'Malta should look beyond 2015'

The government's Vision for 2015 was progressing well and taking shape, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi said yesterday, adding that the country now needed to look beyond that date and see where it wanted to go and what it wanted to achieve.

Introducing a three-day programme of marathon talks and discussions on Vision 2015+, Dr Gonzi said the plus was added to the vision because this had to continue being updated to reflect the country's ambitions and those of its people.

He said that, over the next two years, Malta has to prepare itself for negotiations with the European Union for the second package of EU funds since it joined the bloc in 2004, a package that will cover the seven-year period starting from 2014.

He said the party wanted to listen to people's ideas and find a reply to an important question on the country's future: Where do we want to go?

"The 2015 vision is in the making and the country had already started achieving results towards achieiving this aim. Now we need to see where we want to go, where we want to take the country and decide what the country wants to achieve," he said.

Nationalist Party general secretary Paul Borg Olivier said that, after proposing Vision 2015 on May 1, 2007, the party continued working on a set of values and ideas which would make Malta a centre of excellence in a number of sectors. Vision 2015+, he explained, centred around three aspects: The country's identity, innovation and inclusion.

Identity and what made people Maltese was up for discussion yesterday evening. Professors Oliver Friggieri and Peter Serracino Inglott, President Emeritus Ugo Mifsud Bonnici and sociologist Mark Anthony Falzon discussed the core values of the Maltese.