When Prime Minister Robert Abela announced his first cabinet in mid-January, despite concern about its increased size, there was praise both for the balance of the portfolios allocated and the general choice of ministers and parliamentary secretaries to fill them.

Matters changed swiftly, however, in the fallout from Justyne Caruana’s forced resignation as Gozo Minister when Clint Camilleri was invited to replace her. Concern, and a degree of puzzlement, arose as a result of the prime minister’s decision to place the Wild Birds Regulation Unit under the portfolio of the Gozo minister, where it had never before been placed and did not logically belong.

There can be no argument that the prime minister may allocate responsibilities to his ministers as he considers fit provided, first, that the legislation underpinning that responsibility allows it; and, second, it makes good policy sense to do so.

Malta’s Environment Protection Act (CAP 549) clearly places responsibility for hunting and trapping under the minister responsible for the environment, certainly not under the Minister for Gozo. Legally, therefore, Minister Camilleri cannot exercise any oversight over the Wild Birds Unit – whose tasks include, inter alia, sustainable hunting governance, wild birds’ conservation and the coordination of enforcement efforts – until the relevant legal notices to change the legislation and rectify the current lacuna have been passed.

There is also a fundamental policy objection to the transfer of the Wild Birds Regulation Unit to the newly promoted Gozo minister, which should give the prime minister pause.

It concerns the essential matter of good governance and the perennial issue in Malta of conflict of interest. Camilleri is a registered trapper so there is definitely a deep conflict of interest here.

As Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries and Animal Rights in the last administration, he was also responsible for the Wild Birds Regulation Unit and, in the eyes of bird conservationists and environmentalists, he did not acquit himself well.

According to BirdLife Malta, since 2015, prosecutions and punishments for infringements of bird protection regulations have fallen away spectacularly from 677 fines to just 47 in 2018. Extraordinarily, the specialist enforcement branch had no manpower in 2019.  

As a matter of good governance, therefore, the prime minister, by his decision for Camilleri to continue with oversight of the unit, is perpetuating the inefficiencies and ineffectiveness of the past but also the tensions between conservationists and hunters that existed before.

The cabinet reshuffle was an opportunity to turn over a new page. It was time for a new broom in the Wild Birds Regulation Unit, but the prime minister has opted instead for more of the same.

While the hunting fraternity will undoubtedly feel comforted by responsibility for the unit being retained by Camilleri through the unorthodox gambit of transferring it to the ministry of Gozo, it signals clearly whose side the government is on in this vexed matter by seeking flagrantly to appease the hunting and bird-trapping community.

And to top it all, today we report that the new head of the government’s anti-bird poaching unit is himself a bird trapper. This is disgraceful.

It sends completely the wrong message politically to environmentalists and bird conservationists – not only in Malta, but also internationally – that this administration intends to continue with minimalist enforcement of the bird protection laws. Malta’s reputational damage, already tarnished in so many fields, seems destined for further obloquy.