Malta warming

Colder weather may have arrived, but not such as to cool the political heat. The temperature promises to rise further over the driest of matters - statistics. That type of Malta warming has been with us since little less than forever. The data produced by the Office of Statistics - nowadays, the National Statistics Office (NSO) - has always tended to be splattered with suspicion by the party in opposition - as Nationalists should very well remember from their own years in that frustrating corner.

The current flare up was ignited by a correction by the NSO of the deficit figure for 1996 quoted by Alfred Sant, the Opposition leader, in his reply to the 2007 Budget Speech. He lifted the figure, unadorned, from a time-series released by the NSO in 2004. The time-series put it that the highest ever deficit was totted up by the Nationalists in the final year of their 1987-96 stay.

Oddly, the 2004 time-series had escaped everybody's notice when the NSO released it. That included commentators on finance and economics, like yours truly, as well as politicians. No one drew attention to the whopping deficit figure of Lm188.589 million shown for 1996. It escaped the attention of the NSO itself that the figure did not tally with the revenue and expenditure reconciliation for that year.

When Dr Sant produced the figure to rebut Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi's politically dishonest and tedious accusation that the 1996-98 Labour government had fathered the structural deficit and brought it to a record high during its 22 months span, the NSO went back to basics. It discovered confusion in the 2004 time-series.

The NSO issued a correction, to attempt to explain the confusion. It stated that the correct figure for the 1996 deficit should read Lm102.39 million. The timing infuriated the Opposition leader, who had spoken on Wednesday evening (October 25). The examination of the actual data by the NSO would have begun on Thursday. It seems that it was finalised on Friday morning. The correction was released to the media, and those who receive the NSO's releases electronically, on Friday afternoon.

When Dr Gonzi wound up the first stage of the Budget debate that evening, he could hold up the error to refute the 1996 figure quoted by the Opposition leader, and so press home his claim that Labour ran up the biggest deficit ever, in 1997.

The Opposition leader could hardly have been expected not to make a meal out of the correction. And he did, he did. No less so than what the Nationalists would have done, had it been they who were in opposition, striving to discredit the government as far as possible, plus much more.

As it was, Dr Sant had been trying to chip away at the reliability of the data published by the NSO for weeks on end. That led up to a calculated stance, quite before he quoted the 2004 time-series the previous week. He intimated he was not at all convinced that the NSO data told the whole truth, and nothing but that truth. But, he indicated, he would use that same data to demonstrate that the government's bullish claims were little more than - well - bull.

When the NSO came up with its "errata corrige", Dr Sant charged into attack. He left no doubt that he gained more than a light impression that the books were cooked, and that the NSO was serving the Nationalist government.

This has been an unhappy incident for the NSO. Computers process what they are fed: how could such a whopping error have occurred...?

To be continued