Contrary to what might have been implied, the PL reaction to the government's consultation document on green issues was not merely limited to our concern that we remain laggards on many environmental issues without having even reached the minimum expected of us.
Our primary concern is that although we agreed in principle a priori to engage in the consultation process that we were invited to participate in by the Parliamentary Secretary for the Environment, Mario de Marco, we had been asking for specific terms of reference for weeks on end from the moment the first public announcement of the "project" was made by the PS.
When these were submitted to us a few weeks ago - months after the PS had expressed his wish to engage the PL in the process - I had sent Dr de Marco an e-mail seeking further clarification on certain issues. This was dated July 17, 2010.
This was only replied to 10 days after its being sent in spite of my being promised a prompt reply. And even worse, the reply reached us only after the consultation document was announced and launched publicly.
In our mail of July 17 we had made it clear that we would sincerely like to see this exercise develop into a pro-active all-hands-on-board policy document rather than a mere desk exercise that will hardly improve on the current state of affairs.
Having already studied carefully the State Of The Environment report and discussed it at length in the House, we had looked forward to being duly advised as to what value the proposed consultation paper would bring to the work already carried out on the State of the Environment Report.
On the international level we felt that rather than merely listing our international obligations - as implied - it was even more important to identify whether we are on track, or lagging behind, and even more importantly to ascertain what needs to be done in concrete terms to attain these obligations as well as within which specific time frame.
We had also sought to establish whether our input would be on the same level as that of other stakeholders which so far have remained unidentified to us or whether a level of differentiation will be applied - particularly since in Dr de Marco's own words, work on the paper had started as far back as May this year.
We remain committed to participate actively, but feel somewhat perplexed that on one hand the PS claims that we should be courageous enough to go beyond our international obligations while on the other hand his own draft consultation document states in Para 1.7 that: "This paper does not provide details of the EU policy framework and the resulting obligations and targets."
All this justifies our genuine concerns.