Before the incredulity of the situation the world is facing is really grasped, before all the memes and hashtags have run their course, before all the speculation on post-apocalyptic scenarios are exhausted, there must be hope. 

Pandemic is a word usually reserved for Hollywood scripts or the first few pages of a Crichton or King novel. Maybe however, the single saving grace of ‘all this’ is that it is bigger than everything else and so provokes us as a species to react uncharacteristically. I have the fortune of being surrounded by bright, successful and accomplished people (if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room) and like a haunting chant I hear ‘Things will never be the same’. 

It’s absurd to think of that as a pessimistic statement. 

Like a forest fire burning everything in its path, this pandemic will also leave a fertile landscape in its wake. The very carpet-bombing nature of the pandemic and the health protocols it requires gives a sense of equanimity that is an oddly calming reality check. Still, beyond the medical tragedies and superhuman efforts of a few people for the many, the discussion quickly becomes an economic one. 

Economically speaking we are in a no benchmark zone. There’s no rule book, no precedent and fuzziness around when and how it ends. This last observation means we can’t expect governments to unendingly commit to panaceas and keep a credible level of confidence whilst doing so.

Most governments have reacted (with some exceptions and U-turns) by dealing out big, fast measures of wage protection across the board by direct injection. War-chest or not, deficit or surplus, this was deemed the measure of choice by most elected administrators. The theory is not flawless, for it is a steroid of sorts and so makes it unsustainable in the long term, but it does pump in enough strength to make sure an element of economic and psychological, positive momentum is maintained. Maybe this could be all we need to catch our breath and find the long-term therapy that is needed.

Locally, the measures taken were bold but not enough. Or at least not equitable. To be fair, both Prime Minister Robert Abela and minister Silvio Schembri have plainly stated that this is by no means the end of the conversation. But in my view, the problem lies exactly there. If indeed tourism and retail remain a keystone of the Maltese economy (and they do) then surely numerous other sectors are directly reliant upon them. The reliance is not only in extent but also in time. 

I speak for a sector that includes the extended media and marketing ecosystem, and all the dynamic areas it covers; creative, design, digital, content, news and many more. The direct reliance here is self-evident, so shouldn’t the application of measures be extended across the board? 

If civil service salaries should remain untouched and therefore propped up in these times (and rightly so) and a direct injection is given to tourism and retail, why stop there? The justification of ‘triaging’ and therefore ensuring that critical haemorrhaging is managed first makes sense, but only if the remaining damage is controlled immediately after and with the same level of care and skill.

As business owners, entrepreneurs, employers and colleagues, the industry of the marketing consultants, ad agency, media providers and creatives know too well that this is a business that thrives on human capital alone, a fact that applies to the lion’s share of the service sector. 

We are not sitting on assets that appreciate passively and any retained earnings are consistently reinvested year on year in growth, that for us can only take the form of employment. 

I want to make it very clear that this argument and appeal for equal aid is, by its very definition, one that I make for nearly every sector or vertical of the nation’s economy. I believe we all need to be on the receiving end of the same treatment, if nothing to ensure that the economy revs back into action with most of the pistons firing at the same tempo, when we come out of this storm. And we will come out of this storm, without a doubt. 

Finally, the unequal dishing out of aid is likely to fuel the perception of imbalance, socially and culturally. Malta’s governments have shrewdly worked hard to bring economic evolution to the nation by promoting more and diverse pillars to stand on, essentially moving away from reliance on manufacturing and tourism towards a hybrid economy that has more legs to stand on. Any measure that doesn’t apply across the board only serves to promote (unfairly) a regressive message that anyone entering the job market is sensibly advised to stick to tourism or the civil service. If job seekers aimed for this en masse, our dreams of encouraging diversification are dashed. 

Businesses are, at the time of writing, scrambling to figure out what a NACE code is, and why they are christened with one and not another. Just this type of discussion and the anxiety of discovering why your name is on the list or not is chilling. Chilling because the answer will make you realise whether your enterprise can keep paying your work family enough for them to keep up with their monthly commitments (that show no signs of being restrained) or worse still make you have to calculate the weeks remaining until you need to consider redundancies and have to make that unimaginably dreadful and surreal decision of where to start from. 

Chris Mifsud is director of MPS.