Goodbye, bulldozer?

Confrontation on environmental issues is always specific: the siting of a government or private development, the demolition of part of our architectural heritage, the destruction of our natural heritage assets. It is not often that it is possible to reveal the pattern of events, the structural bias which binds us to recurrent desperate struggles here, there and everywhere. Environment Minister George Pullicino's article "What people need" (The Sunday Times, March 19) does just that.

His attempt to justify the status quo amply illustrates his dilemma, his insoluble problem. It is simply not possible to belong to a political party with ambitions to hold or recover an absolute majority at the polls and to be Green.

The other two political parties are beholden to the construction industry. Their expenditure of around Lm500,000 at every general election (PN Lm480,000, 2003 - Joe Saliba) and millions more in between to sustain their loss-making media puts them in a structural bind. Membership subscriptions will not cover the cost and the Christmas televised fundraising is little short of an annual cover-up for an institutionalised tangentopoli. It is not illegal because no law prohibits it.

This is not a democracy. It is an oligarchy and the environment, our quality of life, have been its principal victims for decades; for far too long. The other political parties need to preserve the status quo. They have become little more than parasites bloated by feeding on the pathological economic setup they have engendered. Construction is everything. It has been this way since wartime reconstruction, which gave us our first political millionaires.

Malta has one major environmental challenge: land use. It has been boom, boom, boom for decades. Billions, many billions, have been made in the uglification of Malta. Nothing compares to the building industry. Nothing at all. It is the major economic force in the country. It is the major power, close to becoming the only power.

Politics and politicians are the front, the façade, the brokers between the money-makers and the people. Our whole constitutional set-up is largely a sham, disguising an unacceptable, real situation as a halting, dysfunctional democracy, which we are invited to accept as the only poor compromise available. Neither of the other two political parties are in a fit state to change any of this.

When Mr Pullicino pleads that it is necessary to make compromises between environmental protection and development (employment) he knows that he is mouthing his party's clichés, which he ably contradicts at every international gathering. He knows that environmental protection preserves our future earning ability.

He knows that sustainable development cannot be a net environmental loss and still deserve the tag sustainable. He knows that his words to the Maltese public fly in the face of the environmental acquis which he is bound to implement.

The environment creates jobs: from the few richly paid consultants' jobs to those of the hundreds of unskilled labourers who would be hard pressed to find other jobs today. This has been our recent history in Malta and Mr Pullicino knows it. It is well established across Europe and is highly likely to continue in this way for the foreseeable future.

Construction provides ever fewer jobs for Maltese workers. Even as it creates ever more wealth for speculators, it gains ever greater support from Government. It causes irreversible damage to our quality of life and to the earning ability of future generations but the government only looks as far as the next election.

As the downward spiral gains speed it becomes ever less likely that any government will be able to pull out in time. At every economic and political crisis more restrictions are lifted, yet another mega-project announced. Government seems to have no answer to any crisis except yet another building spree.

Our manufacturing and services sectors cannot recover because they are starved of investment, particularly indigenous investment, because they stand no chance in the competition with construction. Who wants to take risks for smaller returns when it is possible to make money hands down elsewhere? They are invited to console themselves with the usual platitudes while nothing changes for them either. Some have responded by closing down hotels.

Tragically, construction and speculation, untrammelled by any serious government concern about the situation, keep up the pressure on wages and all other local costs to the services and manufacturing industry. While the contribution to GDP of the construction industry is barely more than that of the agricultural sector, it is constantly and permanently making life harder for other sectors whose contribution to GDP is much greater while leaving ever less physical space for an indigenous agriculture.

Our land is made of diamonds while our labour and capital have to compete in a globalised world where land is just land, plentiful and relatively cheap, exempt from a hysterical and eternal land rush unjustified by any objective reason beyond a perennial irrational exuberance.

Property is not scarce in Malta. The opposite commonplace is simply a myth. We have had an ever growing surplus documented in every census undertaken in the past 50 years. At the last published count nearly 30,000 properties stood vacant while prices shot upwards again. The facts from the 2005 census remain a state secret.

The rent laws remain cast in stone, denying us all a safety valve we desperately need to bring all vacant properties onto the market on a level playing field and easing the skyrocketing of property prices, allowing the laws of supply and demand to determine prices. The government does not dare mention property hoarding and its threat to our common economic future, to our global competitiveness. In effect, the politcal status quo has made the country ungovernable.

Government has commissioned the MFSA to investigate the influence of banking policy on property prices. It is looking in the wrong direction. Easing lending terms by granting 40-year loans gives buyers a better chance to attempt to buy at ever more impossible prices but the detachment of property prices from earning ability is not the fault of the banks alone.

The government has absconded altogether in the matter of addressing the threat of artificially high property prices. It is paralysed over rent law reform and ideologically and electorally prevented from doing anything serious about relinquishing its last remaining cure-all: the construction gold rush.

While the damage to the tourism industry has become palpable if unquantified, government protagonists are still unable to pull out of the final nosedive. The stated policy is not to build over every square centimetre of the place nor to destroy the last vestige of our traditional architecture; these are only the natural consequences of the actions that constantly betray the stated policy. In the PN laissez-faire paradigm it remains impossible to avert the eventual and final destruction of everything. There is no need of any explicit policy to bring it about: it is inevitable, Armageddon by default. Nothing is safe.

