After the budget speech and the ensuing hubbub – mostly about the social benefits and the tax changes that were announced – are over, the time arrives when supposedly the details of the published financial data are analysed and debated. From this would then arise observations about crucial ongoing aspects of governance.
It is a pity that this phase of proceedings just does not retain the levels of attention secured by the initial parliamentary sessions on the budget. Even in Parliament, it is frequently seen just in the light of a political exercise, not to say game. Now clearly the political dimension cannot be excluded for it has its significance. But on top of it, a financial oversight over what the government is proposing in the various fields of its activities and what it has accomplished in them up to now over the year, should be given the greatest attention, even in the details.
There won’t be a better opportunity for such a financial monitoring of what is being done with the people’s money. The analysis made by the auditor’s office emerges two years or more later. When some scandal arises, the enquiries that get organised happen much much later. Which is why it’s a pity that the secondary budget debates pan out the way they do.
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LOANS AND INTEREST
The state of the national debt remains one of the essential points raised in Europe when government budgets are being considered. In Malta as well. A leading issue is the size of the national debt and the rate at which it is piling up.
As a loan, the national debt needs to be paid back. The more it grows, the greater the effort needed to pay it back. But the debt implies as well that yearly interest payments need to be made. To fund their debt, most governments borrow on international money markets where interest rates for available resources fluctuate according to how big or small is a government’s exposure to debt and to how financially sound a government is felt to be. For instance in recent months, France has seen steep rises in the estimates for its future exposure to debt and for the interest it will have to pay on it.
An advantage which the Malta government has enjoyed up to now is that most of our national debt can be locally funded. Up to now, because some wise guys in Europe have come up with the notion that local funding of debt could be a risky way of doing things.
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INHUMANITY
One of the Israeli hostages released by Hamas described how he had been badly beaten and tortured. His captors told him they were doing this in retaliation for what the Israeli minister of the interior Ben Gvir had declared: Palestinian prisoners in Israel were being badly treated as payback for what had happened in Gaza. The Israeli government denied that what Gvir stated was really taking place. However, Israeli courts ruled that the government was in violation of human rights with its treatment of Palestinian prisoners.
This “story” illustrates how inhuman behaviour spreads and is inherited from generation to generation. It is the curse that is active (and has long been active) in Israel-Palestine. On both sides, so it seems, there has appeared no Mandela-like personality who could guide towards some historical compromise which really accomodates the aspirations of both sides. Rabin was assassinated. Barghouti is still left to rot in jail.