On Friday night, a row of mostly Italian cars were parked at Salina watched over by the police, which Police HQ later described as an ‘ordinary roadblock’.
It looked anything but ordinary. The police were looking at the papers of the people who had been stopped. A row of boxes stood near the wall, presumably offloaded from the cars, while a number of persons were walking in the direction of Bugibba maybe to get the papers they did not have with them.
This is only one sign of a welcome enforcement of the law in the face of widespread anarchy.
Another sign of a new change came from a Bring-in Site at Zebbug where a hidden camera showed the liberties ordinary citizens were taking to get rid of their rubbish by dumping it all around the site.
Unsuspecting citizens, some of them driving posh cars, were using the site as a rubbish dump. And then, after unloading their personal rubbish, urinating and even defecating behind the bins.
We now learn these citizens face fines amounting to thousands of euros. And we applaud.
Yet another sign of a new climate is the enforcement on fish pens, especially tuna pens, which have seriously polluted our coasts that only a few years ago were rendered clean by spending so much money on three waste treatment plants. Only to find that there were no waste treatment plans for the sea.
We cannot say this is a new problem which crept up this year. Successive governments knew of the multiple infringements committed by many fish farms and turned a blind eye. They were meant to relocate far to the south of Malta but the relocation, for one reason or another, never happened.
If all these enforcements were the result of a central government policy directive, we applaud. And we say more and more is needed.
This country craves for better enforcement on traffic on the roads. Even before schools start, we are having multiple problems on most roads, with ensuing hefty delays.
People and drivers are stressed and this stress manifests itself in unspeakable rudeness and lack of courtesy on the roads, examples of road rage and accidents where none should happen.
The government must get police out of their office and from behind their desks and patrol the streets, making their presence felt. It would help if road markings are clear and legible, too.
But there is an area of national life where enforcement seems to be on its way out. This is in property development and construction where the government has removed and split Mepa, the former bogeyman of all developers, which allowed more and more development and taken a generally pro-construction stance even as regards the hitherto sacred ODZ.
One final word of warning: the more enforcement there is, the more the various government agencies must ensure that enforcement is done on a level playing field. The worst-case scenario would be for an enforcement that is skewed and that depends on who the miscreant is, or which party he sides with.
The Maltese public is generally a well-behaved people, mostly law-abiding but it will never accept an enforcement that is skewed and tainted. Enforcement puts an added burden on the enforcer: that enforcement can only be transparent and fair or not at all.