How we approach this issue and how we frame and understand it is important. Not just for how we read the situation, but crucially for how we attempt to resolve it.
Over the past few months, there has been much loose talk and not a little debate as to whether Malta is ‘overpopulated’. This has been significantly fuelled by the prediction that if current demographic trends continue unchanged (itself a contestable assumption), Malta’s population could reach 800,000 in the next decade and a half,
Some commentators have inaccurately insisted that locals will soon be outnumbered by foreigners thus feeding the local version of the ‘they are taking over’ theory.
If we accept a projection based on crude mathematics and on Malta’s officially reported 2022 population figure of 542,051, the country could reach 800,000 by about 2035. Some three-quarters of this population would be Maltese, and about 90% Caucasian.
The key challenge in this context of annual population increases (4% plus) is that it is occurring with little, if any serious preparation or planning. In debt to short-term economic and political interests and a chaotic form of (over)development, Maltese society is visibly falling apart.
A brief review of the main stories in the Times of Malta for November 15 and 17 highlights just a tiny dimension of that reality.
This is not due to population pressure per se but to political priorities which do not include properly managing the needs of Maltese society, its economy, the land’s capacity environmentally or infrastructurally but rather the immediate agendas of the country’s dominant elite.
At its core, the problem is not population but base politics - population numbers are but one manifestation of those politics. Simply reducing population numbers (especially those of ‘foreigners’) will do little to resolve Malta’s endemic and corrupted overdevelopment.
The country’s current model of mal-development is dependent on ever-increasing crude numbers - foreign workers, tourists, airport and cruise ship arrivals, hotel bed nights, construction permits, cranes, cement trucks – all generally presented with a positive spin on how successful we have become.
Despite the odd nod to possibly (maybe) addressing limited aspects of the issue, the country’s political and economic elite have no intention (or even interest in) changing the model of warped growth. Ensuring that model of growth has an unending supply of workers to exploit is the raison d’etre of policy and practice, much as it is elsewhere in Europe.
Two very recent and very typical, ego-driven expressions of this approach are the ‘100 years’ agenda of Joseph Portelli and Michael Stivala’s ‘more beautiful’ Malta hallucination. Both read more like threats than anything approaching considered ‘thought’ or planning. Mindless growth on steroids.
One of the most obvious dangers associated with the ‘overpopulation’ equation is that, once again, we end up ‘blaming’ entirely the wrong group of people for our home-grown chaos. We help add to the sum of our prejudices and often to a denial of the most basic of rights. And, of course, we avoid dealing with the issue. By uncritically accepting the ‘overpopulation’ story, we fall for our never-ending politics of distraction.
Words and labels are important. If, instead of using the phrase ‘overpopulation’, with all it implies, we were to choose others – over-vehicled, over swimming pool-ed, over hotel-ed, over restaurant-ed, over craned, over tycoon-ed, over builder-ed (the list is endless), the implications become entirely different.
What the issues are, where primary responsibility lies, what solutions might be feasible become wholly different. But, hey-ho, much easier to blame others than to face reality honestly.
If we crudely act to simply reduce numbers, a great many problems immediately present themselves. Who will make, deliver, or serve our dinners, who will drive that bus or collect that waste, who will take care of our sick or elderly, who will build or staff our hotels, IT, or gambling sectors?
Singling out migrant numbers for reduction is the easy one, especially those we don’t like or whose religion or culture we devalue. But what about tourists or expats or nurses?
Malta’s demographics are not a deus-ex-machina. They are a direct function of decisions being currently made (or, more likely, not being made) primarily here in Malta and Gozo. There is no logical reason why the demographic and related challenges faced by this country cannot be reasonably and fairly planned for and managed.
But only if we and those we choose to lead us have a mind and an agenda to do so. At present, that frame of mind and its accompanying agenda is not a political priority.
Bearing in mind the dates being bandied about regarding our demographics – 800,000 by 2035, we have but three election cycles left to get serious. Otherwise, it’s the '100 years' beautiful agenda.