The Nationalist Party held a convention about the environment and many people got very excited and gurgled on about this great new green awakening.
There were a lot of tweets with the Idea Ambjent hashtag and much sipping of fairtrade coffee and we were told this would be the dawn of a new age, where the Nationalist Knights of the Environment would ride out in battle against the Developer Orcs and their Labour Allies.
The leader of the Opposition said the elephant in the room was the environment and whether a pro-environment PN could win the general election.
In 2014 he had said the elephant in the room was hunting. I wasn’t at the convention, so I can’t really comment on the elephants or political dinosaurs in the room, but I can say this – the elephant in the room is not the environment but the PN’s credibility.
The elephant-in-the-room term refers to a controversial issue, which is obvious to everyone but which is deliberately ignored because it is too painful or embarassing to bring up.
Now over the last decade, environmentalists have been pleading with the political class to pull the brakes on the take-up of virgin land and unbridled development.
As they have done on other related issues such as spring hunting, water use, air pollution and the permanent traffic chaos. What have they got for their pains? Absolutely nothing from the Nationalist Party.
Back in 2006 when the PN government opened the floodgates for development in the rationalisation exercise, did we hear a squeak from anyone in the PN camp about it?
And then, last year, when a word from Simon Busuttil could have spurred the party faithful to stop the unsustainable spring bird slaughter, did he utter that one word, which could have made all the difference? No. He hemmed and hawed and dragged in arcane points negotiated light years ago, when the situation was not as unsustainable.
More to the point, he ignored the significance of making a stand at that point in time. That was the crucial moment when Busuttil could have shown that the environmental lobby was worthy of support and that it could act as a counterweight to the hunting and land-grabbing forces.
The PN’s environmental credentials are as poor as its track record and no number of conventions are going to change that
It was an opportunity to lend succour to a movement which has suffered such devastating setbacks. Busuttil skipped away from that opportunity. In doing so, he passed up the possibility of gaining the trust of anybody with a memory span greater than that of a goldfish.
Because it’s all very well to hold conventions and to deride Prime Minister Joseph Muscat for bringing about the Dubaification of Malta and to rail against his land deal shambles – I would be the first to agree – but if the PN stood back and did nothing when it could, it is not going to do anything for the party’s credibility.
Besides feeling totally betrayed, people who hold the environment dear see that we have now reached the point of no return. There are practically no unbuilt-up areas, few places devoid of traffic chaos and noise, so what is there left for the PN to defend? The manicured roundabouts? The sterile squares of ‘landscaped areas’ in the shadows of the tower blocks built on the PN’s watch? The water table which has been used (for free) by water-bottling companies? The hideous views across the harbour from Valletta? The eyesore that is Smart City? The wild animals cooped up in the illegal zoo of PN’s erstwhile donor Charles Polidano? The birds? The thousands of square metres of ODZ land proposed as a race track (and which the PN currently supports)?
So what exactly is the PN going to safeguard? You know I’m all for reinvention and this modern mantra of being able to be anything you want to be if you wish hard enough and align your positive energies and swing healing crystals between your eyebrows, but how exactly do you discard such a pathetic environmental record? By comparing it to Labour’s equally shoddy one?
How does that make the PN any better, especially as it faltered at every possible opportunity, including the hunting referendum one, some months ago? Renowned author Stephen King said a writer was only as good as his last book.
That applies to political parties and leaders too. The PN’s environmental credentials are as poor as its track record and no number of conventions are going to change that.
cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt