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Interview • December 12 2004


The waiting game

From another televised interview on Int x’Tahseb?, MATTHEW VELLA picks up the highlights from Saviour Balzan’s encounter with Alfred Sant

What good news for Opposition Leader Alfred Sant… the surveys put Labour ahead of an unpopular Nationalist Party freshly bruised out of the first Gonzi budget, and what better place to be in than the Opposition, waiting for that moment to shine. For, even as Labour can only look good as Gonzi’s accident-prone Cabinet ambles into disfavour, maybe just wiping off the dandruff every now and then, and still be able to make a good impression, there are mixed feelings on what the alternative to the PN is, in a political culture jaded by disillusion.
Sant himself, although safe in the knowledge that new economic arguments may save the day, is set to face another memorable day in history. With no plans to vacate the top job at Mile End, which means he is liable to be there come the next elections, he has to face up to the fact that he has been leader since 1992, and that means that Labour’s “changing face” has been a constant Alfred Sant. His two-year stint in power came to a bitter end, with an MLP half-convinced of where it was going, an estranged salvatur ta’ Malta hooking up with his mate Karmenu to form the anti-imperialist front, and a (slightly) renewed and redeemed gung-ho Nationalist Party focused on joining the European Union.
So what changes? An economist by profession, his Harvard degree elevating him from the proletariat’s woes, Sant remains in power of a Party he actually changed, ridding it of the violent elements which fluttered around ministers and changing its image into one of relative savviness. An unrepentant critic of EU membership, even today when Labour has formally accepted the will of the people, he remains unconvinced of the arguments for EU membership.
“I’ll tell you something that has not changed throughout the years and that’s the principles and ideals of the MLP. It’s a party which is there to defend the workers, middle-class, and pensioners.
“What we did throughout the years was to adapt our political strategies and tactics and the way we present ourselves and draw up our policies to suit the changes in the political and economic circumstances as they occur in our country.
“We have made it clear that prosperity remains bound to social justice. But we also said that if the economic motor of the country is not working well, we cannot move forward. The old themes of the MLP keep being updated - on the need for prosperity and freedom, and social welfare. Even the MLP’s most recent campaign, which brought victory at the European Parliament elections – xoghol, harsien, dinjità – remains in synch with the fundamental themes of the party but adapted to the changed circumstances of the country.”
So where would Labour be if it had opted to support EU membership today? “I always took a position in favour of Europe. I always believed that the best relationship would be what we called Switzerland in the Mediterranean (later Partnership). We are not in politics just to run for power, but to enact that what we believe is true and what you believe is in the best interest of who your represent.”
The truth, and so much of it that hurt the Labour government in the mid-nineties: the prospect of economic disaster which finally came to a head only recently; its decision to repeal VAT a year into its coming into force; and to pull out of the EU membership negotiations. It certainly was a high price to pay: “Certainly it would be treason on my part if I went in front of the Maltese and Gozitan people to tell them ‘let’s get into the EU because this is a dream’ and then gain power. After 1998, it still remained our political duty to keep weighing what we believed was the best for the people we represent. To do whatever you can just to remain in power, ultimately means that the values are no longer there.”
Adamantly, even today with a Labour no longer anti-VAT or anti-EU, Sant stands his ground: “With VAT and the way it was introduced, I am one of those who remains convinced this was a bad decision. But you cannot keep on changing the same things because you create more problems. Now they are there, we have to be realistic and pragmatic according to the circumstances, and so face a policy and strategy which is devised in the interest of the employed, middle class and pensioners.
“As for the EU, we have the obligation and duty as politicians to see what we believe is in the interest of workers. But life is a moving process. You cannot change things back to start again. We did it once between 1996 and 1998, and we made good moves whatever anyone else has said. But then VAT was re-introduced and we saw that it did not make sense to go back. In the case of the EU, we made it clear that politically and economically, when you weigh the disadvantages and advantages, we saw it would not be beneficial for the worker. We made it clear that it was the elections that would decide the will of the people, whether for, or against membership.”
The 1996 victory, Sant’s first electoral stint as MLP leader, brought with it certain fears of returning the Party into power. A shocked Nationalist electorate, inebriated by the last ten years of unfettered free-marketeering, with the socialist fantasies of desserta and self-sufficiency then long gone, would stash up the rosary beads to pray for deliverance. Sant, himself the prime mover of the ‘purging’ element in the renewed, thug-less MLP, is still cautious about judging history.
“I wouldn’t say that, when it comes to violence in the ‘70s and ‘80s, there wasn’t ‘just a little bit of fault’ on the PN side, but rather a lot. Who used to place bombs in the 80s… Labour? Who used to hold provocative demonstrations…? I think there is blame to be shouldered on both sides, and one can make harsh judgement on both leaders for not having the courage to rid their parties of certain elements. Let’s be clear, this is a part of our history which we need to look at objectively. Granted that the rightist propaganda will keep on brainwashing people with a certain view: we speak differently of Raymond Caruana and Karin Grech.
“Every time I had the chance and authority as leader of the Party, I said that violence, in no circumstance, will ever be tolerated, same as for corruption. I have never seen that attitude or a statement on that from the PN.”
By 1996, Labour looked into the government’s accounts to find that the prior ten years of basking in the prosperous fast-moving Nationalist progress had cost the country much. The Nationalists, still reeling from the shock result, pooh-poohed Labour’s drastic rush to amend the sins of the forefathers, the urgency of which would partly lead to unpopularity with their economic vision at the time.
