Updated October 31 with PD reaction

The government will be unveiling proposals for Constitutional changes to increase female participation in the coming weeks, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat announced in Parliament.

Giving his reaction to Opposition leader Adrian Delia’s critique to the Budget, Dr Muscat noted the government had an electoral mandate to bring about equality.

“We will need help from the Opposition, because we need to have a two-thirds majority,” he said.

“We clearly say what we stand for. People know where they stand with us,” he said.

‘The Delia catastrophe’

Dr Muscat took issue with the Opposition leader’s insistence that economic growth was spurred by population growth.

“There was a scholar who theorised this - his name was Thomas Malthus,” Dr Muscat said. “Over time, economists started to call it the Malthus catastrophe. Nowadays, we have the Delia catastrophe,” he said.

If economy growth came about by importing people, everyone would do it, Dr Muscat said.

He pointed out that the country where the population grew the most was South Sudan, were the economy decreased by 6%.

Dr Delia also made factual errors during his speech, Dr Muscat said.

While Dr Delia said 11,000 Europeans came to Malta, the truth was 8,826 people came over the past year, 3,904 of whom were third country nationals.

“This number came from the PN’s pre-budget document. He got the numbers in his party’s own pre-budget document wrong,” Dr Muscat mused.

‘Clickbait for the far-right’

Worse than that, Dr Muscat said, the argument that it economic growth was related to population growth was “clickbait” for far-right arguments.

The argument was problematic since it capitalised on fears of those people who had witnessed those who may be foreigners breaking the law outside their doorstep.

Dr Delia is abandoning the Christian Democratic roots and moving towards the far-right, he charged.

“He said we used to generate fears of foreigners before we joined the EU, but we accepted the people’s will, unlike the Nationalist Party, which still cannot wrap its head around not being in government,” Dr Muscat said.

The flavour of the day was speaking against foreigners. This was not only anti-European, but anti-business. “And when you’re anti-business, you’re anti-workers,” Dr Muscat said.

Dr Delia had also said he wanted sound investment from wealthy foreigners. “So why is he against the Individual Investors Programme,” Dr Muscat asked.

‘Not just a government that works, but a government for work’

Thanks to the economic surplus, for the first time in history, Malta was paying off its debt, Dr Muscat said adding that by the end of the year, there would be €210 million debt left, with a surplus being generated.

This is not just a government that works, this is a government for work, the natural home of Maltese citizens,” Dr Muscat added.

Dr Muscat delivers his speech. Photo: DOI/Jeremy Wonnacott

"We were criticised for increasing the labour wage bill, and then for having cheap labour. Pick one, the Prime Minister said.

Dr Muscat went on to list government incentives to reduce poverty and increase quality of life.

For the next year, the government was increasing spending on infrastructure, and had doubled spending on health and the elderly to €781 million. It would also be spending €100 million on the environment.

"The only poverty we can’t target is the poor ideas of this Opposition," Dr Muscat said.

On criticism the budget had “recycled proposals”, Dr Muscat said the things repeated were minimum wage increases, pension rises and increases in stipends among other benefits.

Dr Delia had also raised concerns that the increase in cost-of-living of €2.33 was just enough to cover basic expenses.

"We worked on the mechanism created by the Nationalist government," Dr Muscat hit back.

On the impeding hike in milk prices, Dr Muscat said the government could only control things within its remit and the price of milk had not risen yet.

Dr Delia was also wrong when he said the price of food increased overall by 4%, Dr Muscat added. When you take out the effects of restaurants and hotels, the increase was of 2.3%.

New investment in Gozo

Dr Muscat announced that a company would be announcing a new investment in Gozo in the coming days and an anatomy centre would also be unveiled.

He said the government would also be seeing how to help out those who could not work due to certain conditions that were not physical but still prohibited them from working.

On new organic waste regulations, he said the government was spearheading a culture change. “We expect challenges but the country will benefit in the long-term," he said.

A budget of 'treats, not tricks'

In his opening remarks, the Prime Minister said that this was a budget full of treats, not tricks.

It was the “biggest financial package in the country's history”, giving back €142 million to the people.

"We gave the country back twice as much more after the general election. We have a long-term strategy that makes sense," Dr Muscat said.

"Let me tell you what we took from people," he said, to a pause.

"Did you hear that? I didn't say anything because we took nothing from the people," Dr Muscat said.

Delia's speech

In his initial Budget reaction to parliament on Monday evening, Dr Delia slammed the government's economic policy in a two-hour speech which accused the government of being more interested in public relations that running a country. 

The Opposition leader said the government was hell-bent on growing the economy by boosting output, and criticised policies aimed at encouraging the immigration of thousands of foreign workers. 

Watch: 'This Budget only gave, without taking anything' - Muscat

Dr Delia said that the PN’s economic model sought to create new, high-value-added sectors for the country that would have a trickle down effect to improve people's lives.

‘Treats for the boys and tricks for the people’

Government had no plan and still lacks one. @JosephMuscat_JM confirmed that budget will not solve economic problems @MaltaGov caused with unplanned population growth. @PNmalta wants to put people at the centre of politics. #socjetalijimpurtaha

— Adrian Delia (@adriandeliapn) October 30, 2018

In a statement on Tuesday following Dr Muscat's speech, the Nationalist Party said the country still did not have a long-term plan for the future.

Instead, the Budget was full of “treats for the boys and tricks for the people”.

The surplus was being enjoyed by those in Government and those in positions of trust. Families now had a deficit in their budget, it said.

Dr Muscat showed he was stuck to statistics and not to the realities facing people’s everyday lives.

The Prime Minister confirmed that the Budge would not solve the problems created by the negative effects of the economy, which was increasing due to population growth, rather than by production, it said.

'A wiser government would have given us a better Budget' - PD

In its reaction to Dr Muscat's speech, the Democratic Party highlighted a number of issues it had with the government's depiction of Budget 2019.

Cost of living was rising "a lot" more than pensions had been bolstered, the party said, and the government could not talk of surpluses when people were still living in poverty. 

"It isn't how much the government spends that matters, it's how the government administers income," the party added.