Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi yesterday vowed to continue investing in education and spoke of how the €6,000 spent every year for every student were an investment in the country’s future.
Reiterating his party’s plea to retain and strengthen the stipend system, on which €23 million a year are spent, Dr Gonzi said he was proud of the progress the country was making in the education sector, particularly the fast rate of growth in post-secondary education.
The young, he said, were Malta’s prime resource. An educated workforce was the only way the country could remain an attractive, competitive investment destination.
The Government would continue to invest heavily in education while giving students facilities to learn and to train.
The PN, he said, was and will remain the party of education. “It never closed private schools or the Malta College for Arts, Science and Technology, it never restricted entry to University and it never said it wanted to raise a socialist generation.”
Replying to questions on education from students in Santa Venera, Dr Gonzi urged parents to encourage their children to look at different career paths such as those in the IT sector and sciences.
Dr Gonzi said the Government had achieved a lot despite circumstances and “(people) from within” working against it.
Turning to the current political situation, he said: “Labour is playing a game to stop us and people who are helping them should be ashamed of themselves. Labour wants us to collapse but what we are doing is in the national interest and in the interest of families,” he said to a roar of applause.
He said it was shameful that the Labour Party and others seemed to think that the priority for Malta should be car parks and not economic growth and education.
Referring to the recent minimum wage controversy, Dr Gonzi said Dr Muscat had let it slip that he would freeze the minimum wage and only later added that the cost of living allowance would still be given.
The Government, he said, was in the last weeks of the legislature before a general election. He urged people to consider what they had heard and seen over the past four-and-a-half years.
They could see how this was a government that improved education, created jobs and maintained economic stability in a sea of turbulence. It had also delivered record tourism results.
Clearly referring to rebel MP Franco Debono and former Nationalist MP Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, now an independent MP, Dr Gonzi said the Government was determined to “navigate the ship to port” and this included the next Budget.
“We are at an important point. We have navigated all the way to the end of the legislature and all that is left is the Budget which is an important one because of the challenging year ahead. The captain must take the ship to port and be ready for another voyage. The choice was clear and I am confident that truth will prevail,” he told party activists.