Mr Pullicino's attempt to blame a remote Labour administration for the existing damage is nothing short of pathetic. Of course, Labour in the late neolithic was the pits on the environment. The PN is much worse: while pretending to the environmentalist crown, it proceeds with the destruction at an increased pace.

The losses in the past 20 years exceed by far the damage perpetrated in the previous 16 years. It is poor consolation to people who could not give a damn about the PN and the MLP and especially to those who have contested both the offenders. The unborn losers may not even know who or what the PN and the MLP were. Who cares who did most damage? The question is when will it stop?

The Sliema front was not destroyed by Sliema residents but by a Labour administration that allowed building heights to climb to six storeys, making the temptation to demolish irresistible. PN pragmatism did not make any attempt to staunch the haemorrhage, it set the leeches on the corpse and allowed construction to eight storeys.

The last properties to hold out at the original two storeys only illustrated the impossibility of resistance against a death sentence passed by the system endorsed by both the other political parties. Today even they are gone. And we are talking of building skyscrapers.

Relaxing height limitations all over the country as an electoral carrot in 2003 exposed the urban fabric in all the old village cores to complete destruction. The first casualty deprives its context of unity, homogeneity, of its language addressed to the onlooker, the visitor and those who dwell in it. The future will not know what it has lost except in pictures. Sliema is everywhere, even in Gozo. Everywhere will eventually be Sliema-fied.

Uglification knows no bounds. Urban Conservation Areas? What Urban Conservation Areas? Planning rules or planning chaos? Mr Pullicino has expressed his full confidence in the people who make planning decisions. I feel not the slightest reason to express any opinion even remotely similar. I was born in Sliema and live there now. It hurts like hell every day. They spread the epidemic of chronic pain to every corner of these islands.

The current tidal flow of outrageous development applications all over the country have completely swamped the few NGOs capable of filing objections. Alternattiva Demokratika - the Green Party filed 90 objections on some 3,000 applications filed in 2005. The 2,910 or so applications that got away unscathed were not necessarily blessed by us. We frankly admit that we simply cannot cope and have to concentrate on the most damaging.

The situation is set to get worse in view of the general election now in the wind. Some future government may be inclined to document the current electoral havoc in planning so as to blame its predecessors just as Mr Pullicino blames a distant Labour regime. It will be a depressing déjà vu. It will also be too late.

Whatever any objector does, the system as it stands can defeat him or her. It takes no account of the fact of his unpreparedness, of the unfair advantage of the professional developer in marshalling expertise and securing personal interests to his cause. If developers have the right to complain about the Byzantine bureaucracy at MEPA, just imagine the trauma to which objectors are exposed for the first time in defending the peace of their homes, their street or village. They are foiled by red tape at every turn.

MEPA eventually decides "saving third party rights", the right to go to court, the right to risk one's home in damages for stopping the development next door. To gain what? It's a laugh. There are no effective remedies; consequently there are no remedies at all. Hiding behind the law when the law is a transparent sham is adding insult to injury, an enraging insult to those who have suffered it.

Rather than hide behind the convenient façade of the planning agency or claim some merit for its establishment 15 years ago in substitution of even greater mayhem pre-1987, Mr Pullicino should have the courage to admit that he is responsible for the present situation both as the minister responsible today and as a protagonist with the PN in government for the past 20-odd years.

Where are the local plans promised in 1992? Would their enactment have stymied far too much of the election-related development we have seen since? Would proper planning have crippled the finances of both the other political parties?

Claiming that he has no influence on specific planning decisions is not enough. His and his party's planning policies and procedures have manifestly failed. Even as they are enacted in Parliament, they are foiled in fact by loopholes the size of aerodromes.

Mr Pullicino claims never to have influenced a planning decision. I would be comforted by his sworn declaration that he and his have never brought pressure to bear on MEPA staff on specific applications or enforcement procedures. I would be very surprised ever to hear about it. Not one judicious telephone call? Never, ever?

Mr Pullicino's account of the failures in Sliema blaming Labour are deceptive. I will not waste the space to confute them. Sliema residents are not as gullible as some would think. He would do much better to promise some remedies.

I would start with an immediate amendment to the existing legal process to ensure a stay of execution pending appeal in MEPA proceedings. The worst convicted criminals are allowed bail and a stay of execution pending appeal; why not our national heritage? His failure on this score would explode the last shred of credibility hiding his shame.

The demolition of the house in Ghar il-Lembi Street was no accident. It was made inevitable by the system upheld by Mr Pullicino. It is his direct responsibility. It is his duty to provide an immediate remedy to prevent it becoming a precedent in the long series so far encouraging the overnight demolition of heritage sites once a MEPA board makes the "mistake" of issuing a permit.

It is a symbol of the overall situation, a formative moment for thousands who have followed this issue closely in the media and on the Internet. He can make it a determining moment, a watershed in government policy and action. Or he can fail again. I doubt very much that he is free to act and persuade us that this is not an oligarchy after all.

His party needs over 50 per cent of the vote in the next election and it needs a sackful of money to create the next electoral panic. It is certainly not what many of us voted for in 1987, and more and more of us come ever closer to not giving a damn who wins next time around. How will anything change either way? Some of us have committed to an alternative to the status quo, a democratic alternative.

Dr Vassallo is chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - The Green Party.

www.alternattiva.org.mt