The government’s annual budget is a short-term business plan that should reflect the implementation of a long-term strategy for the country. This administration’s perspective on well-being is continuous economic growth that gives little importance to its costs so long as it puts money in people’s pockets.
Times of Malta has often commented that while steady economic growth is essential to create jobs and improve the standard of living of families, it is the general well-being of people that matters in the end.
Well-being is about the quality of public services like healthcare, education, and efficient public transport. It is also about the quality of the air we breathe, and the ease of moving around on our roads without having to put up with constant traffic congestion. It is about protecting our fragile environment, which is ever under threat because of excessive property development, and the encroachment on the countryside.
The Nationalist Party has given another perspective on well-being in its pre-budget proposals contained in a document that makes interesting reading. The 100 proposals cover all aspects of life from how to ease the pressure on the poor to how we can protect the environment.
This document is not about defining the strategy for the well-being of society in the next decade and beyond. It is a list of action points that could ease the pressures that most people are experiencing as they try to cope with fast-changing social and economic realities. One can hardly deny that every proposal would improve the well-being of some section of society.
However, to be meaningful, these proposals must be linked to the PN’s views on the strategic direction the country should be taking to ensuresustainable economic growth without jeopardising the broader well-being of the community. Such strategic thinking should, for instance, tackle the thorny issues of how to fund incentives to protect the environment, or measures to make our health and educational systems more effective.
Our educational system, for instance, is still failing to address the low achievement levels of a significant section of the student population.
The political debate on how to address this critical issue was often reduced in the past to a partisan competition: which party would give the best laptop to secondary school students or who would most increase student stipends. The real debate should be on how to attract better educators to the profession and how to compensate them for choosing to educate our young people. One hopes that the forthcoming budget debate goes beyond comparing the tactical initiatives of the government with those proposed by the Opposition.
Most people want to know more about how their well-being is being planned for the next decade and beyond rather than what extra goodies they will be getting next year.
The PN has done well to propose measures to improve people’s lives in the short term. It now needs to do the harder work of proposing strategies that take us away from the short-term economic gain strategy that this administration is adopting.
It needs to propose strategies that, while ensuring sustainable economic growth, are underpinned by policies that make people’s lives better beyond the financial perspective.
To do this successfully, the PN needs to resist the urge to promise token benefits while ignoring long-term planning.