Now that the election is behind us, it is worth returning to a conversation that got lost somewhere between the rallies and the soundbites: why Malta's growth, for all its statistical success, has stopped feeling like progress to the people living through it.

For years, the story we told ourselves was that as long as GDP was rising, we considered the economy a success. But ask anyone stuck on the Marsa-Ħamrun bypass at half past seven in the morning, or a young couple being priced out of their own village, and you get a very different picture. Malta has been expanding faster than its roads, its schools, its healthcare system and its sense of space. Growth, in other words, has outrun the systems meant to manage it.

This is not an argument against prosperity, as nobody serious wants Malta poorer. The argument is that prosperity built on population expansion, low value labour and unmanaged construction eventually starts eating itself. Longer commutes, crowded emergency rooms, construction sites on every corner and a mounting sense that nobody is really in charge, are all symptoms of growth without proper management.

Malta needs to decide what kind of growth it pursues next. Because there exists a version of economic expansion that does not require importing more people, pouring more resources or leaning further on imported labour. It relies instead on productivity, digital exports, high skill activity and energy sovereignty, the kind of growth that adds value without adding pressure.

Malta is small enough and educated enough to make this shift successfully. Artificial intelligence and digital tools are today practical instruments that can cut bureaucracy, speed up government services, and free up the hours people currently lose to queues, traffic and red tape. If we learn how to harness these awesome tools properly, we could claw back on the hefty 'time tax', or that invisible cost we all pay simply trying to get through an average day - which is getting heftier by the day. That time recovered, is worth more to most families than any percentage point of GDP growth they never feel in their pocket.

However, for this to take place, we need a government willing to treat management as seriously as it treats marketing. It means investing in automation and skills so that Malta relies less on importing labour to sustain low value work, and more on training its own people for higher value roles. It means building digital infrastructure with the same urgency once reserved for physical infrastructure. And it means being honest that a country of Malta's size cannot keep absorbing population growth indefinitely without consequences for housing, congestion and the environment.

The temptation, especially now that the electoral pressure has eased, will be to let this conversation drop, and that would be a grave mistake.  Malta does not need to shrink its ambitions; it needs to grow in a way that respects the people living here and the size of the island they live on.

Dr Darren Carabott is Shadow Minister for the Economy, Technology and Strategic Projects