Labour leader Joseph Muscat last week had an opportunity of correcting the bad impression he gave in his reply to the Budget speech but, for reasons that are somewhat hard to accept, he chose not to take it. As the newspapers remarked, for the first time in recent history, the Leader of the Opposition did not speak during the debate on the ministry he directly shadows, that is, the Office of the Prime Minister. This was the best possible occasion for him to react to the strong criticism levelled at him for the poor reply he had given to the Budget but he failed to live up to general expectations, leaving political observers wondering what it was that led him to miss such a golden opportunity.

In an apparent damage limitation move, a spokesman for his party explained that, given that the time allocated for the Budget debate was limited, Dr Muscat's two-hour speech the week before was sufficient. What strange reasoning! And, the party spokesman added, the Opposition Leader had a very well-prepared team who could speak on the various sectors of the Office of the Prime Minister. There is no doubt about this but for an Opposition Leader to miss replying directly, in Parliament, to the Prime Minister on matters of his ministry, is most unusual and politically significant.

As expected, the Nationalists lost no time in describing Dr Muscat's move as "abdication of responsibility". The problem for Dr Muscat, and for his party, was that he was far too negative in his reply to the Budget speech. Maybe the real reason for the Labour leader's decision not to take part in the debate on the Prime Minister's ministry was, therefore, the generally favourable reaction given to the Budget by the social partners.

In his reply to the Budget speech, Dr Muscat had concentrated too much on "broken promises". Not that promises, whenever they are made, ought to be broken but the Labour leader surely knows that no political party, in Malta or practically anywhere else in the world, manages to honour all the promises it makes at election time or, even, in a Budget. Labour is no exception, as past experience shows only too well. Yet, election after election, political parties, of whatever belief, keep rolling out an endless number of promises, thinking, wrongly, that voters have a short memory. Can Dr Muscat give a guarantee that, if his party is elected in the next general election, his party will honour all the promises it will be making?

Also, his criticism that the government could not be believed when its economic projections for this year had all gone so drastically wrong, suggests that the Labour leader is blissfully unaware of the economic turbulence that hit so many countries in the wake of the credit crunch and economic slowdown.

Malta's government, as well as banking and financial authorities, were far from being the only ones that failed to meet the economic projections. In an ever growing globalised environment, no country is foolproof to economic turbulence in the major economies, which is why Dr Muscat came across as not being objective, or not objective enough, in his criticism of the Budget. Had he taken up the opportunity to speak in the debate on the Office of the Prime Minister, the Labour leader could have taken a more credible direction and given a more serious contribution than that he offered in reply to the Budget speech.