For Clyde Caruana, next Monday’s Budget 2024 speech will be built around one key concept: “prioritisation”.

As Malta’s Finance Minister, Caruana must find a way of ensuring funding for the government’s most important budget lines while keeping the national deficit in check.  

With the government determined to keep energy subsidies in place, that means Caruana will need to trim the public sector fat rather significantly.

In this 90-minute conversation with Times of Malta editor-in-chief Herman Grech, Caruana speaks about those efforts to “prioritise” government spending, acknowledges challenges with Malta’s reliance on foreign labour and argues the country’s education failings are a societal, not financial issue.

The conversation also includes a number of questions asked by members of the audience.