The flavour of the week, or rather
the past week and a half, seems to be the Planning Authority.
The Opposition has been mounting a
campaign to discredit the authority with the opposition’s member on
the PA board alleging time and again that there is sleaze inside the
authority and that the authority is a corrupt structure.
Our country is now well into setting up a large number of regulatory
bodies. This is the way in which the country will be run in future. The
PA is the first regulatory body of a certain size to be set up, some 10
years ago. It had its learning curve – rather two learning curves, one
the learning curve of a regulatory body and secondly the learning curve
of the body to regulate development in Malta – and by now it should
have learnt its roles and its ropes.
The issue is crucial: the regulatory bodies cannot become government
rubber-stamps, nor can they transpose government bureaucratic procedures
to a higher plane. The aim is to get them to process matters in quicker
time.
But another aim is to enable even more transparency into the
proceedings. And yet another aim is to see to it that the regulators
actually regulate, that is have enough clout to see to it that the rules
are enforced.
In its 10 years or so of existence, the Planning Authority has
established a sort of track record of sorts. On the one hand, it caused
widespread irritation and worse by the delays in its procedure. That has
now been addressed. The PA’s prime duty now is to develop a sort of
code of practice built on precedents so that what is decided on one day
is linear with the decisions taken the previous day, and the previous
month, and the previous year, and that what is decided on a lower level
gets confirmed at the higher level, and vice-versa.
This is a huge task, for every developer thinks that his application has
an element of originality in it and wants it to be approved even if the
others like it were not. His, he’s sure, is a special case.
The authority must above all strive very hard to remove the very current
perception that it is strong with the weak and weak with the strong.
This may not have been the case, but there is a certain public
perception of the PA like that. The fact that nowadays enforcement is
getting stronger is something to be proud of, but that took far too long
to be done.
At the same time, the authority, without bending over backwards to
please entrepreneurs and/or developers must also be careful not to
become a hindrance to the development of the economy. Having said that,
one must also point out that today we are already regretting the lack of
proper environmental consciousness in our collective past. Let us not
tomorrow lament about mistaken decisions we take today from which
tomorrow there will be no reprieve.
These are all concerns that the PA must take into consideration every
day of its activity. One may have qualms about this or that decision by
the PA, about its methods and its approach.
But to move from a critical approach to one which, as the Opposition is
doing, alleges sleaze and corruption, undermines the whole basis on
which the PA is built.
One notes that whenever the Opposition’s spokesmen speak about the PA,
they always adduce incongruent, unprecedented, or downright wrong
decisions by the authority to substantiate their allegations of
corruption. That’s not enough, not by a long chalk.
The meaning of corruption in any language on earth goes far beyond that:
for a party to move from mistaken judgements to allege corruption is
ultimately counterproductive: sooner or later this party will be in
power. What will it do then? Will it arrest every worker at the
authority? Will it institute quick trials? Will it bring back the old
system whereby the minister decides all (look at the Zabbar-Marsascala
road to see what happens when this system reigns)?
Ultimately too, when sleaze allegations take the place of normal
political argumentation, there is no place for any political debate. You
either prove it and hit home, or else you admit you do not have a
figleaf to protect yourself with. In any democracy, allegations of
sleaze can only be answered with two words: Prove it. This time, don’t
talk of moral certainty: that’s neither here nor there. Prove it.
