Nine years ago, there was a lot of public outrage expressed at the then PN government’s rationalisation of the ODZ boundaries. Photo: Matthew Mirabelli

All eyes will be on the national protest that will be held on Saturday by Front Ħarsien ODZ. At the core of the participants will be the representatives of two dozen NGOs that have joined forces to protest against the siting of a Jordanian construction magnate’s university at Żonqor Point.

However, people studying the attendance will be focusing on how widely the whole of society will be represented.

It’s not just the sheer numbers. It’s also the demographics.

There’s a lot being said about how Maltese environmental consciousness is becoming sharper. Perhaps. You just know that environmental awareness is part of the zeitgeist when a papal encyclical promulgated today (and leaked on Monday) re-reads the entire Christian scriptural and spiritual tradition in the light of the global environmental crisis.

That said, the environmental signs of the times have been misread before. Nine years ago, there was a lot of public outrage expressed at the then Nationalist government’s rationalisation of the ODZ boundaries (in part, but only in small part, because some of the critics misunderstood the actual percentages involved; in one egregious case, by a factor of 900 per cent).

In the summer of 2006, anyone basing himself on what was said in the media about the boundaries would have concluded that the government was going to make itself widely unpopular. Some NGOs still think this today. But the two major political parties know better.

Up to that point, the PN government had been struggling in the polls, for the best part of three years. However, its own polls showed that the party’s ratings began finally to rise that summer – following the restriction of ODZ boundaries.

Labour noticed, which is why it’s not a coincidence that its own whispered unofficial promises – at least by some activists – included planning and ODZ policies that resemble what’s coming to light today.

It’s not that there wasn’t an important swathe of people who cared about the environment. The PN had won the 2008 election after having made some U-turns on environmental grounds while, for the election campaign itself, it used the iconography associated usually with the Greens (such as the picture of a young girl holding a flower on the cover of its electoral programme). But, back then, the people who cared were largely members of a restricted part of the whole electorate. Is it still like that today? That’s what the people studying the turnout on Saturday will be trying to sass out.

However, I believe that the keyword is opposition – a negative sentiment, as the Prime Minister might say. It’s not the positive conviction that all ODZ must be protected – the defining platform of the Front Ħarsien ODZ.

I suspect many people who today are against the Żonqor Point project would be prepared to countenance some development in ODZ. Perhaps, at Żonqor Point itself. And it has nothing to do with hypocrisy.

If you doubt me, try this thought experiment.

What would you say if the project had nothing to do with a new-fangled university that needed Malta’s reputation to succeed? If it said nothing about the needs of Marsascala eateries and landlords?

Imagine it was a project based on calling for a show of interest from some of the world’s top- and second-tier universities; indeed, that the government had attracted a handful of them because a Malta-based outreach would enhance their brand in a way that their Gulf campuses do not.

Everyone’s becoming greener while still prepared for trade-offs

Suppose the government then proceeded to suggest Żonqor Point as a campus for the lot of them – a ‘Knowledge City’ that would be linked up to a business park in Smart City – with top maritime sports facilities thrown in.

Would you then still be categorically against any ODZ development in the area?

My wager is that most readers would (just like me) weigh the trade-off carefully and not dismiss it out of hand.

If I’m correct, then we definitely need to be cautious about how we generalise when we consider the Żonqor Point controversy.

It’s clear that the scale of opposition owes at least as much to the behaviour of the Labour government as it does to principled opposition to any further shrinking of ODZ.

Opposition to the proposed Żonqor Point project has become a way to express general unhappiness with Labour’s willingness to feed a greedy construction lobby.

It’s the gluttony that is found to be objectionable, the sense that there will be no end to it, rather than an absolute reverence for keeping ODZ boundaries as they are.

For others, it’s the weakness of the economic arguments. The impact of a new university should be calculated in terms of its contribution to a knowledge economy, not to tourism.

Long-term students behave and consume differently from short-term tourists. There is no strong reason to conclude that a university in the south will lead to students spending most of their money there; the trip to Paceville is shorter than the trips many Arab students would make to keep themselves entertained in their own home cities.

In any case, who says that the profits made in Marsascala will be spent in southern Malta – on a better car bought from a Żejtun or Għaxaq dealer rather than one in Naxxar or the UK, or a meal eaten in Birżebbuġa rather than St Julian’s or London?

If Labour’s behaviour and arguments had been different, I don’t think we’d be seeing the opposition we see today. Some protestors – like Desiree Attard, Marsascala’s deputy mayor – would remain opposed on principle to any ODZ shrinkage. But many others would be less absolute.

If that’s true, then the growing environmentalist awareness in Malta isn’t quite what many people are saying it is.

It doesn’t represent convergence on an environmental standard. It’s rather that the environment is entering our political vocabulary the way, about 20 years ago, the economy did.

It’s been relatively recently that economic performance has become the key criterion by which Maltese governments are judged at election time.

Moreover, the fact that the economy is key doesn’t mean that we agree about what we want out of it. There are left, right and centrist arguments about it.

Something like this is happening with the environment. We will increasingly argue over it from left, right and centre. Each of us in his and her own way, we will judge governments on their environmental performance.

But a wide consensus on absolute protection of ODZ? It would be reading too much into Saturday’s protest. Everyone’s becoming greener while still prepared for trade-offs.

ranierfsadni@europe.com