Appeasing the hunting lobby

Election campaigns in Malta are miraculous. Long-standing problems get solved at the blink of an eye. The MRI appointment you have been longing for finally arrives. The pot-holed road leading to your house suddenly gets tarmacked. Your mother’s hip-replacement surgery gets a date. And for hunters—the request to have lifetime bans imposed on convicted persons lifted after a while.

The Labour Party has promised the hunting lobby that if it is elected to government once again it will introduce legal amendments that would allow poachers who would have been handed down a lifetime ban by the court the possibility of re-applying for a licence after a period of time has lapsed.

You won’t find this proposal in the PL’s election manifesto. It is a side agreement like Konrad Mizzi’s side agreement in August 2019 that committed government to grant Steward Health Care €100 million if the law courts cancelled the corrupt hospitals deal.

Few details have been made available about this proposal. The chief of hunting lobby group FKNK, Lucas Micallef, has told MaltaToday the proposed amendment will not apply to those who would have shot down protected birds. But other than this we have no idea what has been agreed behind closed doors; behind everyone’s backs.

What irks ordinary voters, who may not necessarily be anti-hunting or abolitionists, is the seemingly special privilege granted to hunters and trappers by politicians. The appeasement is nauseating because it always happens underhandedly with little discussion, if at all, with other stakeholders. And this is compounded by a general lack of enforcement to clamp down on poaching and illegalities.

Matters over which there should be no controversy, such as the registration of stuffed birds in private collections, keep getting postponed or ignored because this simple exercise will serve as a powerful tool to fight illegality. Unfortunately, it’s all about watering down hunting laws and making them less severe.

And it’s not just the Labour Party that has adopted this appeasement strategy. The Nationalist Party has also made a commitment to protect the hunting and trapping traditions. This commitment can mean anything—we really do not know because there is nothing in the electoral programme. We shudder to think what is being promised face to face.

BirdLife Malta is correct when it says electoral considerations are taking precedence over environmental protection, the rule of law, and the broader interests of society. It succinctly described this worrying trend as a political race between the two major parties to outbid each other with commitments that risk weakening accountability and enforcement within the hunting and trapping sector.

The obvious question is: If politicians are so keen to bend over backwards to appease the hunting lobby, why aren’t they half as accommodating to environmental activists and resident groups yearning for a planning system that puts community wellbeing first?

We won’t hold our breath waiting for an answer because side agreements brokered away from the madding crowd seem to have greater importance than electoral manifestos.