Tomorrow, the hunters’ lobby will have its big day. It is going to march on Valletta and present parliamentary secretary Michael Falzon with a petition calling on Parliament – or is it the government? – to block the planned referendum on repealing the spring-hunting law.
A petition to stop a referendum is little more than using a democratic tool for undemocratic ends. Instead of acting to stop the referendum which they fear they will lose, those who support spring hunting should simply just vote in it. That’s democracy. They should vote against repealing the law while the rest of us vote in favour. That’s what a referendum is all about.
I can’t follow the hunting lobby’s reasoning, even if I knew they were the most liberal, progressive and democratically inclined people on the islands. What is the point of having a law which allows the holding of an abrogative referendum if sufficient signatures are collected to that effect, if this measure can be aborted at the outset by the simple expedient of a petition with many thousands of signatures?
Signatures used to block other signatures – it’s crazy-minded. Referendums are there so that we can express our views in them, instead of having a Battle of the Petitions. ‘I collected more signatures than you did’ – sorry, but that’s what the ballot box is for: the vote, not signatures.
Joe Perici Calascione, the chief of the hunters lobby, will not tell us how many signatures his organisation has collected. He’s been doing the dance of the seven veils with the press about this for the last many weeks. All will be revealed tomorrow, he says, when the last veil comes off in front of Michael Falzon. Faced with accusations that his organisation is collecting signatures from schoolchildren via their families, he did say that the most numerous age cohort of signatories is 16 to 28, who account for around 21% of the signatures the hunters have collected. How very sad that young people should be as atavistic as their parents. There’s still a great deal to be done.
Perici Calascione was forced to admit that his petition includes many children aged 14 and 15, as well as those minors aged 16 and 17. People under 18 are not empowered to sign anything, still less a petition to block a referendum in which they do not have a vote, but Perici Calascione’s peculiar reasoning is that in the next general election, in 2018, they will have a vote. Yes, but they don’t have a vote now and are not legally empowered to sign anything before they turn 18. Bulking up that petition with signatures of people aged under 18 is like bulking up meatballs with a lot of bread.
Despite this petition and all the fuss he is making about it, the hunters’ chief claims that his organisation is “in no way against a democratic referendum”. Perhaps he would like to explain what an undemocratic referendum might be. I think he might be referring to a referendum in which the rights of a minority are put to the vote of the majority. But that is assuming that shooting birds in spring is a right, which it is not. It is a hobby, an amusement, not a right – and more to the point, it is a hobby which impinges on the rest of society and on other people who would much prefer it if birds were not shot in the spring, because their particular hobby is walking through what’s left of the countryside and listening to them. And that’s to say nothing of the environmental/conservationist aspect.
“If Parliament fails to take into consideration the number of signatures we have collected and does not discuss the matter, it will convey the message that it is not interested in what those thousands of people have to say,” Joe Perici Calascione said to this newspaper’s sister daily. He then used the specious argument that the EP candidates who took a firm stand against hunting were those who attracted the fewest votes. He singled out, for special mention, AD’s Arnold Cassola and Carmel Cacopardo and the Nationalist Party’s Jonathan Shaw.
Aside from the fact that this is completely incorrect, and they are not the candidates who performed the least well, hunting simply was not a factor here. AD is not a main party and in this election had to share the fringe vote with Zaren tal-Ajkla, Ivan Grech Mintoff and the whackos at Imperium Europa, who do have a policy in favour of hunting, yes, but hunting down other human beings and not birds. And Jonathan Shaw is completely new to politics, not just new to the candidates list, performing at the level that would be expected from somebody whose surname begins with ‘S’. By the same token, the reason that Clint Camilleri of the Labour Party collected that many votes has little to do with the fact that he has declared himself in favour of hunting. The entire Labour Party is in favour of hunting, and Joseph Cuschieri, who went directly for the hunters’ vote, fell at an earlier hurdle than Camilleri.
The most offensive of Perici Calascione’s statements is that the people in the Coalition Against Spring Hunting are “extremists out to ruin the lives of minority groups, like hunters, for personal gain, whether political or financial”. How he could have reached this conclusion is quite beyond me. The one thing of which you can’t accuse Rudolf Ragonesi (who leads the coalition), for instance, is financial or partisan motivation. Yet Perici Calascione will not be appeased by peace-loving environmentalists and conservationists. “The call for an abrogative referendum is a vindictive attack on the legal privileges which a minority group enjoys,” he told The Malta Independent.
Not really – in a country that puts the minority right to divorce to the will of the majority in a referendum, the presumed right of hunters not to have their hobby trampled, by those who don’t want birds shot in spring, fades into insignificance. Both political parties favoured the referendum on divorce. Neither can now object to a referendum on spring hunting.
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