Konrad Mizzi’s PhD in filibustering came in handy this week. He took the floor at the beginning of Wednesday’s session of the Public Accounts Committee, right after the chairman’s hello, and rattled, spat, screamed and stomped until the hour was up.
The transcript of his ‘intervention’, which he says he’s a third of his way through, will not be inscribed in marble like the Gettysburg address. It was a random ramble, a mess of stump speeches from 2013, 2016 and 2018, brought up by desperate memory, loudly sung and violently vomited.
Peppered through it all, he included some favourite insults to get the juices of his less discerning supporters flowing. ‘Less discerning’ wrongfully implies there are more discerning supporters of Konrad Mizzi but really means some people don’t need to be his mother to be his fans.
Using “Your royal highness” repeatedly, and with what he must imagine was irony, he addressed the PAC’s chairman Beppe Fenech Adami, accusing him of a “sense of entitlement” because his father had been prime minister and president. He taunted the chairman with the campaign from some years ago about Beppe Fenech Adami’s fiduciary directorship of a company that owned a company suspected of money laundering. “You have no right to ask me questions,” Konrad Mizzi screamed.
If the Capital One story could have taught Mizzi anything, it is that our police is pathologically sluggish when investigating suspected money laundering. He was shouting at Fenech Adami for effect and to absolve himself, but Mizzi was joining calls for the police commissioner to shake off his slumber and get serious about financial crime. Does Mizzi think the police chief has not heard of the Panama Papers?
Mizzi then turned on the other two opposition MPs, Karol Aquilina and Ryan Callus. “You have no right to ask me questions,” he told them. “You’ve never done anything. Never achieved anything.”
Which is an odd accusation. Does Mizzi not remember one of his first public displays of toddler tantrum as an alternative to political debate?
In response to whatever Tonio Fenech had told him on a TV programme, Mizzi shouted back “Shame on you, Ministru. Shame on you.” What had Mizzi achieved then?
Bugger all.
And what has he achieved since? The less discerning supporters of the Labour Party are apparently very easily impressed by whizz kids. For all their habitual hostility to speakers of the English language, a little code switching and waving about of mind-numbing statistics are enough to canonise a darling of their party.
Mizzi’s central claim is that electricity bills are cheaper thanks to him. Cheaper than what? Simply saying they are cheaper than they would have been had the Nationalists stayed in power might have been true in 2014 when the government reduced rates before they had done anything about changing the sources of power supply.
Once corruption in the procurement of energy from Electrogas was exposed and documented though, we find that our bills are more expensive than they would be without Mizzi’s corruption. That’s apart from the fact that the fixed pricing deal with Electrogas is about to run out while the commitment to buy anything they produce stays with us until the end of the contract.
Konrad Mizzi rattled, spat, screamed, and stomped until the hour was up- Manuel Delia
Mizzi’s less discerning supporters are discerning enough to know all this because they wince every time they receive an electricity bill in their letter box. They may not necessarily appreciate that things can only get worse unless Mizzi’s legacy – his deal with Electrogas – is shattered.
While Mizzi is sticking it to the man, behaving like the country belonged to him, and like the “entitled” Nationalists report to him, they’ll continue to cheer him on.
Some, perhaps believing themselves more discerning, rationalise their defence of the indefensible.
Consider remarks by Franco Debono last week who underlined the environmental benefits of using gas instead of fuel oil for energy generation. I paraphrase: “That’s what people in the south care about, not whether politicians go to prison.”
He reduced the argument on whether Konrad Mizzi should face consequences for corruption to a north-south divide. It’s entitled northerners who know nothing of pollution that are bothered with imprisoning Mizzi. The implication is southerners want to erect a memorial in his honour, right next to Lorry Sant’s.
This argument runs parallel to Mizzi’s accusation that “Nationalists” judge him because of their sense of entitlement and pathological arrogance.
It also runs parallel to the near universal view of people who support Konrad Mizzi (and Joseph Muscat). They don’t doubt the corruption, the Panama company and the New Zealand trust where nests in which Yorgen Fenech and Cheng Chen were to pour millions if only they hadn’t been caught by Daphne Caruana Galizia and the Panama leaks.
“What of it? I’m better off thanks to them and they’re being bribed with somebody else’s money. Why should I care that they’re corrupt?”
Konrad Mizzi cannot use that argument in a courtroom. Franco Debono could tell him that. As could ex-magistrate Carol Peralta, who said nothing in the entire PAC session last week even though the country had to wait more than a week for him to be “available” before the session could start.
“It’s true I took bribes, but it doesn’t matter because bills are cheaper and the air is cleaner” is not a viable line of defence in a courtroom.
But it works in the flippant court of public opinion. Hence Franco Debono’s point about “what people care about” and Konrad Mizzi’s tactics of filibustering until the police’s sluggishness in the face of corruption and financial crime and the public’s boredom with a scandal that shocks nobody anymore lets him go free.
He’s Konning us.