Opinion • 01 DECEMBER 2002

Goodbye to prudence

‘Brown kisses goodbye to prudence’ read the Independent, the London newspaper which carries the motto – The Broader View. I thought for a minute that the same title could well stand for a John Dalli teaser.

I read on: the British Chancellor, effectively the Finance minister, has opted to borrow 20 billion sterling to avoid tax rises and cuts in public services.

Mr Brown’s economic forecasts turned out to be very different from his declared targets. He blames this on the global economic slowdown.

Britain is an economic powerhouse that successfully exploits its insularity thanks to a combination of being very English and geographically isolated without eschewing EU membership.

John Dalli must be smiling: he's gone one better than Brown and has avoided borrowing. He continues to dream of zeroing the deficit. Given another three years, there is little or no doubt that he will manage to balance the budget.

His opposition refuse to believe that this is possible, the Leo Brincats and Alfred Mifsuds of this world pour scorn on Mr Dalli.

Mr Mifsud goes as far as saying that Mr Dalli has cooked the books to make the 1998 Labour fall from grace look even worse by leaving a deficit of Lm150 million.

Mr Mifsud poured scorn on the Minister of Finance's plan describing him as Harry Potter.

Yet, Mr Mifsud knows in his heart of hearts, that the silly tax regime imposed by his predecessors led to this disaster.

Yesterday’s Manwel Cuschieri was slightly more profound, emphasis on the slightly please.

The propagandist transfigured into an economics wizard quizzing Wenzu Mintoff and Joe Cilia as special guests on his talkshow.

It was Dr Mintoff who played with Mr Dalli’s choice of the word, ‘ancient Labour’ to point out that Mr Dalli was indeed Malta’s most ‘ancient’ Finance Minister since Independence.

What Dr Mintoff could not say, because political patriots are not allowed to be objective on a Lord Haw Haw radio emission, is that no matter how much we regurgitate at the Nationalist Party, the real economic boost and the transformation of this country took place after 1987. Pluralism, free market, educational reforms, empowerment, quality of life so on and so forth.

Nothing can change that fact. Apart from its obsession with the Church and a suspect aversion to divorce, the PN is far more left on the political barometer than the MLP.

The real problem is that people like Mr Cuschieri are the real Nationalists.

There is one thing that I cannot bear to hear from Manwel Cuschieri. He says, with much conviction and with that unnerving staccato voice, that the Government has drained the coffers of this country and done away with the good housekeeping of the former 1981 Labour government.

Mr Cuschieri is just around my age and if 1981 to 1987 was anything close to good housekeeping then both of us must have been living on separate planets.

Let us look at the figures, Mr Cuschieri, in 2002 foreign reserves exploded to Lm1,304 million, the Central Bank representing 841 million and the other banks the rest. In 1998, the Central Bank reserves stood at 640 million and other banks held 238 million.

Why Mr Cuschieri continues to refer to the MLP's weakest point eludes me.

The other sore point which returns with the regularity of vindaloo afterburn whenever I tune in to Super One is the question of investment. Investments in Mr Cuschieri’s eyes are the factories that take in all the unskilled girls and pay them lousy wages. Happiness is a scene from Bolero.

I cannot blame him for being shortsighted on this one. But if he cares to read through the facts he would discover that investment is not what it used to be in the good old days of Dom Mintoff, who Mr Cuschieri chooses to ignore regardless of Old Dom's copyright on that miserable experience.

No matter how much we shudder at the sight and smell of the soft spoken yuppies in their metallic and racy cars, it is they who represent the new face of economic growth and investment as they operate and produce in their new smallish companies.

The future is in companies which set off as ideas, with low capital but with an abundance of grey cells and use Malta as a base - taking advantage of the tax regimes which were introduced under the so called ‘ancient’ Finance Minister.

Europe, the other world, apart from Dom Mintoff, which Mr Cuschieri will not mention in vain, will open new avenues for this new type of investment.

European open markets, standards and culture combined with the advantages of a singular but perfectly legal regime will allow for more investment of this kind.

Obviously this does not tickle down into Mr Cuschieri’s imagination. He's all revved up in his minestrone of doomsday trigger messages and those unforgettable repetitive accusations more suitable for a Lehen is-Sewwa broadcast than a programme hosted by a party station that places itself on the left of the political spectrum.