Health Min­is­ter Chris Fearne, com­ment­ing about pro­pos­als in the PN’s pre-bud­get doc­u­ment, said that jobs within the pub­lic sec­tor would be pro­tected by the Labour gov­ern­ment.

Fearne crit­i­cised what he de­scribed as empty pro­pos­als made by the Na­tion­al­ist Party in its pre-bud­get doc­u­ment, but could only men­tion 1 of the 91 put for­ward by the party.

Ad­dress­ing the me­dia, he said the rest of the pro­pos­als had al­ready been in­tro­duced or are in the process of be­ing im­ple­mented by the cur­rent gov­ern­ment.

He crit­i­cised pro­posal 19, which deals with pub­lic spend­ing and which reads as fol­lows: “Carry out an in­de­pen­dent HR Au­dit ex­er­cise across all pub­lic sec­tor bod­ies to de­ter­mine op­ti­mum staffing lev­els. Fa­cil­i­tate re­de­ploy­ment of hu­man re­sources be­tween pub­lic sec­tor en­ti­ties to limit the need for ad­di­tional re­cruit­ment,”say­ing this is re­flec­tive of the Na­tion­al­ist Party’s in­abil­ity to change re­gard­less of 2013’s elec­toral re­sult. It re­mains a party for the priv­i­leged with the above pro­posal set to neg­a­tively af­fect the work­force, who ac­cord­ing to him are ‘the weak­est and most vul­ner­a­ble’.

He pointed to the term ‘re­de­ploy­ment’ which is sim­i­lar to the ‘trans­fer pol­icy’ in­tro­duced by the Na­tion­al­ist Party in the late 1980s. The pri­vati­sa­tion of non-core ser­vices is a vague pro­posal which only puts in­sta­bil­ity into the minds of the pop­u­la­tion, in par­tic­u­lar fam­i­lies, Mr Fearne said.

Labour MP Sil­vio Schem­bri also di­rected a num­ber of ques­tions to PN leader Si­mon Busut­til, ask­ing which sec­tors and roles will be af­fected, how many po­si­tions will be re-de­ployed, and whether or not the party had con­sulted the unions be­fore the pub­li­ca­tion of the doc­u­ment.

Mr Fearne also men­tioned that un­der the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion em­ploy­ment has gone up. He re­ferred to the in­tro­duc­tion of 250 jobs within the pub­lic med­i­cal sec­tor. He also spoke about the in­crease in em­ploy­ment in the pri­vate sec­tor with about 19,500 new jobs since 2013.