A recent report by the Italian institute of statistics gave a very sombre view of the financial situation of Italian families. A very large majority of them find difficulty in getting to the end of the month with their salary.

Nearly 15 per cent of families manage to make ends meet with a great deal of difficulty. Just fewer than 30 per cent claim that they cannot afford any expenditure that was not pre-planned. Two-thirds of Italian families claim that they do not manage to save anything. It was claimed that such families only manage to make ends meet by working part time and probably doing work in the informal economy.

The increased family expenditure resulting from higher prices for fuel products, that impact on their electricity and heating bills and on their transport bills, only make matters worse.

The new Minister of Finance is considering the taxation of supernormal profits of certain companies (oil companies were mentioned as an example) to be able to fund further support to families. The governor of the Central Bank of Italy has asked that government increase the retirement age and reduce taxation to inject more money into the economy.

The connection between the situation in Italy and that in Malta lies in the declared policy of sustainability and the need to achieve a balance between environmental, social and economic considerations to attain this sustainability.

It has been mooted that to attain sustainability we would need to make some trade-offs, however to attain sustainability, we do not need to go through the same experience that Italy is going through.

Sustainability does not mean that large swathes of the population have to accept to reduce drastically their standard of living. Sustainability does not mean allocating less resources but making a different allocation of the scarce resources. It means making hard choices, but not choices that cause hardship.

This is where the issue of strong governance becomes critical. If we allow market forces to play havoc with our economy, we could go through the type of experience that Italy and other European countries are going through. With strong governance, we could safeguard ourselves from such an experience. Strong governance would mean strong action on the part of the public service and the wider public sector to eliminate waste. The public sector needs to ensure that every euro it spends is justified through the achievement of some sort of benefit.

The public sector must understand that every euro that goes wasted has been taken away from more investment in education, health, wealth creation and social welfare.

Linked to this argument is the need to ensure that public sector revenue is fully protected. Thus the war on tax evasion has to be strengthened, such that all possible tax revenues are collected. Moreover, any public entity that is a net contributor (or has the potential to become one) to the government coffers, must make sure that, just because its revenue is greater than its expenditure, then it cannot spend whatever it wants. Maximising revenue is essential to sustainability as much as eliminating waste.

We also need to strengthen our war on benefit fraud, because even this sucks away millions from benefits that could be paid to more needy families.

We need to strengthen our efforts to ensure that competition laws are truly being applied in this country. There is indeed recognition that fuel prices and food prices have risen dramatically on the international market; but are we so sure that we do not have anyone abusing from a dominant position in the market?

Then there is the crusade against speculators of all kinds. This is why strong governance is needed.

When we speak of strong governance, one should not just mean the government, as represented by its ministers. We should mean rather all those that have some form of responsibility in the corporate governance of public administration, including government-controlled entities.

It is only through such strong governance that there can be acceptance of the hard choices that need to be made in order to attain sustainability.

I strongly believe that we can weather the storm because time and time again, our economy has proved to be very resilient to negative developments in the international economy.

On the other hand, allowing waste, allowing fraud and allowing mismanagement would only mean that the many have to carry the burden for the benefit of the few.