So, size really matters after all…

Sorry to break the news, folks, but it looks like all your ex-girlfriends had it wrong over the years. All that pillow talk about the ‘motion of the ocean’? All lies, I’m afraid. It really is ‘the size of the wave’ that counts…

Hey, don’t look at me. I ain’t no oceanographer myself. But like most male human beings alive on this planet – with the possible exception of Rocco Sifreddi and a certain Long Dong Silver (both in showbiz) – I, too, have inevitably pondered the most imponderable question of all time.

Does size matter?

My interest, I hasten to add, is entirely philosophical. But I do, um, have a friend who is somewhat troubled by the question. I keep telling him, of course, that he has nothing whatsoever to worry about. Three and a half inches is perfectly normal by any standard… but you know how it is with women these days. If your TV screen is any less than seven millimetres thick, you can just forget ever getting laid again…

So even though my intentions were entirely honourable, the fact is that I shamelessly lied to my… um… friend. It is a painful truth for all those who are preoccupied by the dimensions of their telecommunications devices… but yes, size does matter. It matters a very great deal.

The events of the year that is about to end – and above all, the week that has just ended – have emphatically settled the matter once and for all. It matters greatly to the authorities, for instance, whether your illegality or planning contravention is roughly the size of, say, an illegal washroom on the roof… or as big as the terminal at Gudja International Airport (which reminds me… can anyone direct me to the Gudja Domestic Airport? Can’t seem to find it anywhere…) 

In the former case, you will almost certainly be slapped with an enforcement notice, and find an army of law enforcers behind your door if you fail to comply. In the latter case? You will most likely end up with the Prime Minister literally eating out of your hand, at a gala dinner to inaugurate the latest illegal extension to your private empire.

That, at any rate, was the subliminal message we got from a whole series of unfortunate incidents that took place in 2015. Like the one involving a tiger and a three-year-old boy in the Montekristo private zoo. I won’t go into the details, because they’re all still fresh in our minds. But had that child been injured in a car accident involving an unlicensed (or drunk) driver, there would almost certainly have been criminal charges to face. Instead, the child was mauled by a tiger – i.e., a supposedly ‘protected animal’ that had been imported illegally, then kept in an illegal zoo which was allowed to operate commercially without a licence for years...  so naturally, there is no chain of responsibility anywhere to be seen.

In 2015, we also learnt that ‘size’ is not only relevant, but also relative. In the case of Montekristo, the illegality is not just large: it is an over-bloated Leviathan, gobbling up acres of open space. In the analogous ‘Paqpaqli Ghall-Istrina’ incident – in which over 20 were hospitalised after a car spun out of control into the crowd (through non-existent safety bariers) – the ‘size’ aspect was more of a political than physical variety. Other, lesser events are subject to stringent permit conditions. This event was exceptional, in that it was held under the auspices of the President’s Office – the ‘biggest’ institution in the land. 

Even in the more recent Paceville incident – where 70 people were injured in a stampede – a similar (albeit not identical) pattern emerges. Many, if not most, of the casualties proved to be minors who should not, in theory, have been there at all. Note: I stress ‘in theory’ because, a) we all know that the law is hardly applied, if at all; b) we all (myself included) have been guilty of pretty much the same thing in our teens.

But the reaction of the club owner caught my attention. Nightclub staff could not be expected to card every single person to check their age, he was reported as saying. “We’re not shirking our responsibility but with a turnover of thousands of people every night and most entering in big groups it’s simply not realistic.”

Strange, isn’t it, that this unrealistic scenario is precisely what happens everywhere else in the world… even places where the turnover is much higher, and the groups much bigger? But no matter: the important thing is what he is subliminally telling us (and which is also self-evidently true). In a nutshell, the problem cannot be solved because it is too big. And it became too big because it was left unsolved for too long…

Besides: it is symptomatic of the other case as well. Like the bother of checking people’s ID as they enter a nightclub, it’s just too much hassle to take action against an infringement which is several times larger than Malta’s combined law enforcement capability. Too much paperwork involved. Much easier to simply ignore it, and come down like a tonne of bricks on all those illegal scrapyards and interior modifications…

In any case: I myself thought those three examples – and there were others – would have been more than sufficient to rub our collective noses into the ugly truth underlying this shambles. But no. Looks like those incidents were just not enough to prove to us that the bigger the crime, the more it pays to actually commit it. This week, the government took the entire paradigm to its next logical level. It has just manifestly by-passed all its own planning and public procurement laws, to hammer through an agreement that might just usurp the coveted ‘Malta’s Biggest Illegality’ title from Montekristo Estates.

