Return on Malta's investment

A passing of an age can be painful for those set in the old ways. Nostalgia kicks in and an atmosphere of melancholic loss grips those whose old habits die hard.

Yet, change is inevitable and even those aspects of our life we thought fundamental to our well-being give way to newer attitudes and newer needs. Nothing follows this rule more closely than economics.

When the Suez Canal first opened, Malta enjoyed a period of prosperity serving the fuelling needs of ships on the road to India. When ships became more efficient and did not need refuelling before they reached India, the refuelling business dried up. It felt like Malta could never recover from the change. Similar shocks were felt at the end of the Great War and again when Malta grew out of the colonial and military economy.

All of those dramatic phases signified job losses and not a little worrying by people who had to adapt to that change to survive. And yet survive they did. "Survive" is the wrong word. They flourished as a result of the change. Ultimately, manufacturing and tourism came about because they needed to fill the vacuum left by a demilitarised economy. Since the 1960s tourism, as an industry, has had to change many times over. And so has manufacturing. Industry is at one such set of crossroads and because change is inevitable for economies, any one with even a little sense of future has long expected this.

Labour has spoken about change for some years. Before the EU referendum, Alfred Sant blurted out the names of factories, predicting their demise which, he argued, could be avoided if the majority voted against joining the EU. Labour comes from the reactionary tradition of those who think they can postpone the future indefinitely.

We of the Nationalist Party have also spoken about economic change for some years. In contrast with Labour, we have also done something about it: we have prepared the country for this change and not merely perpetuated stagnation, mediocrity and the siege mentality in our constituencies.

When, in 2000, then Prime Minister Eddie Fenech Adami appointed me as an "eMinister" to champion the introduction of ICTs in the fabric of our society and economy he was acting on his habitual sense of vision.

In 2004, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi built on this vision and integrated the responsibilities for championing ICTs with promotion of foreign direct investment.

Between 2000 and 2004, Dr Sant did not even think it worth his trouble to have a spokesman for the IT sector. By 2004 he realised that our leadership was drawing results and he detailed his foreign policy guru to handle ICTs part-time.

Our ICT programme of the past five years was the building of a knowledge-based economy that will complement and eventually replace the traditional manufacturing economic activity that this country has benefited from for the last four decades. Yet again Labour told us we're too ambitious in our goals.

While in 2003 Dr Sant was mourning manufacturing jobs we were half way through our programme to train our human resources for new job opportunities in the ICT industry. While Dr Sant was waxing melodramatic about the "tragedy" of increased pay packet expectations by our workers, we were developing the infrastructure that global ICT firms need to set up house here and pay exactly those high salaries expected by our people. While Dr Sant was screaming deceit over the "gimmickry" of the government's agreement with Microsoft, we were securing strategic alliances with the most important ICT names in the world.

The difference is that Dr Sant never saw beyond his next electoral objective. Dr Sant has always behaved as if the world may very well end after the next election.

The difference is that since 2000 we have worked to arrive where we are now. It was not with a little satisfaction and excitement that I announced on Thursday the foundation of SmartCity@Malta in the south of our island. This year we are harvesting what we sowed and carefully tilled for the past six years. While Dr Sant mourns the past, the Maltese will succeed in the present and continue to flourish in the future. In Ricasoli the Maltese will be seeing the return on their investment when year after year they kept Dr Sant and his pre-industrial ideas out of government.

Dr Gatt is Minister of IT and Public Investment.