Where are Labour’s environmental credentials now?

Trying to find consistency in a Maltese political party is a bit like trying to find the Loch Ness Monster.

Let’s face it: we all ‘want’ Nessie to exist; we all have this romantic notion that remote Scottish lochs ‘should’ conceal undiscovered living fossils from a bygone era… and we can all even appreciate how such beliefs come into being in the first place.

It’s a lake… we don’t know what’s in it… so… MONSTER!

By the same token (and with much the same misplaced optimism) we all ‘want’ our governments to be consistent; we all feel that there ‘should’ be a clear and unwavering policy approach to issues as sensitive as ‘planning’ and the ‘environment’ (arguably the two most crucial considerations, in a country roughly the size of a walnut)…

But when it comes to the crunch, you may as well believe in the existence of a dinosaur that somehow survived mass extinction 65 million years ago, and continued happily living in a small Scottish lake that was only formed in the last few hundred thousand years.

Both scenarios are clearly impossible; yet there is room to argue that ‘consistency in a Maltese political party’ is actually the less likely of the two. The problem with the cryptid supposedly inhabiting Loch Ness is that its existence is hugely implausible, for a host of biological reasons that are too complicated to go into here.

But there is no concrete ‘evidence’ that Nessie doesn’t exist. In fact, there can’t be: evidence, by its very nature, can never be used to demonstrate the non-existence of anything.

The case against political consistency, by way of contrast, is pretty clear-cut. What happened this week is perhaps the best example I have seen of this phenomenon in the last 25 years; but in all that time, political parties have done nothing but contradict themselves in the most blatant and glaring way imaginable. Unlike cryptozoology, ‘political inconsistency’ is not a fanciful conspiracy theory… it is an observable, quantifiable and indisputable fact.

Consider the following: Glenn Bedingfield – who is a spokesman for the Office of the Prime Minister, from where he administers his blog – recently came out with a blogpost under the headline ‘Fejnhom tal-ambjent?’ (Where are the environmentalists?).

You will, of course, immediately note the stereotyping implicit in that blanket category, ‘tal-ambjent’. A representative of the party which once campaigned to ‘unite Malta’, now actively seeks to categorise its inhabitants into neat little cubicles: with the express intention to distinguish between ‘tal-ambjent’, and… ‘tal-Lejber’.

To put it another way: if the prime minister’s right-hand man questions the whereabouts of ‘environmentalists’ – as if he were talking about a separate species altogether – then it follows that he doesn’t count himself (and by extension, his boss) among their number.

Ah, such consistency from the ‘Malta Taghna Lkoll’ days! Remember all the PL billboards that promised to ‘safeguard the environment’ before the election? Where are they now, Glenn? Where are your precious Labour Party’s environmentalist credentials now, that you yourself make such a distinction between ‘Labour’ and ‘the environment’?

There are other reasons for asking the same question. Glenn’s blogpost was sparked by the fact that his prime minister had just come out against a suggestion to expand the existing Freeport: arguing that any such expansion would have to encroach upon ODZ land… and, more pertinently, that the quality of life of nearby Birzebbugia residents would be adversely affected.

Again, Glenn’s query rebounds upon himself. Where has the Labour government’s concern with ‘quality of life’ gone all of a sudden? Its representative on the PA board has just voted in favour of a project that – exactly like the Freeport expansion – will have a massively deleterious impact on the urban environment of Sliema, and all its residents. Why is Labour concerned with safeguarding the quality of life in Birzebbugia… yet at the same time only too happy to condemn ‘Slimizi’ to eternal construction, pollution, traffic congestion, and daily disruptions of even the most basic services?

OK, this one’s easy. Because unlike their Southern counterparts’, ‘Slimizi’ do not habitually vote Labour in every election. They’re like the ‘tal-ambjent’ brigade… on the other side of an invisible barrier called ‘political prejudice’. So it’s perfectly OK to just carry on shitting all over them, as Labour governments habitually used to do in the 1980s. Right, Glenn?

But the real problem lies elsewhere. On at least one level, Glenn Bedingfield is perfectly right: the government he represents cannot be described as ‘environmentalist’ by any stretch of the imagination. It has defecated more copiously on Malta’s environment in the past three years alone, than any preceding government in the past 25. We saw this in the way Muscat very generously sold a tract of virgin, unspoilt land for a pittance… thereby automatically devaluing the entire natural landscape, and reducing it to an accessory for his own (mostly short-sighted) economic vision.

