Malta needs a new economic model which should start by placing a numerus clausus for incoming tourists at one million a year by 2033. We need to reduce the present number by 100,000 each year for the next 10 years.
Any hotel that is below three stars and all Airbnb in Valletta and villages should be forbidden, allowing only Airbnb in Paceville and St Paul’s Bay. We should stop giving any work permit or residence permit to people coming here from outside the EU and repeal existing permits by 10,000 each year to bring the present over 120,000 foreign workers down to 20,000 by 2033.
We should make it obligatory for all employees dealing with people – such as those in hospitality, healthcare, education, transport and public offices – to be fluent Maltese speakers.
Our public schools should teach in Maltese irrespective of whether a number of children cannot speak Maltese. France, Sweden, Germany and England do not teach in another language but force incomers to learn or stay away.
The minimum wage should be raised from the miserable €4 an hour over a 10-year period by €1 an hour each year until it reaches the EU standard of €14 or €15 by 2033.
Businesses that depend on low wages or below the minimum wage to survive should not survive. They need to be replaced by other types of industries that can pay normal wages. This would mean less jobs for cheap labour but better jobs for the Maltese who would then decide to stay here and not emigrate.
Building should be reduced by strictly applying the planning permits issued and by enforcing – at the cost to the builders and so-called developers – the return to the status quo ante of all buildings that have broken building rules over the past 10 years.
Extra floors should be broken down, the illegal extensions of pools or houses demolished and beach concessions returned to the public who should have access to all shorelines without exception.
As the population reduces and construction works also reduce and maybe revert to restoring old and existing Maltese houses in the towns and villages instead, excess cars and large trucks can be sold off to African and Asian countries for which there is a thriving market.
The Maltese environment belongs to the Maltese not to the developers. No more high-rise buildings and strict height limitations for buildings in villages and town cores. No new Mrieħel monstrosities and no more vanishing church domes and spires behind chicken coop blocks of flats.
All unexplained wealth has to be examined under a microscope, if need be by experts called in from abroad, experts who are not family, or partners in crime or afraid of retribution by the tax evaders and illegal builders.
The environment belongs to the Maltese not to the developers- John Vassallo
The tax system is to be revised to make all taxpayers in Malta, whether companies or individuals, to pay the same percentage of tax on their world income as their Maltese competitors and co-residents here.
This includes foreign-owned companies that remit their dividends abroad – no tax refund – and Maltese passport buyers during their one-year obligatory residence period whether this should have taken place in 2013 or 2018 or 2023.
They should be charged retroactively the same 25 per cent tax on their world incomes wherever they are and if they do not pay we should seize any property or assets they may have within Malta or in countries where we have legal access to.
Maltese businessmen should not have to compete with foreign companies which pay only five per cent of tax. Neither should companies owned by one person only pay income tax on corporate earnings but have their salaries or costs covered by the company and, therefore, have tax-free income from their owned companies.
Companies and their owners are separate legal persons and corporate tax does not absolve the owner from also paying tax once more on what he is given as salary or dividend by his own company.
The list of the new model can go on and on but what is essential is that, during this upheaval and change, the government of the day has to bring in new types of businesses to Malta that will be less labour intensive, better paying and environmentally sustainable to provide salaries and jobs to the population of the island that, by 2033, would number 400,000 once more plus the 100,000 visitors here each day.
If we do not do this without delay, there will be no Malta left. Only a rocky outcrop in the middle of the Mediterranean where cheap tattooed loud tourists damage Valletta with their music, eat lousy food and overcrowd our seafront promenades with their scooters.
Our already fragile infrastructure will soon fall apart at the seams.
Finally, all cases of cheating, bribery, nepotism, fraud and stealing of national services has to be investigated and brought to justice as with tax evasion.
John Vassallo is a former ambassador to the EU.