While the government was boasting of having improved health and safety awareness, many workers on low pay still needed to buy their own safety clothing, Labour MP Marie-Louise Coleiro has complained in Parliament.
She was speaking during the debate on the EU Charter on Small and Medium Sized Enterprises.
Earlier in the debate, Nationalist MPs Joe Cassar and Joe Falzon had pointed out the emphasis being placed on health and safety.
Ms Coleiro said government claims of progress were not borne out by fact. The economy remained subdued and too many young people, including graduates, were desperately looking for jobs. Any profits made by shopkeepers and industrialists were going to cover rising costs and taxes.
The charter spoke about the need for education in entrepreneurship. This was also mentioned in the national minimum curriculum. But what happened to the national minimum curriculum? MUT president John Bencini must have been right to say that its implementation had fallen badly behind.
Why was it that MCAST was producing motivated students who were not being accepted by the university but were welcomed by universities in England?
On the other hand, MCAST was not even catering for all students wanting further training, even though they were well qualified to join. What was to become of such Maltese youths who wanted to advance in their chosen fields? This was fundamental to eventually having the kind of trained workforce that the government was continuously talking about.
University graduates were not finding jobs of the kind or in the quantities they had been led to expect - not even in the tourism sector which was branded as the pillar of Malta's economy.
How was it that after so many years of Nationalist administration the government was still only starting to nudge students towards scientific sectors?
Also after several years, Parliamentary Secretary Vassallo was still continuously lamenting about bureaucracy. Why had no progress been achieved? Bureaucracy was also regularly decried by the Malta Employers Association.
Mepa was just as big a culprit as Malta Enterprise; both were scaring potential investors away.
Mr Vassallo himself had spoken to The Times last week about excessive bureaucracy. No wonder Malta was in the lower end of the league of countries attracting investment.
The whole sector was also labouring under huge fiscal burdens that made businesses unable to invest or generate new business. The public's spending power was also constantly being eroded.
Also in The Times, Parliamentary Secretary Tonio Fenech had ruled out reducing the fiscal burden without a full review of alternative revenue potential.
The raising of VAT to 18 per cent had taken its own toll on prices and the people's purchasing power. This was quite apart from the obscene penalties inflicted on non-payers of VAT: they amounted to state usury.
Ms Coleiro said Maltese products saddled with so many government-induced costs had no hope of competing against cheaper imported products. Now even the old trade of Maltese filigree was facing unfair competition. True, industries needed to be proactive. And Mr Vassallo had told The Times that competition in Malta did not always work the way it did overseas. The smallness of the country itself made for small monopolies.
How proactive was the Office of Fair Competition to ensure fair competition and the best deal for the consumer?
Concluding, Ms Coleiro asked what had happened to the 10 per cent of the proceeds of the privatisation of Maltacom, that was supposed to have gone to help small and medium-sized enterprises.
David Agius (PN) said bureaucracy had a negative impact on businesses because it complicated matters unnecessarily. All service providers, including Mepa needed to be as efficient as possible. Time means money for businesses. The situation where a Mepa application takes long to be processed was unacceptable.
Mr Agius said that one must always aim to achieve quality standards, no matter how small a business was. He made reference to catering outlets, which must especially aim for high standards of hygiene.
With regard to the initiatives undertaken according to the Charter for SMEs, he said access to Internet was important, because it allowed businessmen to see what was happening in other countries and to post information about their own business.
Businesses should always be assisted because every business, no matter how small, helped the Maltese economy, he concluded.