euros a day in polluting fuels does not make sense - money that should have been better spent on cleaner energy, and clean transport systems. Indeed, the Prime Minister almost boasted that fuel is costing us a million euros a day, without indicating any plan or desire to change Malta's situation. On the contrary, we plough along as if traffic congestion does not exist and accumulating public debt for recurring expenditure is not a problem.

One can compare the retirement scheme of a bankrupt company, Airmalta, with the budgets of MCAST and the University of Malta. MCAST is given half of the spending of the early retirement scheme of Airmalta (€42.5 million), while the University of Malta gets basically the same budget of the scheme, €94 million. The budgets of these entities remained practically the same as last year. Moreover, collective agreements with respect to teachers in primary and secondary schools, as well as for MCAST and IfE remain expired or forgotten. The great disparity between the wasteful expenditure and that for the education sector reveals lack of foresight, concluded Sandra Gauci.