Editorial: What the speech left unsaid

President Myriam Spiteri Debono’s address to parliament in its opening was, by the conventions of its genre, the confident catalogue of government achievements and projected ambition. In its historic fourth, consecutive legislature, the newly returned government’s programme is undoubtedly the assurance of an administration that believes its own record.

Certainly, in terms of macroeconomic performance, that confidence is absolutely earned: subsidies on energy, expansive tax relief, social security and education coverage, and the widening of the public health system.

With one of the strongest GDP growth rates in the EU, employment at a historic high, and minimum pensions that exceed what the maximum pension was in 2012, these real numbers deserve acknowledgement.

But a presidential address is also a political vision that can choose what not to see – in this case, the omission of any serious reckoning with the costs of Malta’s economic model. Scant attention was given to the environment, quality of life, or the island’s continued transportation woes and the deleterious effects of overtourism.

At no point does this vision acknowledge that Malta’s growth model has generated a set of social and environmental pathologies that could be worsening, maybe impossible to reverse.

A case in point is housing – the measures for first-time buyers, a buyers’ charter, support for families purchasing larger homes, are responses to a crisis that the Maltese political class declines to name. Today home ownership is a far more difficult prospect, particularly for younger Maltese without parental capital behind them.

A decade of construction-led growth, fuelled by a residency and citizenship-by-investment ecosystem, has repriced the island. Nowhere in the speech is any restraint proposed on the forces that are pricing people out.

Prosperity cannot ultimately be measured only by economic output or fiscal surpluses

On the subject of “quality of life” that the speech gestures toward, Malta today reaps both the benefits and the ills of its growth – first-world problems are certainly nicer to have, the logrollers will say; but there is a daily reality of construction, road traffic, impoverished air and sea quality, endangered countryside and coastlines, and inescapable noise pollution, that no government wellbeing index will truly capture.

Overtourism is perhaps the most conspicuous omission. The codeword “high-value tourism” is newspeak that recognises Malta’s quantity-over-quality model has reached its limits. But it stops short of naming what those limits are on the ground, or how to reverse the way the Maltese social texture has been reoriented around the four-day visitor.

Understandably, Malta’s economic growth is certainly more desirable than government inertia; it has been the precondition for improved livelihoods. It is also the resource base from which a serious government today can address the distributional and environmental consequences of the growth it has generated.

But it has also weakened social and class solidarity – the ‘little rich man’ seduced by rent-seeking and its handmaiden, property development, can enjoy passive profit and income, even through a cheap, foreign workforce that lacks agency.

Little scrutiny is then reserved for the overlords and political patrons who keep investing in the ruinous over-development of the islands.

Malta may have built considerable wealth, but its citizens and fellow non-Maltese workers will also ask what that wealth is for when villages no longer feel ours, green spaces are decimated, and public spaces taken over by private profit.

Prosperity cannot ultimately be measured only by economic output or fiscal surpluses. It must also be judged by whether people feel they belong in the country they have helped build, and whether future generations inherit an island that remains liveable, affordable and recognisably their own.