Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1292560
10 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 27 SEPTEMBER 2020 Raphael Vassallo OPINION One step forward, two steps back EVER get the feeling that – in spite of so many undeniable sur- face improvements, in terms of legislation, regulation, invest- ment in infrastructure, and so on – in some respects, we seem to keep moving backwards instead of forwards? Admittedly, it's one of those things that are much easier to talk about in generic than spe- cific terms. Take the construc- tion and development sector, for instance. It would be facile to deny that all the regulation in place today – between the PA's meticulous permit appli- cation processes; the existence of a 'Building Regulation Office'; public consultation on all major projects; an Appeals Tribunal, and all the rest – is technically far superior to whatever existed before the 'Malta Environment and Planning Authority' was first established in 1992. Yet even just by looking out of your window - and choking on all the incoming dust as you open it – you can tell at a glance that the environmental and social impact of this sector is infinitely worse today, than anything we can re- member from the distant 1980s. Extend the view further, and you will realise that develop- ment has also been permitted to eat into far more previously vir- gin land – including arable land, or ODZ areas – than ever before: notwithstanding all the Consti- tutional and other legal instru- ments that supposedly exist to protect those areas; as well as the fact that environmental aware- ness (and, specifically, public re- sistance to over-development) is also arguably at an all-time high. But much more importantly: the cost in terms of human life and limb is much, much high- er than ever before, too. Over the past three years alone, more people have died in construction accidents – either in the form of workers killed on building sites, or people buried under the rub- ble of their own home – than in the preceding decade. The most recent such head- line ('Worker Killed in Cospic- ua Wall Collapse') dates back to July: almost a year after new building safety regulations had come into force, specifically in response to three previous fa- talities also caused by building collapses. And apart from instantly re- focusing the spotlight on health and safety, that particular case also reminded us that there are other issues that are also supposed to be well-regulated at law, but which consistently keep rearing their ugly heads regardless. Like the exploitation of vulnerable people (usually African migrants) for cheap la- bour… which is about as close to 'slavery' as you can get, without chains, whips and active slave markets. Sticking only to the construc- tion example, then: there almost seems to be inverse proportion- ality between the amount of of- ficial regulation that exists on paper… and how well that sector is actually regulated in practice. And I hate to say it, but this paradox is by no means limited to construction and develop- ment: or even to the environ- ment in general. You could, in fact, apply it to almost any other issue you care to name. (For the sake of another quick example: today, there is much more de- tailed, specific legislation tar- geting mafia/money laundering than we ever had before; yet at the same time, we also have much, MUCH more in the way of money laundering and organ- ised crime. Funny, huh?) But we are still talking in pure- ly generic – and therefore easy – terms. Matters become slight- ly harder when it comes to an- swering more specific questions: like why, exactly, does 'more leg- islation' always seem to always translate into 'less regulation'? OK, in some cases the answer might seem painfully obvious: and nowhere more so than the construction sector itself, where there are undisguised vested economic interests which out- weigh virtually all other consid- erations (as can be attested by all those PA public hearings we read about so often, where the voices of concerned residents are routinely drowned out, and all reasonable objections in- stantly overruled, in the mad scramble to churn out as many building permits as possible.) But the mechanics of how it actually happens are slightly less clear-cut. Are the regula- tions themselves flawed? And if so, is it simply a case of having been poorly cobbled together… or were certain loopholes in- tentionally built into the system itself, so as to ensure a pre-or- dained outcome? Alternatively, it could also be that there is nothing effectively wrong with the regulation side of things; but that, for various reasons – including unwilling- ness, but also lack of manpow- er, resources, etc. – it is the en- forcement side that is constantly found lacking or unprepared. In any case, the precise answer is obviously going to vary from scenario to scenario. So for the rest of this article, I will limit myself to just one other example (and I think you'll agree that it has certain parallels with the one I've been talking about so far). Hunting. It has, in fact, been a while since I've written about this par- ticular topic; and this also ties in with that 'inverse proportionali- ty' paradox I mentioned earlier. Now that I think about it, part of the reason I stopped paying so much attention was that (na- ively, I now realise) I was under the impression that the hunting situation had actually improved quite a bit in recent years. Yet this week – and we're not even halfway through the au- tumn season yet – Birdlife Malta described the present scenar- io as 'the worst year for illegal hunting': having received more injured birds over the past nine months, than over the previous eight years put together. And OK: Birdlife Malta chose to only go back eight years in their search for a 'worse year for illegal hunting in Malta'. Had they extended their time-frame by a couple more decades, we would have gone back to a time when there were no such things as 'hunting regulations' at all (and, more to the point, when being 'an anti-hunting activist in Malta' was the closest you'd ever get to actually experiencing the Vietnam War). Nearly everything we now asso- ciate with regulation in that area – e.g., that certain birds (the vast majority, as it happens) are sup- posedly 'protected'; that hunting is not permitted in certain res- ervations (or near schools, or in