In those quiet moments of personal honesty and reflection, we know intuitively that the agenda of growth at all costs, regardless of impact is fundamentally damaging. 

It is hugely damaging in Malta, but also more widely internationally. 

It is damaging to individuals, communities, countries, regions and inevitably environments and the planet and to those to who will inherit our mess.  We are not just pushing against the limits of many resource, environmental and social boundaries (so very clearly evident in Malta and Gozo), in many cases we have carelessly and recklessly surpassed them. 

We continue to push our country and our planet way beyond any reasonable capacity and instead of facing up to this, we spend inordinate amounts of time justifying and defending it.  None more so than the world’s richest countries and individuals who continue to rapaciously devour the world.

And we (for Malta is now, despite our protestations, an established member of the rich world) do this in a context of perverse and growing inequality.

Ideologues in Malta and internationally never tire of selling the lie that crude economic growth automatically brings prosperity to all. This chant prescribes policies and decision-making from economists to politicians and to many international (and influential) bodies.  The chant - ‘growth is always and everywhere unquestionably good’.

Almost inevitably, the reality could not be more different as detailed in a report to the UN Human Rights Council in May of this year. That report records that while the eradication of poverty has been endlessly promised via the ‘trickling down’ of wealth, crude economic growth ensures that such wealth flows upwards to those already advantaged, especially the ‘super advantaged’. 

The report is worth quoting in detail:

‘As long as the economy is driven mainly by profit maximization, it will respond to the demand expressed by the richest groups of society, leading to extractive forms of production that worsen social exclusion in the name of creating more wealth, and it will fail to fulfil the rights of those in poverty’.

The reality of growing income inequality (rather than its promised reduction) has been frequently documented in Malta as well as internationally.   

The wealthy of the world not only disproportionately consume that world, they also set the tone and rhythm of consumption locally and internationally.  Superhomes, superyachts, private jets, conspicuous consumption, profligate waste, investments in carbon heavy industries, tax avoidance and corruption fuel climate change and the associated social ill-fare.

So much of what is happening today in Malta mirrors this reality at the micro-level as Malta’s elite drive the growth and consumption levels in an orgy of excess.  Top-of-the-range cars and SUVs for Malta’s traffic gridlock, harbours clogged with mostly static yachts and cruisers, mega homes with ever more extravagant pools, mega constructions to massage mega egos with total disregard for rules or laws (or ‘interpretations’ as recently described) and a two-fingered salute to public wellbeing.

And to cap it all, mega corruption to ensure that the growth on steroids agenda continues to deliver...for them.  A reality that is occurring in full public view.

This never-ending obsession with crude growth at any cost and its relentless abuse of natural resources, is propelling our planet beyond anything that is sustainable.  According to detailed and reviewed evidence (based on 2,000 separate pieces of research), the Stockholm Resilience Centre in 2023 concluded that six of the nine ‘planetary boundaries’ - our most basic life-support systems - have already been crossed. 

In a world that has never been wealthier, almost half of the world’s population live on less than $5.50 per day (World Bank data) and more than 4 billion people have no access whatsoever to social protection.  Many millions continue to struggle to simply survive, routinely driven to exhaustion in poorly paid, often dangerous jobs to satisfy the needs and wants of the rich and to boost profit and to service excess.

Predictably, none of this is necessary or inevitable – there is more than enough locally and internationally to satisfy everyone’s reasonable needs but the power and the excesses of the rich forever intervene.  This reality is everywhere to be witnessed, even in tiny Malta.

Instead of pandering to the excesses of the rich, we should be questioning it and the ideology and practices that underpin it while also challenging those who facilitate and justify this toxic culture of excess.