Sant reminds how members of the civil service were kept in their jobs but that “despite this symbol of national reconciliation, still kept putting spokes in the wheel”. He says he prides himself on accomplishing major projects in tourism, with the embellishment in Bugibba, “because it had become a dump, and we did the same thing with the south of Malta – Birzebbuga, Marsascala and Marsaxlokk.
“We attracted new investors, such as Accor, getting Frosh back to Malta, and tourism started taking on a new lease of life. We liberalised the casino sector, to help tourism. In manufacturing we saw that our investments were going to the dogs, but we managed to convince Dowty and De La Rue to stay in Malta. With small enterprise, we understood the need for intense work and created IPSE to offer funds, despite our financial problems, to help small enterprise and move on.”
At the same time, trouble was brewing in the Labour Party. Lino Spiteri and George Abela, essentials to the power structure within the party, called it a day as the going got tough and relationships worsened in Labour. Dom Mintoff himself, erstwhile father of Maltese self-sufficient socialism, decided to take his leader to task, making it clear enough that he found no favour with Sant. “Mintoff is known as someone who doesn’t keep back from saying what he thinks,” Sant says. “We were in the middle of an operation, and you cannot remove the anaesthetic in the middle of an operation. There was someone who wanted to mess up the way this operation was going on, and problems therefore arose.”
But did he take note of the laments of the people? “We wanted matters to move with urgency and not to sweep things under the carpet – there are those who accuse us of attempting to do too much in too short a time. But if we are not urgent in taking up these challenges we’ll be fooling the people. Maybe we were too rushed. It could be a political defect but we take the higher moral ground for it. You do it without any fear or political favour.”
Following the last budget, Sant says nothing has really changed with Gonzi’s government. Expenditure is still going up and the government is attempting to patch it up by the increase in debt and the increase in taxes, “and the reality is that we are becoming less competitive, and selling less in the sector of industry and tourism. Taxes are increasing and the economic motor is not moving. The thing which worries me most is that even the import of raw materials has decreased over last year – this means that there will be less work, less production and greater chances of unemployment and economic recession. Last year, there was no economic growth and in real terms, if it will increase, it will only grow by one per cent. Not even new investment is coming in.
“We need serious accounting which shows us the level of expenditure, and to see how we can reduce recurrent expenditure. The latter is really the money we are spending on Foundations and Authorities that have spawned over the last years. Look at the recurrent expenditure – our proposal is to reduce the spend by three per cent over three years, year by year. This means setting financial targets, liable to save us Lm60 million by the third year. Our top managers in the civil service are there to perform and they have to be the ones to decrease such spending, with a control on new recruitment, control on expenditure, cars, travel and other waste. We recently had the example of engineer Emanuel Farrugia in the question of FTS who was being paid Lm30,000 a year and an extra Lm6,000 in benefits because he is the second cousin of Louis Galea’s wife. Targets have to be met now.”
Sant disagrees that cutting down on the public sector workforce should be an option that overrides other considerations. “If government is increasing expenditure, how can we talk about decreasing workers? Take a look at what is happening now in Parliament, where a law is being piloted, naturally by Louis Galea, for the creation of an authority for archives. So we’ll create another structure like the FTS, where the Minister directs contractors as to what to do, without the CEO knowing, who then ends up paying them for work he did not approve. This is the point - before decreasing the number of civil servants, we should not increase complications.
“It’s the expenditure which has to decrease. And we need a management that devises policies and keeps financial targets. We can do it by rationalising Foundations and Authorities, or amalgamating certain entities, cutting waste, going back to a zero-based budget, and removing extra security costs for certain people.”
The latest however in Sant’s political arguments has been the question of depreciating the Maltese lira. It is an argument which few economists believe should be bandied about so liberally in the political arena. The Nationalists won’t have anything of it. Indeed, talking about depreciation and devaluation so freely risks sending a stab into the confidence of the public in the lira.
“The reality is that we are not competitive enough and we have to say the truth - the more time passes the more the people will want the truth. The majority of the people are convinced that Gonzi’s strategy will not reap anything beneficial. If we don’t become competitive we are not going to get anywhere. We need to explain things which maybe will not be understood properly at first, this is the way it happens when explaining economic policies.
“You have to have courage, and present proposals. You don’t say, true, whilst in government that you will depreciate the Lira, but you just do it, without talking about it. But we wanted to see what was happening in this government. Our depreciation proposal was based on studies conducted by esteemed economists, such as Prof. Edward Scicluna, who showed that the value of the lira had increased, and we saw that this price did not reflect the actual value of the lira. As an opposition we can suggest this proposal, as Edward Scicluna also did.
“I’m not in a popularity contest. I’m not here to be Ira Losco. I want to see the Labour Party winning the elections – even the latest surveys, although I rarely trust them, show that we are well beyond the PN. I prefer being an unpopular figure but gain victory for the MLP. The work of the leader is to keep the Party ready for an electoral victory based on its principles and beliefs, and to ensure the Party is ready to be in government, and take decisions in the best interest of the people.”

The interview will be broadcast on Smash TV next Tuesday at 10pm

 

 

 

 





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