Thanks to the Nationalist government, Malta has a state-of-the-art hospital offering the fifth best health services in the world, an impressive international airport that has been classified as the fourth overall best airport in Europe (Airport Service Quality Survey 2009) and, according to a new OECD survey, 82 per cent of Maltese households now have a high speed internet connection placing Malta third in the world, behind Iceland at 86.7 per cent and Korea at 95.9 per cent. We are leaders in many other fields as our workers are excelling in every sector.
We have managed to strengthen our economy in spite of the international financial crisis. Unfortunately, in this fast-moving day and age we tend to take everything for granted, hardly appreciating the giant steps this tiny island has made.
Tourism, one of the major pillars of our economy, is back on track. To quote the president of the Malta Hotels and Restaurants Association, George Micallef: “The results achieved for the first six months of the year are indeed encouraging and in terms of tourist arrivals we are doing better than most of our competitors. These results confirm that the government did well to decide in favour of investing more money for the introduction of new routes and to increase seat capacity. This decision has paid off and the economy is reaping an immediate and handsome return (August 4). The MHRA went further on September 15: “Malta’s tourism arrivals are practically back to the records established in 2008, thanks to wise decisions taken early this year by the government to invest further in the industry and increase seat capacity and routes.” Have we ever stopped to think how tourism would have fared without the introduction of low-cost airlines?
Thanks to the Nationalist government’s wise decision to join the European Union, Malta will have received a staggering €1.3 billion in EU funds by 2014. In fact, according to the Public Consultation Parliamentary Secretary, Malta managed to use the entire amount of EU structural funds allocated to it in the 2004-2006 period along with an additional €1.3 million coming from the European Regional Development Fund, used over these past five years, to finance infrastructural improvements, as in resurfaced roads, engineered landfills, recycling and sewage treatment plants.
We are also benefiting from EU education and training programmes offered exclusively to member states. I dread to think how we would have coped without so many professional personnel who, apart from graduating from University, the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology and the Institute of Tourism Studies, grabbed a myriad of opportunities to further their academic development abroad.
Lying poles apart from the Nationalist Party, new Labour was vehemently against EU membership and old Labour had lambas-ted anything technological. New Labour had strongly criticised the introduction of low-cost airlines and old Labour the building of the Delimara power station, the three Gozo ferries and Mater Dei Hopstial, which it labelled a white elephant. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to imagine the mess we would be in if we didn’t have any of them!
If we were a Switzerland in the Mediterranean, if our workers were mediocre and if our communications and technology systems were lagging behind the rest of the digital world, would investors risk their money in Malta? To quote the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Communications: ”I always believed in Malta and my government’s policies have helped unleash our true potential. I consider this latest leap in broadband take-up to be yet one more sign that Malta is a truly inclusive society and provides the ideal environment for investment and initiative” (timesofmalta.com, September 6).
Unfortunately, there is a downside to all this progress: The more tourists, the more strain on our infrastructure; the better the health services, the longer the waiting lists; the more frequent crossings between the islands, the worse the queues. Commuters are steadily on the increase and I suspect that before long we will have to build a couple more ferries. Our roads are constantly undergoing a makeover and, yet, as time goes by the more inadequate they seem to be to meet the ever increasing demand. We definitely have too many cars on the island and I often joke that, perhaps, former Labour Prime Minister Dom Mintoff was right to introduce quotas on car importation.
They say that time waits for no man and unless we continue fine-tuning what we already possess we will falter. The power station extension furore springs to mind. Consumers demand to have adequate energy supply at all times as does the industrial sector. It is useless bickering over how and who. It is the government’s responsibility to take decisions and not the opposition’s and, unless the latter has viable proposals other than those that will inevitably treble our energy bills, I suggest it zips up.
For our childrens’ sake we must, all together, leave our country in a better condition than we inherited it.
Thus, the Marsa plant needs to be decommissioned as soon as possible, the Delimara power station extension must be completed by the end of next year and the earlier we have the interonnector with the Euopean mainland in place the better. Although the mentality to instal solar panels, photovoltaic panels, etc. is growing, I have a horrible feeling that reaching the optimum balance between generating enough energy supply to meet the ever increasing demand and protecting our environment will be one of the hardest challenges we have yet to overcome.