Friday, 4th July 2008
Only two decades more
Acursory glance at the government's White Paper on Rent Law Reform must persuade anyone that the Nationalist government has not only fully and finally endorsed the stance taken by Alternattiva Demokratika since it launched its reform campaign in the run up to the 2003 election but also that the government has had good reason to acknowledge the facts of the matter all along.
The White Paper fully documents and quantifies the situation in detail thanks to the data gathered in the 2005 Census held out of sight of the public until the autumn of 2007. John Dalli cannot possibly claim to have fished all this out of a hat since the March election. Considerable credit should go to his predecessor, Dolores Cristina, and to her aides. Political expediency has dictated that for the past five years the country should not get to the beginning of the beginning of the reform as we have done now.
Mr Dalli's introduction goes one step more: in espousing the Green rationale for a property reform ranging further than the one before us today, he acknowledges the crying need for legislation determined to secure sustainable development. It sounds like another stupendous victory for the Greens. It will be if and when the words produce the right results.
At last, we have before us what the government is proposing and we will all discuss it for the next nine weeks or so. Love it or hate it, it eradicates once and for all the absurd slur on the Greens that they lacked a social conscience. The referendum campaign, necessarily an attempt to abrogate the existing legal structure since only abrogative referenda are possible in Malta, would have obliged the government to legislate. Today, we have concrete evidence of what that legislation would have looked like. The White Paper makes it clear how complex the situation actually is. No government would have allowed the referendum to have full effect without having the necessary substitute legislation at the ready. This would have been it and there is no social holocaust envisaged. The Greens have known it all along.
In essence, the proposed reform is a transition to a fully liberalised, if centrally regulated rental market in 20 years or so. Very many landlords will tell themselves that something is better than nothing. It is made to sound reasonable, almost generous.
Much is made yet again of the 1995 rent legislation, which is a total irrelevance with regard to controlled rent properties.
Once more the PN compromise factory has produced something that looks good and markets it as the best in the world.
What the White Paper fails to mention is the fact that rent reform or no rent reform as now proposed, every expropriated landlord has the right to seek redress. No matter what the White Paper claims, they are legally entitled, under the Constitution and under the human rights provisions of international treaties which Malta has signed, to compensation far greater than that proposed in the White Paper. It is well and good that the White Paper enunciates the principle that no private person should be made to bear the burden of social housing and the government has sole responsibility for that reality. When the White Paper effectively leaves the same burden on the same shoulders, only marginally alleviated, for the next two decades, it remains the splendid declaration that it is.
While the White Paper purports to be generous and just, it fails to acknowledge that the government is under the obligations of our supreme law to be far more just and it is not a matter of generosity but of payment of what has been long overdue. Few people seem to have noticed but the exception to the human rights provisions inserted into the 1964 Constitution to prevent landlords seeking redress 44 years ago is no longer there. No such knowing denial of fundamental rights can ever again be made as long as we remain signatory to the EU treaties. It is not Mr Dalli's White Paper that grants these rights and no legislation that is produced from it can prevent them being vindicated in Maltese and European courts.
Once more, a PN government raises in excuse for dragging its feet forever the possible lack of cooperation from the opposition. Who said that Labour will oppose? Even if it did, a just and effective reform fully in place and committing the nation at the next election would be an insurmountable challenge to any future government. Only a botched up job will leave us with landlords seeking redress and a future government, PN or MLP, obliged to take draconian measures to address a housing catastrophe. Only a far wider reform encompassing all properties and, especially, all vacant properties will give us all a fighting chance.
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