Prime Minister Joseph Muscat yesterday insisted the government had a responsibility to ensure Malta was “future-ready”. Photo: Labour

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat yesterday hit out at the “conservative forces” that opposed the controversial citizenship scheme because, he said, they feared change.

In a rousing speech that lasted almost an hour in front of a sizeable crowd at the Fgura Labour Party club, Dr Muscat insisted the government had a generational responsibility to ensure Malta was “future-ready”.

As he extolled the social and economic benefits that could be derived from the scheme, he said the resistance was akin to the opposition the Labour movement had faced when it wanted to introduce pensions and other social services in the 1970s.

“History has tasked us again to change this country and we are ready. This is not just a simple citizenship programme.

“It is about change... how this country will not remain languishing in the middle of league tables,” Dr Muscat told supporters.

The Prime Minister said he did not want a country that made ends meet from one Budget to another.

He then listed a series of examples of how the money from the citizenship programme could help the country step up gear.

“We don’t want to tell the poor that we cannot help them because there is not enough money... I don’t want to tell anybody whose mother suffered from a rare disease that cost €1,000 per week to treat that the country does not afford the treatment. Or tell people stuck in traffic that we don’t have the funds to build the country’s infrastructure.”

Dr Muscat said he wanted history to judge his government as one that tried to solve problems and improve people’s lives.

He said the country’s social and economic structures were still geared for a society that belonged to the last century and the government wanted to change this.

With reference to the EU Parliament’s overwhelming rejection of the scheme, Dr Muscat accus­ed Opposition leader Simon Busuttil of breaking “the golden rule” of not criticising the country abroad.

We don’t want to tell the poor that we cannot help them because there is not enough money

Dr Muscat then quoted a speech Dr Busuttil gave two years ago in the European Parliament when still an MEP.

In the speech, Dr Busuttil had objected to the European Parliament’s debate on the Hungarian constitution, saying this was a sovereign matter over which the EP had “no power or competence”.

Mockingly, Dr Muscat criticised the Opposition leader for – rightly – standing up for Hungary but now “working against his own country”.

“They [the PN] are constantly telling us not to forget the EP vote but people will be telling the PN not to forget the March election result,” he said to loud applause and chants of ‘we are behind you’.

ksansone@timesofmalta.com