The government is looking into how to safeguard Malta’s “traditions and hobbies” within the Constitution, Prime Minister Robert Abela announced on Sunday.

Abela was speaking at a Labour Party activity which placed a focus on feasts, sports, and hobbies such as hunting, with an angle at criticising a recent motion fronted by the Nationalist Party to introduce the right to a healthy environment within Malta’s constitution.

Abela said that the Labour Party had already introduced the safeguarding of the environment in Malta’s constitution back in 2018, and that the government is now going down the route of carrying out the biggest environmental project the country has seen at Manoel Island.

“Because the Constitution is the highest law of the land, we can never permit that what is dear to us: our hobbies, our traditions – are not just put in danger, but are mortally killed by it,” Abela said, as he attacked the PN’s bill.

“That is what was going to happen in the last few days,” he said.

He said the prudent politics brings the environment, hobbies, and traditions together rather than putting them in conflict with each other, adding that this is why the PL had taken a clear position in Parliament and why it had launched a Green Paper asking for advice on how to improve the country.

Abela said that he had instructed Justice Minister Jonathan Attard to carry out a legal analysis, together with local and international lawyers to look into what happens in other countries for traditions to be safeguarded by law.

“This is the road that we are happy to move forward with: that we introduce the safeguarding of our traditions, of our hobbies, in the Constitution so that we can give a guarantee within the country’s supreme law that what we hold dear is protected once and for all,” he said.

He spoke of other hobbies such as camping, and announced that a “beautiful” part of the northern part of the country is to be allocated for camping and be set up on the basis of the highest international standards for this.

He said that the caravanning facilities in L-Ahrax will also be invested in and improved, and announced that a new scheme for band clubs who have used their own money to take out a loan and purchase their premises is also in the works.

This scheme will see the government helping with interest rates on the commercial loans taken out by the band clubs to effectively turn the loan into a soft loan, Abela said.

He also said that the surface of the quarter-mile drag strip in Hal-Far will be finished in the coming weeks, and infrastructural work will follow, to the point that by the end of 2026, the go-kart track will also be finished.

The Labour Party’s two deputy leaders also addressed the event.

Deputy Prime Minister Ian Borg said that the government will only defend those who are responsible, as he referred to an incident where a falconer’s Falcon was shot at by a hunter on Saturday.

He said that whoever had shot at it, did like the PN with its constitutional motion and fired carelessly.

“They didn’t know what they were doing when they tabled that motion… actually they knew what they were doing: they wanted to open every opportunity to interfere with the hobbies and sports of others for the benefit of the few,” Borg said.

He referred to the PN’s recent economic proposals as careless as well, saying that fiddling with taxation systems won’t lead to four-day weeks (as the PN proposed in the past few days) but full weeks at home because companies will leave Malta.

“Let’s be responsible,” Borg said.

PL Deputy Leader Alex Agius Saliba meanwhile said that the PL is the only guarantee for the safeguarding of feasts and hobbies that make people proud to be Maltese.

He said that the PN’s bill was a “real threat” to things, such as fireworks and sports, which are taken for granted.

“We could have lost everything that gives us our identity in the blink of an eye,” Agius Saliba said.

He said that even in Europe, the PN through its MEPs – here naming PN MEP Peter Agius – is continuing to attack Malta’s traditions through things such as the noise pollution directive and regulations on nitrates in soil.

“They said that when they are in government, they want to get this motion through immediately – so it’s clear the only guarantee for hobbies is the Labour Party,” Agius Saliba said.

The event featured a panel of three: FKNK President Lucas Micallef, PE teacher Kelly-Anne Beerman, and feast enthusiast Ray Azzopardi, and also featured interventions from Malta Shooting Federation President Frans Pace, Aquatic Sports Association President Karl Izzo, feast researcher Mario Coleiro, Sports Journalists Association President Antvin Monsigneur, and Noel Aquilina, who forms part of the St George Philharmonic Society in Cospicua and the Cospicua Regatta Club.