Overspending the budget by €150 million is no laughing matter and should be dealt with seriously. The people need answers and the Opposition was right to raise this issue.
In a normal country we would have had a normal government that faced with such questions would have given clear answers as to what happened and why the government has overspent its budget.
However this is Malta we’re talking about, it’s not a normal country under any stretch of the imagination. If you’re still in doubt about that, just look at how many countries in the European Union have ministers that are implicated in the Panama scandal. Yes, none of them apart from us. This clearly demonstrates that things are done just slightly different over here.
In his Talking Point, ‘Indeed a shocking matter’ (January 12), Finance Minister Edward Scicluna went on a tangent and discussed a few issues that I don’t necessarily agree with. The minister, and I quote verbatim, said that: “This expenditure was the third lowest figure presented by the government since 2000.” I find this reasoning seriously flawed.
As we well know budgets increase every year. Year in, year out, we have larger budgets to deal with so in the proverbial sense, we have a larger cake to spread. With that in mind if the government utilises a percentage of this for a certain issue, the next year it doesn’t mean that it should spend the same percentile because if the cake is larger, if we still divided by the same amount of portions the portions would grow.
During this legislature we have gotten used to a situation where everything is for sale for the right price
It’s good to remind the minister that we’re not talking about the cash flow of a private company but about taxpayer money.
Thus the taxpayer needs a justified explanation as to why expenditure is increasing. It’s high time that we treat taxpayer’s money with the respect it deserves and not treat it as something for the government to use and abuse.
Another flaw that I find in the minister’s argument concerns long-term planning. How are we going to finance this once the one-time schemes end?
We can’t grow sustainably if growth is based on a one-time investment. One day these investments will end and we will end with a worrying situation of high expectations versus nothing else available to sell.
It’s very evident that in this legislature we have gotten used to a situation where everything is for sale for the right price, even if it’s a suspicious deal cut in a few minutes to sell virgin land in Żonqor. Malta is the size it is and we can’t go ahead with the chopping, dissecting and the selling of pieces of it to finance one-time income to the government.
Another point I wish to highlight is the clear inferiority complex the Labour government unknowingly shows each time it tries to rebut an argument from the Opposition.
It’s true that everyone expects better from the PN when compared to the low expectations that everyone has of Labour. This was once again demonstrated by the minister when instead of doing his job and trying to justify the government’s overspending, the only thing he could do was act as an opposition to the Opposition. He felt more at ease criticising the Opposition for not being a government.
It’s good to remind him that we are all still waiting for the government to behave like it is in government and not in opposition. This sheer inferiority complex prevails from the fact that Labour knows that morally they’re in the wrong in the various shortcomings that we have seen over the last four years.
I urge the minister to focus more on his own house rather than the one on theopposition side and to provide clear answers to the very valid questions the Opposition raised. Let’s keep in mindthat under his watch, the governmenthas overrun its expenditure to a staggering €300 million. That minister, is indeed a shocking matter.
Alan Abela-Wadge is a Nationalist Party candidate in the ninth and tenth districts.