Following the Finance Minister’s announcement that there will be no €1,000 super-bonus cheque this year, despite the promise made during the general election campaign, Opposition Leader Alex Borg is challenging the government to issue the cheques, while goading the electorate to hold it accountable for failing to deliver on its promise.
The Opposition Leader should start to get serious about public finances. This is not the responsible way to run public finances.
Labour has turned public finances into its personal electoral war-chest and public subsidies, especially the €1000 cheque which is ultimately intended to buy votes en masse. The Opposition is going to drive us into oblivion by appropriating Labour’s populist fiscal measures.
The most obvious sign that the Finance Minister is lying about what Marisa Xuereb described as the Minister’s strawman fallacy on fuel and electricity subsidies, is that things are already collapsing. The ongoing collapse of our electric grid is a consequence of Labour’s prioritisation of recurrent expenditure versus capital expenditure. The only analogy that the Finance Minister should make shouldn’t be about hens or Bibles: we simply have a pot of money that eventually is going to run out and we are spending this money wile delaying the structural solutions to the fundamental problems.
The fundamental problem is electricity generation and this isn’t going to be solved by buying Martin Bajada’s solar panels, who has been using his position at the Chamber of Commerce to self-servingly promote renewable energy: this will be solved with a new power station. The more we delay investing in our solutions, the bigger the pain will be tomorrow.
This is very simple and even the Finance Minister understands it. He is very well aware of the risks he is taking, however ultimately, the Minister’s first priority seems to be greasing Labour into power and this is why, according to him, there is no other solution to our predicament other than with his populist measures.
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