The prime minister's criticism of developers for filing certain planning applications was a sign that the government lacked confidence in its own institutions to make sensible decisions about development, Opposition Leader Bernard Grech said on Sunday.
He was speaking during a radio interview broadcast on the PN’s radio station NET FM.
Grech was reacting to an interview Prime Minister Robert Abela gave on Saturday, in which he criticised developers for filing planning applications that breach planning policies, saying that these were ‘non-starters’ that should not even be entertained by planners.
Abela’s comments came hot on the heels of reports of a planning application in the heart of Birkirkara that seeks to turn a disused palazzo near St Helen’s Basilica into a four-storey boutique hotel. The application has sparked debate and drawn criticism for its design as well as its location within the urban conservation area of the locality.
Grech said that Abela had no solutions to the country’s problems and only sought to blame them on others and such was the case with development. Rather than blaming developers, Grech said that it was the fault of the institutions that failed to keep them in check that were to blame.
“Obviously, cowboys of any sort are not acceptable, but when you create a culture of impunity where every permit application is expected to be accepted because that is what the prime minister wants, then people are going to put up their own applications with the same expectations,” Grech said.
“When you say ‘don’t propose certain projects’ it is a vote of no confidence in your own institutions because they are not capable of saying no to certain projects.”
The PN, Grech continued, had been criticised in the past for introducing policies to protect urban village cores, but it was thanks to those decisions that the public was able to enjoy those areas relatively untouched.
“Despite the criticism we stuck to our vision, we looked towards the common good and today we can enjoy these urban conservation areas. It is clear that the PN is capable of protecting and bettering our cultural heritage because we are able to take the necessary decisions freely,” he said.
Grech again criticised the government’s policy of growing the economy by expanding the population, saying that it was unsustainable to continue to grow the economy at the cost of the people’s standard of living.
Debt rising by €2 million every day
The Labour government, he said, was growing the country’s national debt by €2 million every day and has nothing to show for it, while people continued to buckle under the burden of the rising cost of living and have their quality of life shattered by the worsening state of the environment.
Rather than being able to strive for quality jobs and better professional development, Maltese and Goztan people were stuck in a race to the bottom with foreign workers who were willing to work for less pay and kill competition for a better job market.
A PN government, Grech said, would continue working and refining its electoral proposals and grow the economy through better solutions, like introducing new economic sectors, providing better jobs, removing taxes on the cost of living adjustment, creating a fund for importers to help subsidise the local cost of goods and incentivise investors who meet their ESG goals.