Everybody is now clamouring for a new economic model for Malta. From the minister of finance, one of the authors under Joseph Muscat of today’s catastrophic model that has destroyed almost everything that made us Maltese, to the leader of the opposition and experts.

Normal people that make up the voting population too are beginning to wake up to the reality that we cannot continue as we are doing now.

To have a population of over 800,000 people plus the 200,000 tourists visiting each month would mean that, on every day of the year, there would be one million souls sharing our water, roads, air, countryside, beaches, seafront promenades, restaurants, museums, housing stock, sewers, rubbish collection, parking spaces and so on.

Consider that this model, if allowed to continue, would mean that, in 2040, there would be seven foreigners for each three Maltese persons living here. No wonder the youngsters want to leave.

When one considers that most of the 70 per cent of the people living in Malta would be low-paid foreign workers from countries with other languages, religions and racial backgrounds, mostly men sending home remittances from their meagre salaries, just imagine the mess this would create on our infrastructure, culture, education and health systems. This would suffocate us Maltese and kill off our language, identity and traditions.

A new model is urgently required and this model should be called ‘Malta for the Maltese’.

Yes, we should stand up and fight for our identity, environment and our democracy as we have been doing for the past 15 years, ever since the introduction of today’s model based upon tax planning, favouritism of foreign investors while punishing Maltese honest businessmen, and imported cheap labour.

A model that has been hijacked by a few businessmen who finance and bribe the politicians to allow the destruction of our towns and villages, our ever-diminishing ODZ and driven by legislation that aims to undermine all principles of fairness and is discriminatory versus the real Maltese.

Clyde Caruana has recognised his own mistakes made when he was in charge of the labour market before becoming finance minister. He knows that the mess we have today has been caused because of the greed of a few oligarchs who have bribed their way to great wealth and because of weak chinned politicians who serviced them and who gave jobs and small gifts to their neighbours’ families and friends for votes. Who has the courage needed to bring about change?

We need discipline and an iron fist on illegal buildings- John Vassallo

I think I do not see anybody around with those intentions, even though some of the new young generation of PN politicians seem to be voicing some of these ideas. Who knows when the establishment of the PN will snuff them out? Hopefully not and they will manage to convince enough of the disgruntled voters that they have a vision to return Malta to the Maltese. This is our present reality and our only hope for survival.

What will the new model look like?

First of all, it should be a long-term plan to change the system over a 10- or 15-year period. It should be strict and controlled with iron fisted discipline. It should aim to return the country to a sustainable population size and raise the level of earnings from the bottom up instead of being based upon a trickle-down economy. It should have a numerus clausus for all activities that involve people and should be discriminatory in favour of the real Maltese and exclude the passport buyers.

This new model will need courageous politicians with a clear mandate of the present voting population. I say present since, till today, the Maltese still have a majority of the voting rights. In 10 or 15 years, if we wait to change, the

Maltese will also have the minority of the votes.

We have so many examples already today in restaurants, in the Maltese contingent of the Games of the Small States of Europe – where we did not give real Maltese citizens a chance but imported peoples specially from abroad just to win gold medals – in taxis, in motorcycle food delivery drivers, in nurses at Mater Dei Hospital and in old people’s homes where the working population is almost entirely devoid of Maltese.

We need discipline and an iron fist on illegal buildings. Any breaches of the regulations going back 10 years are to be corrected not by small irrelevant fines but by evicting squatters and breaking down and destroying illegal floors and pools or removal of illegal extensions or squatting sites and even where there is a legal concession by passing laws to terminate these concessions.

We need to return nature, towns and villages back to a Maltese way of life.

We need to be able to teach our children in Maltese, to be served in restaurants in Maltese and to give a reduced but better-paying tourist numbers a Maltese experience.

John Vassallo is a former ambassador to the EU.