Budget 2019 lacks economic vision

The 2019 Budget is conspicuous not by what it says but by what it has left unsaid.

In his customary long speech, Minister Edward Scicluna opted to make no reference to the major challenges that Malta is facing. He made no reference to the economic vision that is going to carry this country forward in the coming years. He made no mention of how he is going to alleviate the hardship being faced by pensioners, twenty thousand of whom are living in poverty or at risk of poverty. He had no words for couples seeking to buy or even rent their first house and who have found themselves priced out of the property market.

In 150 minutes he made no reference to the dire situation facing our banking institutions. He did not find the time to talk about the growing strain on our country’s infrastructure. He had no words as to how this Government aims to address the pressures our education system is under.

Instead, Minister Scicluna opted to read out a list of fiscal and monetary measures which, in the main, will make no major difference to resolving the challenges we are facing.

This was pure and simply a PR exercise bereft of any effort to build a stronger, leaner economy. Instead of addressing problems, in this budget this government is doing its utmost to hide them.

But there is a limit to how much you can hide the kind of issues we are facing. On the environmental front, our country is grappling with a waste and air quality problem. With every day that passes, and with the population on the increase, these problems are getting out of hand. Our roads are becoming congested to the point that, at certain times of the day, they resemble car parks more than actual roads. Road resurfacing programmes will not resolve this issue and, at this rate, neither will new or wider roads. We need a modal shift. We need to invest in a public transport system that encourages people to leave their car at home. Of course, no mention of this was made in the budget speech.

Minister Scicluna made no mention of how his government intends to tackle the prob- lem of cheap labour and the atrocious conditions being offered to some of the foreign workforce.

Minister Scicluna did not mention the growing list of projects that were promised in previous budget but have never seen the light of day. From the airstrip and cruise liner terminal in Gozo to the garages for rock bands, from the land reclamation projects to the racing track, there are scores of projects that government flaunted in the past but which have now disappeared completely.

I expected Minister Scicluna to give a detailed explanation as to how he intends to undo the damage done to Malta’s reputation. Under his watch, the regulatory institutions that were meant to safeguard our common interest failed to act. As a result, today our country’s name is being banded around in less than favourable terms. We are considered as a rogue nation, out to make a quick buck. Forget the OECD, Transparency International, the European Banking Authority and the European Commission with their reports, black lists and formal warnings. It takes a taxi driver in South America to make Minister Scicluna realise he has made a mess of our Country’s reputation.

The Opposition, in its prebudget document, laid out its economic vision for the future. We want an economy that builds on the strengths of each and every one of us. We want an economy that builds on the success of the existing economic sectors that are delivering growth – our financial services, iGaming and tourism – while investing in new sectors. We want to re-balance population growth in line with our island’s carrying capacity. We want to invest in education and ensure that our future generations are skilled to take on the best opportunities that our economy can offer.

We want a fairer distribution of income. We want the line between the haves and the havenots to fade away and not grow bolder, as is the case today. We want our pensioners to be able to live a decent living on their hard-earned pension. We want to put the environment once again on the national agenda. We want to remove the unfair competition that our small and medium-sized businesses are facing. We want to rebuild our country’s reputation by building the trust in our institutions.

This year’s budget makes the grave and erroneous assumption that wellbeing and GDP growth are one and the same thing. It assumes that a government’s budget surplus means that everyone is making ends meet. Both these two assumptions are wrong. Over the coming days, the Opposition will have the opportunity to show how government is whitewashing over the nation’s problems. Our economy today is like an athlete who is taking performance-enhancing steroids. This government is injecting people into our economy to make it grow. The problem with steroids is twofold: firstly, they come with serious side effects and secondly, the moment you stop using them your performance will dwindle. That is the situation our economy is in at the moment. And this budget does nothing to address this reality.