Robert Abela p prosperity’: ‘W behind, we will

Prime Minister Robert Abela promised a “new prosperity” for Malta, and pledged not to stop fighting while people remain left behind.

Speaking in Parliament during his own Budget-replica, Abela ran through many of the main proposals announced by Finance Minister Clyde Caruana last week in the Budget speech and fired numerous broadsides against the Opposition throughout his two-hour speech.

Most government MPs again chose to flaunt Parliamentary regulations which recommend the wearing of face-masks while Parliament is in session.

During his speech, Abela said that the budget was built upon the fact that Malta was able to come out strongly from the pandemic. He said that not everything had been promised – it would have been irresponsible to promise everything: “I prefer to leave irresponsibility to others,” he said in a veiled jab at the PN’s raft of measures announced.

The question now, he said, is how to be better next year than this year – even when this year saw the highest ever level of social security investment in the budget that this country has ever seen.

He said that the level of social security investment is double that which the PN invested in the same sector when they were last in government, as will the level of investment in the environment.

“They chose austerity when they were last in Cabinet. They chose to increase the weight on everyone’s shoulders… and they chose to increase their salaries!” Abela said of the PN.

Abela said this budget is the basis of a new prosperity which will provide the building blocks for the future of the country.

The Prime Minister harked back onto the government’s achievements in the vaccination programme, noting that the PN had said that Malta would only get 40,000 vaccine doses but that the country had now administered 835,000 doses and that while the PN said that Malta wouldn’t get a vaccine dose before April, the government had started vaccinating people five months prior.

“They think that everyone works with their own mediocrity and lack of ambition,” he said before noting that in the last pandemic – that of Swine Flu – the PN hadn’t even managed to get vaccine doses for Malta and had to beg the Dutch for their leftovers.

He lambasted his counterpart Bernard Grech’s criticism of “over-spending”, saying that he was not surprised of Grech’s criticism, considering that the PN leader had called the economic measures which saved thousands of jobs during the Covid-19 pandemic “over-spending.”

Abela said that the PN had criticised the fact that the deficit had gone higher than projected.

“Half of that was after spending on public health. Would it have made sense that in the middle of a global health crisis to get cheap with people’s health? That’s what you’d have done – like you did in the past. We will continue to invest,” Abela said.

He criticised Grech’s “insensitivity” in calling Health Minister Chris Fearne “impotent” during his speech yesterday. “But we’re used to their arrogance and insolence now,” Abela said of the PN.

Noting that the Budget had increased the number of medicines which were available for free, and questioned which of those medicines the PN would have removed from the formulary to cover for the government’s apparent “over-spending.”

Turning to the environment, Abela admitted that the environment had been pushed to