This country is doing well. The economy is booming, attracting investment and creating jobs. As we have proven ourselves able to cope with our European membership, investment is pouring in, our social structures are developing in a manner that is sensitive to the needs of everyone in our country, effective measures are being taken to address the major environment issues, our health care has risen to very high levels ...
Do we need to scrap all this and start afresh? Does this country need a new beginning as Labour is proposing?
It does not.

European Union
Our EU membership has plugged us into a political, social and economic system of high quality and which has given the foundation to modernise and upgrade our systems and to set our standards to levels that push us to the forefront of successful countries. What does a new beginning mean in this context?
Labour has stated that they will be reopening negotiations with the European Union. Even when EU officials stated that this will not be done, Labour, in its inimitable style, keep insisting on this stance – driving themselves into a wall. Such a “new beginning” can only mean instability as Maltese and foreigners become unsure of the future as it also opens the spectre of the Labour leader’s latent antagonism to Malta’s membership in the EU.
This stalls down all the measures that we currently have in progress to develop this country in so many fields – economic, social, environment, infrastructure, etc. This dampens the push for reform in our institutions and economic entities and gives confidence to those who are anti-change and who prefer to wallow in the status quo. This freezes investment, as no one, local or foreign, will risk money in a situation which has even a low degree of uncertainty of what the future holds.
(Let us remember that in the 22 months that a Labour Government governed Malta, when the same Labour leader and team froze Malta’s application to the European Union, investments had totally tried up, creating unemployment and instigating an economic stagnation and financial disaster).

Labour backward focus
Labour’s policies are once again very retrograde in concept and non-defined in execution. The infamous reception (repetition) class is reminiscent of the old-fashioned socialist credo of levelling everyone downwards. The effect is a one-year parking of all Maltese children in the education system, overcrowding in our schools and a reduction of a full year entry in our labour force.
This is counter-indicated on both the personal level vis-à-vis the children that will have their development stultified and the national level vis-à-vis the economic effect of reduced productivity and the increased costs to finance this unnecessary expense.
The halving of the electricity surcharge will only motivate consumption of an expensive resource which needs to be imported and will not result in any improvement in productivity. The mechanics of this measure are again cloudy to say the least, as Labour’s leader keeps rehashing the implementation criteria on a day to day basis to reply to criticism or to adjust to opinion poll results. What is more worrying is the fact that such tinkering often contradicts with previous declarations.
This is reminiscent to the fiasco of the VAT change which was promised before the 1996 election and which was implemented in such a disastrous way.

A quality leap
This country does not need Labour to start anew
This country needs another Nationalist administration to continue with the process of gradual change that we have been going through over the past years. We need to focus on quality and make the leap in our conscious and subconscious to put quality as the superstructure within which we operate in all areas.
Quality is assessing and establishing what we are doing well and see how we can perform better by establishing what we need to change to ensure we meet the aspirations of our people. Quality is about having the right vision and knowing the objectives and how to achieve them, learning from past experience and use this knowledge to develop our organisation and its services to achieve continuous improvement so that we achieve a high level of satisfaction amongst the people even if they come from different groups.
Quality is change. The Nationalist Party is the party of change. It is the only party that guarantees the sensible change for the better on which our quality leap is to be based.

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