Opposition leader Simon Busuttil said this morning that the government was on an orgy of nepotism and vote-buying as the general election approached.
Speaking at the PN club in Dingli, Dr Busuttil also accused the government of letting Air Malta go to waste, adding that the country would be at a loss without it.
Dr Busuttil said the Labour administration had underestimated the airline’s situation and the difficulty of solving it.
The Sunday Times of Malta today reports how an internal report warns that unions’ “power game” could destroy the ailing airline. The report claims unions pose “the single biggest risk” to Air Malta.
“Union behaviour and power game will bring Air Malta down in the very near future,” the government, as the airline’s major shareholder, is told in the report.
The business is threatened by “the very high level of strike willingness for almost every small change, to protect the power of the unions involved”.
The report was prepared by top management and forms the basis of the government’s negotiating position in its bid to settle outstanding collective agreements with various sectors of the airline’s employees.
Reacting to this, Dr Busuttil said the government was trying to blame unions for its failure to secure the airline’s future.
The PN, he said, was the only hope for Air Malta, and he promised to secure its future once elected.
“If Air Malta stops operating, our island country loses an important connection to the rest of the world. If that happens, our economy suffers,” Dr Busuttil said, adding that we could not hedge our bets on low cost airlines.
Financial surplus
Dr Busuttil also weighed in on the government’s recent boasts of a financial surplus, saying this was the result of a halving of spending on capital projects.
He lambasted the government for letting public projects simmer on the backburner. Public spaces, roadworks, and schools were just a few of the areas that the government had let slide.
The surplus, he said, had been achieved at the people's expense. The surplus should have been achieved by ending squandering, such as on people on positions trust, rather than by reducing spending on what the people needed.
He said that as the general election approach, the government was in an orgy of nepotism, an orgy of vote-buying.
He referred to reports that some people had more than one ID card and more than one vote, and said this was an example how the government would try anything to hold on to power, something which the PN would not allow.
Minimum wage
Dr Busuttil said inflation, but not the minimum wage, had risen under the present government.
He called on the social partners to discuss and reach agreement on how the minimum wage could be responsibly raised. The PN, he said, would back such an agreement and support it when in government.
Earlier in his speech Dr Busuttil also referred to the EPP Congress hosted in Malta by the Nationalist Party, saying the PN had made Malta proud.
Muscat denies surplus achieved with drop in capital spending
Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, speaking this morning, shot down Simon Busuttil’s criticism that the surplus was achieved because capital expenditure was slashed.
Dr Muscat said capital expenditure last year was brought back down to normal levels after an extraordinary increase the previous year when EU programmes were coming to an end.
The Prime Minister said capital expenditure in 2012, the last year of a PN administration, was almost at par with 2016 and yet the government then had registered a record deficit of more than €300 million.
“With a similar expenditure last year we registered a surplus… this is the difference between us,” Dr Muscat said, adding that even a university student starting a career in economics would have read the numbers better than Dr Busuttil.
Dr Muscat said the choice was between continuing down the road of success or stop half way and lose all that has been achieved.