Chief Minister (Government) (Gibraltar)

Peter Caruana (Gibraltar, 1956) grants us one of his last interviews before dissolving Gibraltar’s Parliament. His term is concluding and now the Gibraltarians will have to decide if they want to keep Caruana in power, as they have for 15 years, or if they want a new era under the Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party. Caruana is vehement about such a perspective: "Everybody knows that Gibraltar has never been better", he claims. "The government has transformed Gibraltar not just physically but economically and socially too. We believe that logic and common sense will prevail and the electorate will decide there is absolutely no need to change the government."

Should he eventually stay in power, Mr Caruana says he will reinforce security and invest in infrastructure for the port, particularly in cruising. To him, Gibraltar’s challenges are already drawn on a map. 

You have been Chief Minister of Gibraltar since 1996. Some sectors of Gibraltarian society maintain that one of your major achievements has been the hard work you did to develop Gibraltar’s identity. Do you identify yourself with this statement? What other achievements would you highlight from these years in office?

The biggest achievement of the fifteen and a half years that we have been in office has been the huge political and economic dividend that Gibraltar has reaped from one basic premise that sustains all our policies: to reposition Gibraltar away from a tax haven, out of the mainstream of international consensus, into an onshore compliant European place for doing business. In parallel to that, repositioning of Gibraltar’s economic activities (whether it is shipping, whether it is tourism, whether it is financial services, whether it is on-line gaming), providing high regulation and a commitment to accept only operators of high standards and reputation that would share with us our primary concern, which is the international reputation of Gibraltar as a jurisdiction and as a country. We attach such importance to that because we are a very small place. Our principal economic resource is our international reputation and people’s willingness to choose Gibraltar as a jurisdiction in which they know that they can safely locate their business operations, safe in the knowledge that their corporate reputations will not suffer from association with a badly-run territory. As a result of this repositioning and refocus of what Gibraltar wants to be in the world, over the last fifteen and a half years, our economy has tripled in size, the number of jobs has increased by 60%, we’ve been able to invest and lower taxes at the same time and we have been able to keep budget surpluses (even in these times of economic crisis we maintain budget surpluses of around 3.5% of GDP).

Opinion polls suggest that the results of the next election will be very tight for your party. What do you think the outcome is going to be and why?

After 4 terms in office, it is right that election results should be tight. It is a sign of a vibrant, mature and well-functioning democracy. You can only win 4 elections in a row and add a fifth to that by delivering to the electorate the quality of governance and the results that encourages them not to want to change government, and that becomes harder and harder to do because of the natural electoral and political wastage. We will go to the next election confident of the outcome. And not the least because people in Gibraltar have seen a huge increase in their standard of living. Everybody knows that Gibraltar has never ever been better, that the government has transformed Gibraltar, not just physically, but economically and socially, too.

And that, at a time of economic turmoil where governments are struggling financially around the globe, the Government of Gibraltar is still expanding the economy, taxes are still coming down, salaries are still going up, and there is very little unemployment.

Our economy has been run in a way that when very difficult times have come, we have been able to resist much better than others, the effects of global recession. In consequence, the community of Gibraltar has been spared the social consequences that other European countries are suffering.

Therefore, I think people in Gibraltar will value that positively and will continue to support us. We believe that logic and common sense will suggest to the electorate of Gibraltar that there is absolutely no need to change the government.

You expressed your support to remove bunker storage vessels from the sea in a 3-year time period. Is this idea related to the project that will allow bunkering on the East Side, as Gibraltarian business community in general demands?

Gibraltar was the first European port to establish a supervised and policed bunkering code. We dedicate a lot of time and effort and regulatory input into ensuring that bunkering operations take place safely. The results of that are there to see. The record of accidents and noteworthy spills into the sea speaks for itself; they are very few and there has never been any serious incident. But, of course, the environment is a delicate thing and however safe one may think things are, accidents can always happen. Therefore, there is a continuing burden on governments not to be satisfied with the safety of what they are doing at present but to continue to strive to minimize risks even more.

And one of the measures the government has adopted as Gibraltar’s policy position is that by bringing our bunker storage capacity on shore, we eliminate the risk, however remote it may be, of accidents involving not a ship being bunkered, but an accident involving the ship that stores the bunkers.

In your opinion, what are the main challenges that the Port of Gibraltar should face in the next few years?

The main challenges faced by the Gibraltar port are common to many other small countries and indeed larger countries in the context of the changing world: a much greater emphasis on security. Gibraltar needs to continue to invest in port infrastructure not just to accommodate an increasing sense of the importance of security but also to accommodate, particularly in cruising, increasingly large ships, which in its turn means that you must have an increasingly large transport infrastructure for passengers.

Gibraltar provides, for such a small place, very good port facilities. It provides sheltered waters, safe anchorage, bunkering facilities, etc. Additionally, because of the proximity of the airport to the port, it provides a very convenient port for crew changes and for connecting ships. It is a very cohesive and widely-based product offering for shipping companies. You must consider the huge popularity of Gibraltar amongst ship owners from all over the world and our leading position in many of the areas mentioned before and principally in bunkering.

What are your personal plans for next year? Is there anything that you haven’t yet achieved that you would like to do?

Assuming that we win the next elections, then we have specific policies for the next 4-year term. They are not radically different, but in the same direction. There are new projects, things that we didn’t have time to do and others things we would want to do. But the direction, the vision of Gibraltar and the approach to governance and investment and to economic and social policy that we think is necessary to deliver that vision, which is so far been very successful of Gibraltar, is no different to what has been since may 1996 when we arrived in office.

What kind of personal legacy would you like to leave when you eventually leave office?

I think all politicians should have the same personal legacy: to leave the community that they have served sufficiently and significantly better off socially, economically and politically than they were when we first arrived in office. In other words, that our service should have been of demonstrable acknowledged value to the community. Whether I win the next election or not, I will take a huge amount of personal satisfaction that it is not possible, even for the most radically-opposed member of the electorate of Gibraltar…, if you find the person in Gibraltar who is least likely to vote for us, I would be surprised if that person does not acknowledge, in a private moment, that the GSD Government has been hugely valuable and beneficial to Gibraltar’s social, economic and political development.

What would be your final message to our readers?

Our port and our shipping industry and services are a very important part of our economy, in which we have invested very heavily. At the core of that is excellence both to ensure the safety of shipping and also to ensure that ship-owners and ship operators can use Gibraltar with confidence.

Gibraltar has been a major port since the time of the Phoenicians; there has been no period in the history of mankind since shipping has existed in the affairs of mankind that Gibraltar has not been an important port because of its hugely significant geographical location at the crossroads not just of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic but on North and South of Europe and Africa. Therefore, this industry is important to us not just because it adds to our economic vitality and prosperity but also because we see ourselves as current custodians of a much more than a 1000 years plus maritime tradition that we are very proud to carry on.