The news that the government intends to give great swathes of public land on the southern coast, to speculators for the building of three hotels (one of them in a historic fort), a coastal promenade, restaurants and beach concessions has come like a bolt out of the blue. Or perhaps not, if you are keenly attentive to the way this government operates and the sort of people who hang around it for what they can get.

Sandro Chetcuti, the real estate speculator notorious for flashing his red Ferrari and for hanging around Labour politicians as though he is their new best friend, is one of them. He is a key player in these wonderful plans and so is that other terribly bright spark - Silvio Parnis, boss of the south, at whose request this week's bombshell report was drawn up by the government's Privatisation Unit.

That's right - the Privatisation Unit, because now that office has extended its brief to the privatisation of public land as well as state corporations. And that sort of fits in with the main motivational principle of this government: if you can make money out of something, do so. It is the 'sell your mother for a cent' reasoning of those who never grew beyond the starvation mentality to the appreciation of the intrinsic worth and value of things (and people).

You can see the thinking here: there's all that land out there with nothing on it but fields and farmers. What a waste. We can make money out of that, cover it in big hotels and concrete walkways for people to walk on while they are drinking their fizzy drinks and eating their ice creams and stopping at one of yet another row of samey cafes and restaurants. If Sandro Chetcuti were to gaze upon the Grand Canyon, all he would see is potential for flats and maisonettes, perhaps 50 hotels to take all that tourist traffic and a 'Grand Canyon Experience Centre'. So he really does have a friend and soul mate in the Prime Minister, who leased his own car to the government for his own use, and who thinks that the definition of a brilliant money-making scheme is selling passports.

The public land in question stretches from SmartCity to Zonqor Point, and the plans to clutter it up with hotels, a promenade and beach club, plus all the ancillary tat, have drawn down the ire of environment NGOs who, understandably, think this is crazy and irresponsible. They have pointed out that having the proposal drawn up by the government's Privatisation Unit abusively bypasses the proper planning process and reveals that the government has no holistic vision or plan for development and the environment.

The storm clouds are gathering hard and fast for the environment in this country, and the Environment Minister is looking increasingly like a wet fish, incapable of controlling the speculators who have a hot-line to the Prime Minister. A few days ago, Din l-Art Helwa called him a Pontius Pilate who has washed his hands of the environment. Coming from this rather sedate NGO, which does not subscribe to the hysterical hyperbole of others, that is criticism indeed. How can Leo Brincat hope to rescue his reputation? He can't. He looks like a puppet who is now even being bypassed by the press when they want comments on projects that affect the environment.

Nor does it inspire any sort of confidence at all that the person supposedly in charge of all this is Silvio Parnis, chairman of the 'Consultative Council for the South'. Parnis is best known for striking fetching poses while wearing interesting outfits and carefully gelled hair, with or without a funky blue sports car, and uploading the fascinating results on Facebook for the rest of us to goggle at. When we hear him speak, generally on some interview show on the tackiest of the private television stations, we are surprised once more how easy it is for people who can't string a coherent sentence together to get ahead in Malta.

A massive development project on virgin land in an Outside Development Zone, spearheaded by Silvio Parnis and Sandro Chetcuti? Some minds may boggle, but not those of us who have been here before, and who have seen much the same a hundred times over already. We thought all that was gone, but clearly, it is not.