Opposition leader Joseph Muscat said in Parliament today that Air Malta was facing a life or death situation but he was confident that with hard work, it would manage to survive.
Speaking in parliament during the debate on a Bill to authorise emergency lending to the loss-making airline, Dr Muscat said he would not, today, make political arguments he wished to make, so as not to prolong the discussion. However, in the future, in the interests of transparency, matters which deserved to be said should be said.
Air Malta, he said, was Malta's bridge to mainland Europe. It was a tool for Malta's economic development.
He was confident that Air Malta would manage to emerge from this nightmare because Malta needed it and the people wanted it. However the long-term survival would depend on making better use of this 'tool' through better coordination of the role of the government as policy maker and owner.
History could not be forgotten or ignored. The airline was set up when some felt that the ghasafar tac-comb could not fly. Yet the airline never took a cent in subsidies.
Without Air Malta, Dr Muscat said, the Maltese economy would be very different today. Companies such as Lufthansa Technik and ST Technics could never have come to Malta.
Dr Muscat said Air Malta was not brought to its current position because of low cost airlines - the Opposition was not against low cost airlines - but the strategy adopted by the government had contributed. The issue, he said was balance.
At present, low cost airlines and practically everyone else could be assisted, except, apparently, Air Malta. More creativity was needed.
The workers, Dr Muscat said, had already made sacrifices, but this could not be said of all senior officials and their performance bonuses.
He could not understand, Dr Muscat said, how foreigners who came to Malta three weeks ago, could tell the airline which routes were viable and which were not. What had the airline's highly paid officials been doing all this time?
The Opposition, Dr Muscat said, would take up upon itself to ensure that Air Malta survived and that the government kept its word with the workers.
Now that Air Malta had been brought to the edge, the Opposition wanted solutions which lasted at least 10 years, not stop gaps. The current situation, he said, had not come suddenly but was an accunmulation of a number of mistaken decisions.
Before the last election, the prime minister had promised Air Malta workers that their jobs were safe, even when he must have been able to read the sign of the times. That promise had to be kept.
Dr Muscat said the government needed to retain control over the airline, and total privatisation would be wrong.
Replying later, Finance Minister Tonio Fenech said the airline was already taking measures to reduce its costs. He said the contracts of the Chief Officers had not been renewed.