Editorial | Sunday, 04 January 2009

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Fasten your seatbelts

As the New Year has started to unfold and the festive season is slowly being forgotten, the daily realities of a hard year will be hitting us all in the face. The bills, the fines, the loans, the lay-offs, the mortgages, and the dwindling tourism figures will be soon making regular headlines. The global financial crisis, albeit so far somehow cushioned, will reach us too, in various forms, and attack the core of our economy and social fabric.
Some festive inebriation still lingering in the air may make it not immediately clear to all, but it will soon be visible and tangible, and the effects of its devastation palpable, like that of a hurricane.
We believe this international doom and gloom can also be turned into an opportunity to reinvent ourselves at a time when some of the strongest economies are crumbling and gigantic multinationals are hanging by a thread thanks to multi-million government bail outs.
Our biggest national challenges in the year ahead will be spread across the property market, tourism, and energy sectors. Like all nations we also face global warming, putting sustainability and environment protection as another immediate priority which, left untackled, will spell global disaster.
Yet this ongoing crisis is also a cautionary tale to all the blinded optimists of unfettered market capitalism, that nothing in our social, political and economic world is etched in stone. Fierce market liberals have come to realise that ideological capitalism devoid of common sense, pragmatic regulation with a sustainable and humanist perspective, is doomed to self-destruction. They are now all clamouring for government intervention.
The property market on our island is a case in point, calling for creative policies and tailor-made regulation that keeps in mind the full picture. It means putting high on the equation the fact that land is at a premium, that there is over-supply, that there is an effective price freeze and that the realisation that property speculation is different from sustainable development.
Tourism is another front where we will sustain heavy casualties, unless we quickly reinvent ourselves on the international stage. What we need here is the inventiveness and perseverance in rethinking our national tourism policy and making sure to implement it consistently. The number of tourists travelling out of their countries will inevitably fall down globally, but surely the island with the oldest free-standing temples in the world can repackage itself for the discerning tourists and the niches that enhance its character without depleting environmental resources.
These are times when we should all go back to the drawing board – government foremost - and rethink the areas in need of policy making. In a sense it is a great opportunity to put environmental sustainability at the essence of every public policy that matters.
We also note that, sadly, the financial crisis has had no effect on the extent of wars and conflicts in the world. The year has started with the world witnessing the tragic aggression of Israel against the Palestinian people in a brutally cold overreaction and widespread massacre. Here too, Malta has to reinvent itself as an assertive actor on the world stage, in the same way it engraved the common heritage of mankind on the environmental front in the past. It is all too facile to dismiss the possibility of contributing in world affairs and keep looking short-sightedly at the immigration problem, while the bigger picture keeps clamouring for world attention with conflicts spreading all over the globe. The political rhetoric from the Yes camp prior to joining the EU used to repeat that once we join, we will be on a respectable seat around the European political table. Now that we’re in, let’s start believing it.

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