That’s saying something, you know. Montekristo has lions, tigers, leopards and jackals. It’s not just Malta’s planning laws that were fed to the animals at that zoo… it was also all the treaties and conventions Malta ever signed for the protection of endangered species worldwide. It would take something truly imaginative to top that as an infringement, I’d say. Something epic, in fact.

And just when I thought we had an undisputed winner in the category of ‘Most Blatant Disregard for All Known Rules and Regulations’… well, what do you know? Not only does a new contender enter the ring… but it just happens to be the Government of Malta, too. You know, the one that actually writes all the rules and regulations that get to be enforced on everyone else, when their illegalities are too small and petty…

Let’s watch this Olympic achievement again in slow motion, shall we? It started with a plan to build a university on ODZ land… and already we are beyond the parameters of what is actually legal, though the project itself is still at conceptual stage.

But wait, it gets bigger. Once it was pointed out that the ‘American University of Malta’ project, as proposed, would violate the Structure Plans… the same plans the Labour Party defended, at the time when infringements were proposed by the Nationalists… out pops a newly revised version of the Structure Plan, in which the only discernible difference concerns ‘exceptions’ to enable the government to simply sidestep planning laws at will. (All in the “national interest”, of course…)

These new regulations may or may not have been hurried through in time to facilitate the project – though the timing was sure convenient – but the even more troubling problem is another. They will apply to all future development projects, too. So not only is this a gargantuan perversion of the entire planning process in its own right – it renders the same planning process entirely redundant. What good is a set of regulations that can simply be by-passed for this or that project… depending how ‘big’ the project is?

Ah… we’re back to our national preoccupation with size. For this is the other way in which the government has outgrown the most heinous planning crimes. It has now written it into the law, that the applicability of regulations depends exclusively on the size of the investment. If it’s big enough to guarantee so many jobs and so much in cash… we’ll just tear up the statute book for as long as it takes to get the project done. For everything else, they apply.

Honestly. May as well put up a big ‘For Sale’ sign on the Constitution while we’re at it…

All this, by the way, before we even get to the part where the land in question was actually transferred to the Sadeen Group. Here, a small proviso may be necessary: I have lost count of the number of comments criticising the transfer itself (as opposed to how it was done), for all the world as though this were somehow the crux of the entire matter. But it isn’t. The government is within its rights to lease out land on a temporary emphyteusis. It does this all the time: MIDI took out a 99-year lease on Tigne and Manoel Island. Ditto for SmartCity, etc.

Leaving aside the small matter that two-thirds of the land in this case is supposedly ‘protected’ (and therefore should not be touched at all)… the problem here is not so much that the land was leased; but that the most basic rules of good governance were simply ignored altogether throughout the process. 

The government is bound by laws (which, again, it used to cite all the time in Opposition) specifying that any public deed of significant value should be put to a public call for tenders. The process was inexplicably waived in this instance: the government just went ahead and chose the Sadeen group, which… regrettably… does not seem to have even the most basic accreditation to open something called a ‘university’ in the first place.  

Clearly, you cannot argue that this company was chosen for its academic credentials. On the contrary, it seems that the entire selection process was dismantled, specifically because the government did not want to be faced with a choice. This was a ‘fait accompli’, if ever I saw one in this country… and it might just constitute the single largest example of its kind we’ve ever seen.

What does all this actually tell us about the administration of justice in Malta in 2015? I know what it tells me. If you want to break planning or governance laws in Malta, and get away with it… do it big time. Don’t waste your time with petty infringements. Go straight for the serious felonies, and perpetrate them as blatantly and as massively as possible.

After all, size matters. In fact, it may well be the only thing that still does…