Prime Minister Robert Abela on Sunday said the easing of COVID-19 restriction measures was fast approaching but the government was seeking to strike the right balance not to undermine all the sacrifices made so far.
The key to managing this process, Abela said, was finding the ‘Goldilocks’ period which means not easing off the measures too soon while also not waiting too long either.
Instead the government wanted to find an approach that was 'just right'.
“We need to find the right time, and this will impact the way we will have managed the entire pandemic once this is all over,” he said.
In a separate statement, Deputy Prime minister Chris Fearne said that no new cases had been recorded in the past 24 hours.
In an interview on the Labour Party’s media outlets, Abela said that as numbers of new cases continued to drop, the public were now asking “what next?”.
While the return to "full normality" enjoyed before the outbreak began will not happen for a long time, Abela said, the country was getting close to easing some of the restrictions and entering into "a new type of normality".
This, however did not mean the public could go out in the streets and celebrate the end of the outbreak.
“If we do that, we will undo all the hard work and sacrifices made so far,” he said.
It also meant that major restrictions such as the closure of the airport would remain in force for the time being.
Abela said that in his opinion, just as the country was being assessed on the way it managed the health aspect of the outbreak, it would also be assessed on the way it stimulated the economic recovery.
'Passport scheme helped fund COVID-19 war chest'
The prime minister said the controversial passports scheme was key to the country’s handling of the crisis. If Malta did not have the funds raised through the citizenship program, he said, then it would not have had the comfortable financial ‘war chest’ which was helping to finance aid for families and businesses.
Malta's IIP scheme allows wealthy investors to purchase Maltese citizenship, and with it access to the European Union.
The European Commission has repeatedly said that it dislikes such schemes, which exist in a number of member states, and last week EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders said that Brussels had written to Malta, Bulgaria and Cyprus to urge them to “phase out” their citizenship schemes.
On Sunday Abela said the government was engaging in dialogue with the Commission over the matter, but stopping the scheme was not on the government’s agenda.
The prime minister segued from this issue to the controversial topic of migration, saying that while the EU was seeking to interfere in a member state competence of citizenship, it was shirking its responsibility when it came to managing the migration crisis.
“This problem of migration is meant to be something that the entire EU deals with collectively, but it is being left to states like Malta and Italy to deal with alone,” he said.
The prime minister also weighed in on ongoing magisterial inquiries into Malta’s decision to close off its ports to migrant disembarkation, and the possible loss of life that could have resulted from the decision.
Abela insisted the government had not only met its responsibilities when it comes to saving lives at sea, but gone over and above what it was required to do.
He accused the Opposition and of a civil society group behind the criminal inquiries of trying to undermine the national effort to contain the COVID-19 outbreak.
At a time when the whole country was focused on the national interest, he said, there were some who were trying to play politics - the country would not forget this, he warned.
During his interview, he also spoke briefly about the government’s announcement that it had started the process to select a new police commissioner. He hoped the Opposition would come to an agreement with the government to help find a police chief who truly embodied the principles of the rule of law.