The planning bills aren’t dead. They’re napping.

On Thursday morning, Planning Minister Jonathan Attard stood up to speak at a conference called The Citizen, the Environment and Development. He did not get far. Activists from Moviment Graffitti and Friends of the Earth Malta took over the room, and the minister abandoned his speech.

Shouting down a minister is not an argument, and this column would rather win the argument. But it is worth asking how we got to a point where more than seventy organisations — the Ġustizzja għal Artna coalition, which has put thousands of people on the streets of Valletta — have concluded that being polite has stopped working.

Two bills that never went away

Remember Bills 143 and 144? Last year the government put two amendments to planning law before Parliament. Taken together, they would have:

• stopped the courts from revoking a planning permit, even one they found to be flawed;
• limited appeals to the grounds that objectors had raised before the permit was granted;
• let the Planning Authority’s executive council alter local plans, and placed the Authority’s own policies above them;
• widened the room for planning boards to depart from policy.

University of Malta academics warned that the bills threatened the rule of law. Graffitti called them a developer’s wish list. When the 2026 budget was presented, the Prime Minister promised not to rush them through without consulting NGOs. By February they had stalled. When Parliament was dissolved for the snap election, they lapsed — along with the media reform bills, which also quietly ran out of road.

Lapsed. Not withdrawn. A bill that lapses can come back in the new legislature at the stroke of a pen, and nobody in government has said that these won’t.

A bill that lapses has not been defeated. It is waiting for everybody to look the other way.

Credit where it is due

In August, the government published a consultation on planning appeals that does something campaigners have asked for for years: it suspends works while an appeal is being heard. No more building the block first and losing the appeal later, when there is nothing left to save. It also sets deadlines — six months at the tribunal, four (extendable by two) at the Court of Appeal. Ġustizzja għal Artna welcomed it, and so do we.

But they attached a warning, and it is the right one: no last-minute changes to suit powerful interests working behind the scenes. We have seen this film before. The part the public asked for arrives first, in a consultation. The part the developers asked for arrives later, in the fine print.

The man at the top of the Authority

Thursday’s protest was aimed at the Planning Authority’s chief executive, Johann Buttigieg, who was leading the conference’s discussion on citizens’ rights. Eleven environmental and residents’ organisations have written to demand his removal and an independent investigation; the groups at the conference accuse him of corruption and of being too close to powerful business interests.

Those are claims, and until someone with the power to test them does so, they are only claims. Which is exactly why an independent investigation is the right demand. If the NGOs are wrong, it clears him. If they are right, the country needs to know before the next set of planning laws is written. The only people who lose from an investigation are people who have something to hide — and the Authority, of all institutions, should want to be seen to have nothing to hide.

What the minister could say tomorrow

Jonathan Attard can end a lot of this anger without giving a single speech. He needs to say three things, in writing: that Bills 143 and 144 will not be reintroduced in their old form; that the appeals reform will go to Parliament as it went to consultation, without new clauses; and that he will ask for an independent review of the questions raised about his Authority’s leadership.

Until then, people will keep turning up where he speaks. They are not the problem. They are the smoke alarm.