Did you know that Malta doesn’t even have a fully functional digital land registry?
Currently, the process to assess whether a property you want to buy is registered, along with learning about its general history, involves filling a form and spending an ungodly amount of time shuffling back and forth with the Lands Registry.
If the sale goes through, guess what – more forms to fill in. You can already hear your notary rubbing their hands with glee in the background.
Malta doesn’t even have a unified registry. You have to either go through the much more expensive public registry (a database which traces individual owners and the properties they own) or the lands registry (based on location).
As explained here, signing up for the lands registry is not compulsory for all land owners in Malta, and is “purely voluntary” in 46% of all territory.
After decades of failed promises from successive governments, in February, then minister for lands Stefan Zrinzo Azzopardi was the latest government official to make the same promise. The minister claimed that the government aims to have a unified, digital lands registry covering all of Malta and Gozo by 2035.
Considering that Zrinzo Azzopardi recently begged the prime minister to remove the lands portfolio from him, I wouldn’t wait for any updates on this system with bated breath – not unless you want to asphyxiate.
Anyone who’s clued in about the Manoel island campaign can probably read the headline of this article and accurately guess where I’m going with this.
I’ll admit I was at least partly wrong about how receptive the major political parties would be to a parliamentary petition which effectively calls upon the government to rescind MIDI’s contract and turn Manoel island into a public park.
At first, their responses clearly aligned with my worst expectations: prime minister Robert Abela flatly refused to even consider it, while opposition leader Bernard Grech pissed off the entire country by describing it as “a beautiful dream” that will sadly not happen because, you know, contracts and stuff.
Those virtually identical stances crumbled under public pressure – the tacit agreement to let MIDI have their cake and eat it suddenly became a race to determine which of the major parties can make the quickest, most populist U-turn imaginable.
Though the parliamentary petition has no actual weight at law or in fact, it seems that the psychological pressure of around 30,000 signatures calling for the exact opposite of your party’s line on the subject has forced a course correction.
That is all well and good. Hats off to the diplomatic, media-savvy activists who spearheaded the campaign and managed to give the issue national prominence in practically every major forum of discussion.
However, the fact remains that there is something seriously wrong with a country in which politicians can decide that public land is to be gift-wrapped and handed over to the private sector.
Let us not forget that in Manoel island’s case, it was unanimous approval from both sides of Parliament that led to the Tigné Point/Manoel island concession.
All it took was a vote and a few quick signatures on the relevant documentation. The same system that allowed for that to happen was abused to enable dozens of other public-private concessions which yielded disastrous results for the taxpayers who shouldered the burden for it.
The question we need to ask ourselves now (while the Manoel island campaign’s got them by the short and curlies) is: what happens next?
Because the onslaught of overdevelopment isn’t going to stop, even if this particular campaign continues to overcome disproportionate odds against it and somehow manages to preserve Manoel island.
In a country where both political parties give major developers the red carpet treatment, win-by-petition can be considered a stay of execution at best. This is not the cynical part of me acting up again: it’s the cold, hard truth.
Beyond this, we must seriously push for a far more rapid implementation of a digital lands registry. It’s an issue that’s easy to overlook until you realise how crucial it is to ensure the system remains vulnerable to corrupt manipulation.
Any ambiguity in the process of issuing rights to public land always works in favour of the private operator and against the interest of the taxpayer.
Most of all, we need to define once and for all a set of parameters for how these decisions are taken.
Nobody in their right mind can possibly argue that it is fair and decent for a government authority to be able to steamroll over thousands of objections to any particular project.
Unless you have a weird, amorphous blob in the space where your soul should be, you probably don’t think that it’s right that the elected representatives of two political parties with an incredibly narrow field of vision should be unquestionably allowed to call the shots on behalf of everyone else.
The simplest, fairest way to do it would be to devise a system in which major projects are subject to the equivalent of a public veto. Any project that exceeds a certain footprint (the ‘major’ bit would need to be clarified by experts) would need to respect public conscience rather than pay lip-service to it.
After all, these sprawling grassroots campaigns can only be sustained for so long until resources need to be diverted towards the next front.
Unless these major outbursts of public approval are exploited to codify legislation that severely restricts the freedom with which such public-private land deals can be negotiated, we will keep fighting consortia of money-men and their jackals for the rest of our lives.
Hands off our public land. No ifs, no buts.