It’s really quite simple. Hunters don’t have a right to shoot birds; they have a licence issued by the government to do so. They pay their licence, while the rest of us foot the bill for the police and the army to try and stop them from blowing anything that flies out of our skies.
During open season, anyone out for a walk in a countryside splattered with RTO signs and Bangladesh-style huts would certainly feel short-changed, given the taxes we pay. You don’t argue with shotguns and this Labour government does not argue with hunters. Inversely. We’re all equal now, you see, degenerate minorities and all.
The government is planning to allow trappers to catch 26,850 finches come autumn. It’s not because it is looking for loopholes, we’ve just been assured. Funny, we all still remember the Parliamentary Secretary for Animal Rights, Roderick Galdes (he should change his title, it’s offensive) saying exactly the opposite on April 30, 2013. He’s either changed his mind or found that loophole and plans to sell it like a Maltese passport, also the fruit of a loophole.
Reading the heading in Times of Malta announcing the government’s grandiose plans to appease hunters, I’d wished the paper had also carried a photo of a finch because I’m sure I never saw one outside a cage. Apart from sparrows and pigeons, robins are the only ‘exotic’ creatures I have ever seen flying free on this godforsaken island. Our hunters appear to have a right to trap them but I have no right to see them. Funny, how ‘minority rights’ can work against you under Labour.
The hunters have come up with a petition signed by an impressive 104,000-odd people saying that, forget the waffle, we shouldn’t hold abrogative referenda when minority interests or privileges are involved. The FKNK tribe chief, Lino Farrugia, said we should restrict referenda to issues like divorce and possible abortion. Really, and we were all led to believe that the Nationalists had grown arrogant?
Hunters are warning fellow minorities that if they get the chop, which looks unlikely, others may follow like off-roaders, horse racing enthusiasts, feast enthusiasts and, yes, of course, gays.
Cyrus Engerer was there in Valletta last week, taking a break from his computer to support a crowd of sour faces as they present a petition to effectively stop abrogative referenda.
The issue is simple: are hunters a minority? No, they’re just a bunch of people with a terrible pastime. If they were a minority, their rights would be protected by our Constitution which upholds human rights. Any abrogative referendum which impinges on those rights would be thrown out of our courts before you can say ‘shoot it’.
But Labour has abused the term minority to pander for the gay vote. It has perversed and degraded its meaning to the point that minority can now mean anything to anyone and practically anything has become a right, including adopting children and shooting birds. Engerer can explain this perverse logic better.
Hunting has also got nothing to do with tradition or culture. Just because a hunter’s father or grandfather was too uncultured to find nothing to do with his spare time other than kill birds does not make hunting a tradition, only a very bad habit that should be stopped in the public interest.
And there lies the catch – public interest. Shorn of any political ideology, Labour as a party and in government is simply a conglomeration of interest groups like hunters that have come together to promote their myopic self-centred interests.
This is the direct opposite of what constitutes public interest. This wide, fragmented movement Joseph Muscat boasts of is a living, contradictory coalition that thrives on selfishness, narrow-mindedness and that terrible island mentality that’s so incestious that their numbers are increasing, not dropping.
Yes, that dumb rabble is growing bigger and they’re all happily waving car VAT refund cheques and decreased energy bills paid for by themselves, the taxpayers. As my science teacher often used to say when she looked down on our dumbfounded faces: happy in their state of ignorance.
The hunters’ petition is a threat to democratic rights
That 104,000-signature petition is a rude awakening to anyone thinking that all’s fine under Labour and that they can get by if they keep their head low. Justice, human rights and the common good do not fall out of the sky. They need to be fought for every day to be safeguarded. That hunters’ petition is the very epitomy of all that Labour stands for: selfishness. It is a threat to democratic rights.
In such a situation, compromise is not the answer because if you do not stand up to a bully, even when brandishing a gun, he’ll be back for more. If that abrogative referendum on spring hunting does not get through, it’s going to be mayhem out there.
The PN has been hopelessly pussyfooting around the hunting issue for decades with abysmal results, yet its stand on the hunters’ petition was correct. It said it will not move the FKNK motion forward in Parliament as it did not believe people should have their right to hold a referendum denied.
Faced with this threat to the hightest democratic tool of all – referenda – the PN should really consider going the whole hog and push for the abolition of hunting. Writing hunters off would only do the party credit and underline once more the great divide that exists between itself and Labour on issues of principle.
That petition is immoral. Hunters should pay the price for even proposing it.
Labour’s stand was naturally different from the PN’s. The hunters found a willing candidate to table their petition, Parliamentary Secretary Michael Falzon, the man spearheading the disintegration of the planning authority to cut the red tape for our ever-hungry building industry.
Falzon tried to make a short, passionate speech in Parliament to explain why he took it upon himself to forward that anti-democratic petition. The Speaker’s proposal of a Parliamentary TV channel makes sense only in this context because it would have been interesting to watch Falzon’s face as he made such a shameful statement. Right inside the country’s highest institution where democracy is meant to be at work, a government MP presents a petition that negates that very democracy. How very Labour of him.
He started off apologetically, saying that people had asked him why he was doing this and that it can reflect badly on him. Falzon, a former hunter, keeps some good company, that we can credit him.
Then he said that as he believed in the rights of every Maltese citizen, he had no problem presenting a petition on behalf of 104,000 signatories. Every citizen should have his rights protected and just because someone has a hobby, or believes in something, he should not be considered a second-class citizen.
Obviously, all warped up in his party’s spin, the irony of what he says escapes him. That 104,000 people want to do away with abrogative referenda to pursue their selfish interests does not put the onus on him to present their petition, unless he agrees to it. His other option would have been to refuse to endorse it.
Numbers do not justify what is wrong and undemocratic. History has shown that a thousand times over. But we forget, this is Labour.
And then Falzon appealed for sympathy and sounded hurt by caricatures of him in newspapers that ‘denigrate or made fun’ of him. An MP who stoops so low to appease a lobby group and offends intelligence deserves more, not less, caricatures.
Finally, Falzon came up with his trump card: “I always had the courage, and I pray to God I will always have the courage, to say what I believe in without fear.”
Yes, there are many other people out there praying as well.