The highlight of last week's electoral campaign news was the announcement by Lawrence Gonzi that a Nationalist Party had been converted into the only genuine Green party on the island. You were one of the first people in Malta to defend the idea that there were limits to economic growth because of environmental considerations. This happened probably because of your involvement with the founders of the Club of Rome, Alexander King and Aurelio Beccei, who were also colleagues of yours on the Council of the International Ocean Institute at the University of Malta. Do you think that the PN has really had a Road-of-Damascus-type experience?

The Prime Minister certainly seems to have realised the truth of another argument that I have been stating over some years. A most important factor in any crucial policy question in Malta is space. That is why the body that was originally envisaged as a land-use regulator very quickly changed into the sole dominant planning authority over all aspects of the social and economic life of our islands.

If anyone doubts the overriding power of the body, the name of which is now Malta Environment and Planning Authority, let me just say this - the development of higher education in Malta at the time I was University Rector was entirely conditioned and, in fact, constricted by the Planning Authority (as it was then known). The council of the University would decide, for instance, that it should accept a munificent offer from abroad to build a special school on University grounds to serve basically as a kind of laboratory for the Faculty of Education or that courses in project management should be set up in the Faculty of Architecture for which purpose some buildings had to be adapted.

But it was impossible to carry out these projects because the Planning Authority would not authorise the University to erect the required buildings - on the ground that it did not consider that the objectives for which permission was required were the proper priorities. I was advised that the Planning Authority legally had the power to do what it was doing, namely dictate to the University what the priorities in higher education were.

Now I had been a prime promoter of the setting up of the Planning Authority in the hope that it would put to an end the notorious abuses that had taken place under the Labour government. The Planning Authority had been set up to be a bulwark against corruption. But in its legal setting up it was given such nearly absolute and all comprehensive powers that sooner or later it was bound to provide yet further proof of the truth of Lord Acton's famous dictum: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

So you agree with Gonzi's personal assumption of the responsibility to reform Mepa if he is re- elected?

The proposition that I am wholeheartedly supporting is rather that Mepa should be responsible in any case to whoever is the Prime Minister. This is consistent with two other views that I have been defending lately and that have been disagreed with even by a few friends. The first is that the Prime Minister's role has, in fact, become here as elsewhere a Presidential function.

Secondly, that spatial decisions have become almost generally among the most important political decisions and that in Malta they are paramount. It is not just that we are a small island, although a sovereign state too, but that "outsmarting" our smallness is, as I have argued previously, the next big step that we have to take in the progression from independence to membership of the European Union to locating ourselves in an appropriate niche in cyberspace; it could be as champions of open access systems that correspond in the social context, consequent upon the electronic revolution, to what co-operatives were in agricultural societies and what workers' councils were in industrial societies.

Open access systems represent the participating dimension in the management of power systems; i.e. the hallmark of Christian Democracy and Catholic Social teaching. Our championing of open access in cyberspace is the logical continuation of our successful proposition of the "common heritage of mankind" principle at the UN in the Law of the Sea and in International Law and governance more generally. It could be even more important in its practical consequences for Malta as a small island state than even the holistic approach to marine space has so far proved to be. Spatial planning is already recognised to be of primary importance in the Blue Paper published by EU Commissioner Joe Borg that is due for major discussion on March 11, when presumably we will have a new Cabinet.

Coastal zone management is a major item in the Mediterranean Regional Plan for Sustainable Development. There can be no doubt that even internally consideration of space will be a key factor in determining Malta's success or failure in the future.

The Prime Minister's stance vis-à-vis Mepa should not be reduced to his determination to remove any smell of sleaze and ensure consistency. It even goes beyond redressing the environmental balance, in similar fashion to his redressing of the financial deficit. It is an integral part of his 'Vision 2015'.

In his Borg Olivier Memorial Lecture, on November 5, 2007, Gonzi said: "The biggest obstacle to Maltese development is the smallness of our country. How are we to reconcile the diverse uses of the space that we have - economic, social and cultural - so that as far as possible everybody can enjoy it without spoiling it?

However, these are not just challenges; they are also opportunities. Information technology can help us transcend in some ways our smallness. And, above all, the new importance of the sea .... shows that we can enlarge our space, so to say according to the criteria of the Lisbon Agenda, that is with environmental sensitivity while becoming more competitive". (My translation from the Maltese original).

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti