Labour leader Joseph Muscat said this morning that while the government boasted of economic growth, the only real way to see if the growth was real was to ask the people.

The people should be asked a simple question - Are you better off now than you were a year ago?

The truth, he said, was that the people are not better off. In many cases, they are worse off. Pensioners, in particularly, could hardly scrape by. Thousands of old people were receiving a pension which was even lower than the increase given recently to the prime minister and ministers - €7,000 a year, he said. This was what the government had achieved after 22 years in government.

Turning to the power station, Dr Muscat sad the tender for filters at the Delimara power station had been stopped “and we don’t know why” adding such decisions were detrimental to people’s health.

On Mepa, Dr Muscat said the reform had only served to push up prices for applications. This had led to a sharp drop in applications with only 36 being submitted to date when the application rate should have reached about 1,400 to be in line with previous years.

Speaking about Air Malta he criticised the authorites for encouraging its pilots, which it invested so much in training, to seek jobs with other airlines. He also questioned how much it cost Dr Gonzi to fly to Brussels on a flight that was practically empty and questioned whether Brussels would foot the bill.

In the health sector, far better results could be achieved. Results were not matching spending on this sector and some sectors were not being given sufficient importance, such as dementia.

Malta was the only country in Europe where dementia patients were not given direct assistance. Doing nothing, as the government was doing, would eventually cost the country more in costs for care, apart from the consequences on society, he said. The easier availability of medicines for dementia would be among the Labour government's priorities, Dr Muscat said.

He said that Mater Dei Hospital was in a crisis, with patients on stretchers or wheelchairs for 36 hours because the hospital lacked sufficient beds owing to government incompetence.

Patients were also seeing too many medicines out of stock and they were having to buy them directly, at considerable cost. People paid their taxes for medicines, then ended up having to buy their own medicines as well.

The real problem was the bed shortage at Mater Dei, and he suspected this was part of a plan to introduce charges for health services, as could happen after the next general election. The PL, however, would promise that health services would remain free, Dr Muscat said.

On education, Dr Muscat said there was no doubt that reforms were needed, but it was obvious that with just two months to go for the new benchmark tests, the way how the reform was being managed was questionable and teachers, parents and pupils did not know what was happening. Children, Dr Muscat said, should not be used as guinea pigs.

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