Much more seriously, Muscat’s government even tinkered with the most sensitive laws and regulations that exist to protect the environment. It butchered the local plans, in order to justify any ODZ project which is ‘in the national interest’ (translation: in the interest of the government of the day). As a result of this gross act of irresponsibility, any future government can now justify any public project – no matter how environmentally unsound – by simply overriding all legal obstacles at will.

It’s ‘in the national interest’, remember? So all laws are automatically suspended to allow for the project to go ahead…

Not content with that, Joseph Muscat also split the twin roles of the authority formerly known as ‘MEPA’: creating an ‘Environment Resources Authority’ that has just proved spectacularly toothless in every sense of the word. So much so, it didn’t even send a representative to last Thursday’s PA meeting, and therefore didn’t actually cast a vote either way.

That’s some dedication to protecting the environment, you know. One of the most pivotal environmental issues we have ever seen gets to be discussed in a public forum… and there isn’t even a representative of the ‘Environmental Protection Directorate’ at the discussion table.

One can only conclude that this was the specific intention behind the ‘demerger’ in the first place. Muscat has created a situation where planning has been divested of any environmental considerations whatsoever. Such issues are no longer even discussed, when taking decisions of unprecedented environmental magnitude. In one fell swoop, he has simply turned the clock back to a time when projects were approved directly by the government, with no functional checks and balances of any kind.

And now, we even have it straight from the horse’s mouth. Joseph Muscat’s spokesman has emphatically confirmed that ‘environmentalists’ and ‘Labourites’ are two completely different animals, not to be confused in any way or under any circumstances. You know, just in case his government’s miserable environmental track record, on its own, was insufficient to make the same point…

Meanwhile, for the umpteenth time we are left to pick up the pieces, after yet another government’s environmental credentials imploded before our eyes. And this time round, I greatly fear there won’t be very much left of our country to actually piece back together again, once all the fragments are duly picked up.

That is why I wasn’t exaggerating when I said that this government has done more damage to the environment than any other Maltese government since independence. It is not the repercussions of any individual project we now have to worry about; it is the opening of floodgates that can never realistically be shut again.

I’ll leave it to the experts to explain why the decision to build a 38-storey tower, in the most densely congested part of a tiny country which lacks even a rudimentary system of mass transportation, is a bad idea. It is, after all, up to architects, engineers, urban planners and environmentalists to point out such things… and it’s not as though they’ve been particularly quiet, either.

But however much they scream and shout, we all know that authorities like the PA will never listen to expert advice. No, not even when it commissions the experts itself.

Apart from the Sliema Townsquare project, the Planning Authority also approved four high-rise buildings in Mriehel… even though the developers provided less than two-thirds the number of parking spaces necessitated by the Traffic Impact Assessment.

Sort of raises the question of why they even bothered commissioning a Traffic Impact Assessment report, when they very clearly didn’t give a hoot about its findings. The TIA specified that this gargantuan project would require 1,500 parking spaces… so the PA naturally approved the application, even though it only provides for just over 1,000.

This same dogged insistence on ignoring all expert advice characterises every last aspect of both the Mriehel and Sliema decisions. In the latter case, an expert geologist even warned that the Sliema bedrock was simply not strong enough to support such a massive structure. To which the PA promptly responded: Who cares? The only important thing here is that we rubberstamp a policy to approve any application filed by any major political party donor (actual or potential). Whatever happens after that is no longer our concern… no, not even if the entire edifice comes crashing down about Sliema’s ears (as it very well might).

And this, ultimately, is the only element of consistency to be discerned anywhere in all this mess. As with all other issues, we have consistently put the cart before the horse: hastily approving multiple high-rise buildings, before finalising anything resembling a ‘masterplan’ to guide and oversee the development of high-rise.

If this is the way we are going to approach decision-taking at such a sensitive level – flying in the face of all warnings: not just structural and infrastructural, but even economic – the next major project to be approved by the PA may as well just be a giant tombstone with the words:

‘Here lies Malta, buried under the rubble of its own short-sightedness and greed. 1964-2016. RIP’

Oh wait, maybe that was the last one it approved… either way, it doesn’t really matter much. We will all be buried soon enough anyway…