Environment policy ‘cannot mask government failings’

The Labour Party could agree with the National Environment Policy in principle, but it did not mask the government’s miserable environmental track record, Leo Brincat said. The policy was an extensive environmental wish list that was hard to disagree with but the “proof of the pudding was in the eating”, Mr Brincat, the Labour Party’s spokesman on the environment, added. Scratch past its various proposals and the policy emerged as a document lacking concrete targets or commitments.

When deadlines had been set, it was “very convenient” that they fell at some point beyond this Administration cycle, Mr Brincat said.

Asked whether a Labour Administration would adhere to the policy, Mr Brincat refused to be drawn into specifics but said the first thing a Labour government would do was take stock of the environmental situation at the time.

Labour had no intention of “throwing the policy document away”, Mr Brincat said, but nor was it willing to commit itself to measures without having evaluated them first. Good practices would be continued while bad ones would be discarded, he said. Mr Brincat did, however, suggest air quality and environmental health would both be key environmental issues for a Labour Administration.

The draft policy was launched for consultation by the government two weeks ago. It is a comprehensive document that cuts across an entire series of environmental issues and aims to lay down a policy framework from now to 2020.

The policy’s success, Mr Brincat said, required political will, accountability and transparency, all issues that the government had been found to be lacking in environmental terms.

The policy included some questionable definitions of what constituted an environmental measure, he continued. It was “an insult to people’s intelligence”, he said, to describe the extension to the Delimara power station as an “environmental measure”.

In criticism similar to that made by hydrologist Marco Cremona recently, Mr Brincat queried the proposal to double the number of green jobs by 2015. The government was being deceptive, he said, by claiming that there were 5,000 green jobs in Malta, yet failing to explain how it had arrived at the figure.

Saying that Malta’s environmental policies would go beyond EU standards, as the policy suggested, was not credible when the government was being reprimanded by the European Commission for failing to report on already existing environmental directives, Mr Brincat charged.

In a statement issued last night, Parliamentary Secretariat for the Environment pointed out that the government had invested in a number of successful environmental projects which proved that Malta was moving in the right direction, a fact which was also acknowledged by Janez Potocnik, European commissioner responsible for the environment. He said the policy was meant to show the path towards safeguarding and bettering our environment.