There was a time in the not so distant past, when the Labour Party did actually put forward legislative items in parliament that were in the national interest, such as the Public Domain Act. As you can read in article 4 of Title II of the Act, every year the government is expected to take submissions from public entities and the NGOs about recommendations for sites to be listed as public domain. The Labour government is not applying and enforcing this legal practice. The Act was introduced by the Labour government in 2016.
No hobbies were hurt in the process of this legislation.
The law was originally proposed by Jason Azzopardi and Labour adopted it swiftly. The law provides scheduling status to areas deemed under the public domain – with Malta’s coast determined as public domain. This status prevents the area from being developed. This law could have been used effectively to conserve large parts of the countryside, but the Labour government refused its full application having consistently sided with the interests of developers. In fact, the Planning Authority eventually refused to schedule up to 20 sites which were proposed to it: this was one of the many disputes that took place between the Ministry of the Environment under the previous Minister José Herrera and the Planning Authority run by Johan Buttigieg.
Today, Labour is making steps backwards with its new Planning reforms as it intends to give the Planning Authority the right to override most of Malta’s existing planning and environmental regulations. Labour has also opposed the Nationalist Party’s proposal to introduce constitutional protections to the environment and the ecosystems to instead prioritise what it describes as “hobbies” such as bird-hunting. Labour is projecting itself as considerably inconsiderate towards the environment and it is being very transparent about this. Conserving the environment has gone ever lower in the government’s list of priorities, which also explains why the number of people who are concerned about the environment, is ever more increasing.
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Historian and Publisher
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