The government yesterday voted in favour of one of the counter motions moved by Opposition leader Simon Busuttil to the Strategic Plan for the Environment and Development (SPED)
The motion, the second moved by Dr Busuttil on Tuesday, called for any changes to development boundaries to be approved by Parliament. It was approved unanimously.
The House was taking the vote, after a division, to approve the Strategic Plan itself.
Dr Busuttil’s first motion – that the plan should be sent back to Mepa to be redrafted from scratch – was defeated.
Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said the first motion could not be accepted by the government for the simple reason that the 1992 Structure Plan was outdated.
The country could not continue to work with a 1992 document
The country could not continue to work with a 1992 document. The government looked upon SPED positively as there were no votes against it in the House committee.
The second Opposition amendment proposed that revisions to the 2006 development zone boundaries shall be construed as an amendment of the plan and, therefore, they needed to be approved by Parliament.
The legislation on SPED already laid down that any changes in boundaries had to be brought before the House for approval. The Opposition’s counter motion meant that the SPED document itself would now state this.
The government would be voting for the motion, he said, because it had nothing to hide and was not afraid of parliamentary scrutiny. This would double the certainty that amendments were approved by the House.
PN calls division
Last night the Opposition called a division on the votes taken over SPED, and with a 20-minute break between each vote, the session was expected to carry on into the early morning.
The Opposition said it was doing this because it wanted to send a message that there was something fundamentally wrong in the way the government was doing things.
The government was regulating the environment instead of protecting it. It was riding roughshod over civil society and well-meaning citizens who wanted a fair balance between the environment and development.