I recently had a coffee with an old friend of mine. It was a farewell coffee because, after 15 years, she is effectively packing up her life and “going back to her country”. She met her partner here, had a child here and built a home here but, in her own words, she can no longer stay.
Her rent has climbed and climbed; she is exhausted from relocating from one town or village to another every few years. One landlord even told her to her face that her little family wasn’t the problem: he just could get more bang for his buck by letting his property to 10 people instead of three.
The final straw came a few months ago when she went to the supermarket and had to remove things from her trolley because the bill amounted to an astronomically high total. She went home, cried, drew a bath, waited for her partner to come home and told him the Maltese dream was over for her.
I was sad but not surprised; it’s not like I’m not also at the supermarket wondering when butter started to cost as much as gold.
In every single sector, prices have gone up, and what makes it worse is that our wages are simply not making up for it. At first, I thought it was perhaps merely my perception but, last week, this same newspaper quoted a new report by accounting giants KPMG that showed that wage increases over the last couple of years have been completely absorbed by rapid inflation.
This rising cost of living has left people with a lot less purchasing power. The accounting firm also found that the prices of food and non-alcoholic beverages had had the highest uptick, increasing by almost 10 per cent.
Even when it comes to housing, it’s a similar story. More and more single people are being forced to reside with their parents thanks to the fact that the loans they’re able to secure from our banks are nowhere near what is needed to buy a one-bedroom apartment in the middle of nowhere, and many couples have been completely priced out of buying houses and are struggling to find somewhere to live.
In every single sector, prices have gone up, and what makes it worse is that our wages are simply not making up for it- Anna Marie Galea
This, in turn, is leading to the trend of older families tearing down their own homes and building blocks of flats so that their offspring can have somewhere to live. And let’s not even get started about rising rent costs and landlords reportedly not wanting to rent to locals who are harder to exploit. It’s become a dire situation on all fronts, and, as expected, homelessness is sadly also on the rise. While the YMCA had 367 referrals in 2022, it had a total of 512 referrals in 2023. It’s hard to look at these numbers and not feel concerned about the future.
Instead of using their time to participate in petty sparring wars with each other and asking for apologies every other day of the week, the government and the opposition need to come up with feasible, concrete plans for the country’s future.
We have thousands of unoccupied chicken coops masquerading as apartments that could be subsidised. We could also continue to standardise food and drink prices instead of allowing our businesses to play tombola with the pricing.
Less bickering, more doing, please.