This Labour government’s very poor record in accountability, good governance and transparency is now well established, with the Panama scandal being only the latest example (and by far the most serious) of this shocking trend which has characterised the administration led by Joseph Muscat.

There is, however, another area where the government has performed absolutely abysmally ever since it was elected to office just over three years ago: safeguarding the environment and protecting Malta and its people from overdevelopment. The government has barefacedly put the interests of big business and the building industry well ahead of those of ordinary citizens.

A prime example is Sliema, where overdevelopment is going beyond the already lamentable levels reached under the previous administration. The proposed mega project at the Fort Cambridge complex in Tigné, which includes a 40-floor hotel, and the 38- storey Townsquare Towers project, which is part of the proposed redevelopment of the old Union Club, are cases in point. Both projects are concentrated in a tiny, densely populated area of land. If approved, they would ruin that part of Sliema for good.

Townsquare would be particularly damaging to the residents’ quality of life. It is opposed by the Sliema local council, which has warned that it would be impossible to improve the road network to accommodate the increased traffic that would be generated in the area. Din l-Art Ħelwa too is objecting to the project, together with all the residents in Qui-si-Sana. The heritage NGO identified traffic, air quality and density as key problems, saying daily lives will only be worsened by a project of this scale.

The Townsquare project includes the excavation of the site, the construction of an underground car park and service facilities, a number of low-rise buildings, food and beverage outlets, a pedestrianised mixed development of retail and office outlets, and residential units. Construction is estimated to take 54 months, and one can only shudder at the expected environental impact on residents, such as noise and dust pollution, as well as the effects on the infrastructure.

The proposed hotel at Fort Cambridge has also been sharply criticised, with prominent architects saying the project lacks long-term planning. Prof. Richard England, for example, remarked that developments like this require a clear master plan as well as a profound study of their impact on traffic and infrastructure. “Otherwise,” he said, “the whole thing is going to burst”. In his opinion, the way such high-rises could work in Malta would be to have them constrained to one specific zone. Spreading them around would cause a collapse of “the whole traffic system, the whole infra structure, the whole economic system...”. Quite an indictment from the esteemed architect.

And in reality, how much space in the market is there for so many of these mega projects? The Sunday Times of Malta last week reported that the Seabank Group was planning high-end residential apartments in two towers on the former ITS site in St George’s Bay – on land still owned by the public and where residential development is not permitted by planning laws.

Besides the suspicions of back-room dealing raised by the story, the risk is that these mega projects will create a property bubble, a scenario with unthinkable consequences for the economy should it burst.

It is indeed tragic that the government has sold its soul to big business and to developers. It has adopted a savage laissez-faire, neo-liberal economic policy when it comes to development and it has shed its social conscience; we are all worse off as a result. This is not what we expected from a supposedly social democratic government.

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