Spring hunting: if the politicians will not decide, let the electorate do so

Daphne Caruana Galizia Thursday, 9 January 2014, 10:09 Last update: about 11 years ago

If the government and the Opposition know what’s good for them, they will encourage and back the holding of a referendum on spring hunting and not sit on the fence as they have tended to do so far so as not to enrage and upset the blackmailing (with their votes) guns-and-nets lobby.

More than 40,000 signatures have been collected in the law-backed petition to force a referendum on this matter. The law sets a mandatory minimum of 38,000 signatures, but you need some leeway because there are bound to be invalid signatures and even people who have signed twice perhaps due to forgetfulness because the signatures have been collected over several months and some uncertainty can creep in as to whether one did in fact sign it or not.

The organisers of the petition, who are a coalition of non-governmental organisations involved in environment and heritage matters, have submitted the list to the Electoral Commission, which is the proper authority for vetting it and authenticating the signatures. The process, the Electoral Commission has said, will take at least until September. We don’t exactly know why. Perhaps it is because they plan to type each signatory’s identity card number, name and address into a software system which will check for duplicate entries and match names and addresses to ID numbers for the sake of veracity. They might also need to scan signatures and match them to those on ID cards. After that, we should hope there are no delaying tactics and that both government and Opposition will work towards supporting the referendum, which is not the same thing as supporting either the Yes or No vote, which they clearly do not wish to do.

It’s simple. If the electorate decides in a referendum, then the politicians don’t have to. It’s out of their hands. Of course, that still leaves the matter of their vote in parliament which will be required to legislate according to the referendum result, and we saw enough somersaults in the post-divorce referendum parliamentary vote to know that some MPs are going to consider this a real dilemma if the Yes vote wins and they then face a choice between voting against a popular decision in a referendum and teeing off hunters and trappers.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ve a long way to go before the referendum is actually held. As we have seen, it won’t be until at least September that we will know whether there are in fact sufficient valid and authentic signatures to force the referendum in the first place. If there are not, more have to be collected and then checked. After that, we have the actual campaign, with both the Yes and No lobbies fighting it out in print, in the streets and on the airwaves. Things will hot up and the issues will crystallise, as they did with divorce – and this time, I think we can say for certain that we will be spared the sight of Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando on our screens 24/7. He now appears to be interested in a very different sort of bird-hunting.

The politicians should be content that the decision on this contentious matter is being taken out of their hands. That is why they should encourage it and say or do nothing that might come across as intended to thwart the process. They themselves do not wish to act to ban spring hunting, not necessarily because they like it or agree with it or believe that it is a matter of personal choice and liberty, but because they are concerned about loss of votes, both in their own constituencies and for their party.

The fact that 40,000 people have been eager and willing to put their name, identity and signature to this petition should give both the government and the Opposition some indication of how the land lies. Given the organisers – who are anti-spring-hunting, which means that the petition has effectively been organised by the Yes (to a ban) vote – the signatories are almost certainly all people who will vote the same way.

This is a society in which people tend to prefer to stay out of things, put their name to nothing and keep their views secret unless they are appearing in Labour Party marketing collateral in return for favours and jobs. Getting 40,000 people to declare in writing and against their signature that they want a referendum to ban spring hunting – which is tantamount to making public how they will vote – was no mean feat. It is quite amazing, really.

On TVM the day before yesterday, Rudolf Ragonesi, representing one of the groups involved in organising the petition, said that signatures had been collected faster than expected. The catalysts for this speed were a number of cases of shocking illegal hunting, publicised in the media, and the hunters association’s self-defeating move of trying to get a petition going to have the law on referendums changed. That seems to have really annoyed people who reacted by going straight out to sign the petition for the referendum.

Joe Perici Calascione, of the hunters association, said on the same television show that he has no idea how many signatures his people have collected in an attempt at changing the referendum law and stopping the referendum (a very democratic and liberal move, but then what can you expect). He did say, however, that he thinks many people who signed the petition for the referendum could have been “tricked”. He did not say how he thinks we were tricked, but there you go. He is unable to accept that we really do want to have hunting banned in spring so as to protect birds when they are breeding.

There were two MPs on the show, too: Charlo Bonnici for the Opposition and Roderick Galdes, who is parliamentary secretary for animals and hunters, for the government. The latter said that those who hunt in spring are within the law because of Malta’s derogation on spring hunting, missing the point that this is precisely why 40,000 people are calling for a referendum to change the law. Bonnici said that the Nationalist Party is in favour of “limited” spring hunting. Neither Bonnici nor Galdes would or could say how they would vote in the referendum or, it follows, in parliament afterwards. Rudolf Ragonesi remarked at this stage that a referendum gives the electorate the right to take a decision directly without their MPs as intermediaries.

Joe Perici Calascione reacted by saying that he hopes the referendum won’t be held at all – a clear-cut indication that he knows the hunting lobby’s boast of being a majority, rather than a powerful minority, is a vain one. While they can wield direct influence on vulnerable MPs and worried political parties, they have no such leverage on the electorate, and so the referendum vote is free of the concerns which afflict politicians.