While the Labour Party has been coming up with proposals highlighting the direction in which it wants to take the country, the Nationalist Party criticised but failed to come up with alternatives, Labour leader Joseph Muscat said this evening.
Dr Muscat was addressing an activity in Paola’s main square.
He said that the Labour Party had learnt from its mistakes, it listened to and heard the people, it transformed itself and spent the past five works working so that it could now face the people and present them with the changes it wanted to propose.
Throughout the campaign Labour had not been at all negative but only attacks and criticism was forthcoming from the government.
Dr Muscat said the PL knew there were problems which it was committed to solve. The PN criticised but failed to present alternatives, he said.
Dr Muscat referred to S&P’s downgrading of Malta. The agency, he said cited government debt as one of the reasons. It also mentioned Enemalta warning that unless things were changed the company would go bankrupt.
Dr Muscat said that the only way the jobs of Enemalta employees could be saved was through Labour’s plan.
S&P also mentioned the low female participation rate. Labour, Dr Muscat said, wanted to address this problem in the most aggressive manner to avoid a major problem with pensions.
Dr Muscat said that the Prime Minister opted to blame Labour for S&P’s report on the country. But the people were realising this was a desperate act by those who wanted to hang on to power.
Dr Muscat stressed the importance of unity saying there could not remain a tribal mentality in the country.
“We have to be one people, a united country. This may be hard to take by those who have been suffering for 25 years but I am not interested in administering a government system which has divided the country… We have to work together. Injustices have to be rectified without new ones being made,” he said.
He referred to the government’s claims that there were no studies that linked power stations with cancer and said these offended the people’s common sense.
Unlike other, Labour did not see people as numbers but as individuals.