The next Budget will again include tax refunds as part of a system introduced in 2017 as part of a Labour Party electoral pledge, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said on Sunday.
Speaking on ONE news, Dr Muscat said that the government intended to continue decreasing income tax through the handing out of refunds.
The initiative was another electoral pledge that was being rolled out gradually every with the maximum amounts to be received at the end. Those with the lowest income would receive the biggest amounts, Dr Muscat said, insisting that the government always looked out for the most vulnerable in society.
To be in a position to do so, the Prime Minister said, the government needed to actively work on making the economy stronger, insisting that his visit to Japan earlier in the week was an example of this.
“They can call me a salesman if they want but that will not impact me. That is my job,” he said, noting that apart from exporting tuna to the Asian island, the government was also looking at the possibility of exporting other goods, including pork and potatoes.
Acknowledging the fact that while he was in Japan promoting the sale of tuna, Malta’s beaches were once again full of slime as a result of food escaping from fish pens, Dr Muscat said that he had informed the operators that while he wanted them to succeed in exporting tuna, the government would ban them from feeding the fish if they did not take all the necessary precautions.
“While we help them sell, we also take action and if there isn’t the equipment to stop the slime, we will not allow feeding,” the Prime Minister iterated.
On poverty, Dr Muscat that statistics issued this week showed that the government’s policies were indeed working and while figures on the poor always “saddened” him, the fact that poverty rates had been slashed needed to be acknowledged.
“We managed to rope back in practically all the people who were on the doorstep of poverty. There is always more to be done but we would not be acknowledging the truth if we were to ignore these facts,” Dr Muscat said, pointing out that in the past the Opposition had insisted that the issue was only a perception in the Labour Party’s head.
On the Fitch Ratings report, issued on Friday, Dr Muscat said investors relied on such reports and often followed the conclusions by such agencies and not the government.
“Our economy is regarded as one of the strongest. We are one of the few countries who have no natural resources and yet still register a surplus. This allows us to create more jobs,” Dr Muscat said, making, however, no reference to a similar report by another credit agency, Standard and Poors (S&P), also issued this week.
In its report, S&P highlighted increased reputational and operational risks for Malta’s banking sector, moving its risk score up two notches on its 10-point scale.
Shifting the focus on the Egrant inquiry, Dr Muscat criticised Opposition leader Adrian Delia for not suspending former leader Simon Busuttil, accusing him and the Nationalist Party of “taking onboard a lie fabricated by the former leader”.
“Once again, Simon Busuttil is the de facto leader and I congratulate him. They have decided to support him and so Adrian Delia and the rest of the party have made the lie their own. They had the option to have the person who invented the lie carry the weight of this but instead they have decided to burden themselves with it as well.
“With what he said last April, the aim was to break down the economy and bring me down but in reality, that was the smallest problem. The people would have been the ones who suffered. To this day, I’m still astonished that he has not yet discussed the problem.”