Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1302895
11 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 25 OCTOBER 2020 OPINION bull's eye with that statement… but there is still a level at which the Prime Minister's response was also 100% accurate. Loose- ly translated from the gobble- degook I quoted above… what Robert Abela was really putting across, through that DOI state- ment, was nothing but a simple (and completely truthful) de- scription of the actual state of affairs, from the ground up. And it's not applicable merely to the COVID-19 regulations: it is, quite frankly, how the Robert Abela administration tends to functions in all areas, and at all levels. In a nutshell: it is not the government's job to enforce the rules and regulations it comes up with; on the contrary, it is everyone else's responsibility to just comply… in the absence of any enforcement whatsoever. And who in his right mind could possibly deny the factual- ity of that statement? Its truth is in evidence almost every- where you look: from the way Abela's government drew up plans to regulate unlicensed, il- legal zoos… only to immediate- ly shelve them, when an irate 'zoo-keeper' – who also happens to be a well-known Labour sup- porter – publicly objected… and we never heard another word about the new regulations again. The result of that retraction is that owners of unlicensed, illegal zoos have been left to their own devices to 'regulate' their estab- lishments… just as journalists at that press conference were told that that they had to observe those regulations of their own accord (and not, say, because there would be consequences for breaching them.) And it's the same almost lit- erally everywhere else. I've al- ready mentioned the Miżieb and L-Aħrax deals, so I may as well expand on that for my next ex- ample. In signing over those two enor- mous swathes of land to the hunters' federation, Robert Ab- ela also divested his own gov- ernment of any responsibility for the administration of the result- ing hunting reserves. This was even written into the contract itself: which not only empowers the FKNK to draw up its own project plan delineating the site, and thus determine which areas are accessible to the public in both sites; but even, incredibly, to enforce hunting regulations themselves. And to cap it all, the same con- tract even pre-emptively exon- erates the hunters' federation for any failure in that regard: for the FKNK has only been obliged to ensure that no illegalities take place "within [the FKNK's] rea- sonable power". Going on the hunting lobby's past track record in that de- partment, the only foreseeable outcome of this agreement will be… more hunting illegalities, and less enforcement that there already is (in other words, prac- tically none at all). But what do you think will happen, the next time a flock of supposedly protected birds gets blasted out of the skies above L-Aħrax and Il-Mizieb? You don't need to be infallible to ac- curately predict this one: Robert Abela will blame the law-break- ers for breaking the law… but not himself, or his government, for diluting environmental pro- tection laws to such a degree in the first place. And of course, he would once again be perfectly 'right'… as he always was in the past, and will always be in the future. Not in any moral sense of the word, of course; nor on any factual level, either. No, he'd be 'right' because that is undeniably the way the cook- ie crumbles in this country right now: and this in undeniably because the Robert Abela ad- ministration has weakened the country's enforcement sector so very much, that 'rules and regu- lations' have become practically unenforceable… with very visi- ble, and very depressing results.