Alex Borg is a fact-checker’s treasure trove

Opposition leader Alex Borg is a fact-checker’s dream come true. The Nationalist Party leader has no tract with Mark Twain’s adage “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please”. Instead, he just throws out statements with not even a cursory attempt at distortion. He simply invents “facts”.

Take for, instance, his claim in his budget replica that the number of tenants has doubled as Maltese people cannot afford to buy a property anymore. He stated that from 78% in 2021, the home ownership rate is now 66%. That would mean that out of six people who were homeowners in 2021, we now have just five. A mind-blowing fact… if it were true. Of course, nothing of the sort happened. A complete misreading of statistics, conflating the rise in the foreign population who rent their property with trends among young Maltese.

National Statistics Office (NSO) data show that the proportion of Maltese who rented their property was 14.5% in 2021 and it dropped to 13.6%. Rather than collapsing, the proportion of Maltese who own their property rose from 80.7% to 82.1%. Last year alone, there were 11,582 properties bought in Malta, an average of 32 properties per day, or more than one property sold every hour. Earlier, Borg had claimed that, each year, there are 550 first-time buyers, when the government paid the first-time buyer grant annually to five times as many people.  

COLA miscalculations

Then, we had Borg’s claim that the COLA is calculated according to an old formula based on bare necessities as bought 15 years ago and not the actual goods and services consumed by families today. Hogwash. COLA is calculated on the basis of the Household Budgetary Survey (HBS), the most extensive statistical exercise in our country except for the Census of the Population. At the end of this month, the NSO will be finalising the most recent HBS, which has involved monitoring the daily consumption of 7,000 families.

This exercise, carried out according to the most complex international statistical methodologies, is not just verified by Eurostat but is monitored by the Retail Price Index Advisory Committee. Every month, these representatives of unions, employers and university academics pore over the calculations of government statisticians. On top of this, you have the Central Bank of Malta, and the European Central Bank, keeping tabs on them.

Fact-checking the leader of the opposition is truly a delight, with hardly a sentence failing to disappoint- Alex Muscat

Moreover, besides the standard COLA, half of the families in Malta these days also benefit from the second COLA wholly paid by the government. This benefit uses data from the HBS to focus on price changes in the most essential items, particularly those consumed by pensioners, and awards an additional top-up.

So let us take the typical pensioner. He gets the normal COLA, an increase over and above that in his pension and, then, the additional COLA (a payment that can range from €200 to €1,500).

Unjust economy?

Another gem from Borg’s budget replica was that we have an unjust economy because so few of us can afford a holiday abroad. I am starting to suspect that the NSO must be out to get him. Just two days after he said this, they issued a press release stating that, between July and September, 270,635 Maltese residents went abroad (only 16,046 on business).

They spent nearly 2.1 million nights out of the country, or an average of eight nights, and their average expenditure was €1,125. If you look at how many Maltese residents travelled in the first nine months of the year, the total was 661,026 persons. This is about 87,000 more than the whole population on the islands, which means that, in the first nine months of the year, there were people who not just went abroad once but went twice.

And do not pin it just on the young. There were 60,642 Maltese 65+ who have already had a holiday abroad by September. Yes, those poor guys who, according to Borg, can barely afford half a loaf of Maltese bread. Around half of our pensioners have already spent a lot of their “paltry” pension abroad. In fact, NSO data show that the fastest growing Maltese tourist age group is the 65+, rising by a sixth this year.  

Our poor pensioners, besides their half loaf, were also not given any cut in taxes, stated Borg. Could it perchance be because, since 2017, pensioners do not pay any tax on pension income? Maybe he did not know this as it was before his election to parliament. But, wait, on page 30 of the budget speech you read that, if pensioners earn other income the equivalent of twice the maximum pension, they also now get to not pay tax on that. Surely, that counts as a tax cut.

Fact-checking the leader of the opposition is truly a delight, with hardly a sentence failing to disappoint.

A

Alex Muscat is a Labour MP.