A few weeks ago, the Minister of Homeland Security told this newspaper – which reported the fact – that it is his intention to make it a crime to mock Malta’s sale-of-citizenship plans. This was before Parliament voted to make it law and the law hit the international headlines to the extent that Mallia’s fabulous scheme was mocked as far afield as Boulder in Colorado, Taiwan and New Zealand. That must have put a bit of a rocket under his mad scheme to use his friend and lackey Peter Paul Zammit to pursue through the courts all those of us who think those plans ridiculous and offensive and say so. The arm of the law may be long, but trying to prosecute a local newspaper published in Florida for joking about Maltese passports is a little unrealistic.
But really, what that told us was that the Minister of Homeland Security is not particularly bright despite all the propaganda to the contrary. And it also told us that he is not very European, either. European democracy is not built on votes for politicians and the parliamentary process, but on the free press. Even in Italy, one of the least democratic states in Europe, the press is strong in its scathing criticism of politicians, who are mocked relentlessly and torn to shreds. But in this respect, Malta does not really belong to Europe and never did. People in general don’t understand that kind of thing at all – it’s seen as an ‘attack’ – and some politicians take advantage of this and play to it. Manuel Mallia is one of them, even though with his farcical behaviour and the individuals with whom he surrounds himself he is really just asking for it.
Manuel Mallia himself does not understand the workings of the free press or the fact that a completely free press is essential to the workings of a democracy. As befits somebody who is far farther to the right than to the left, who is in jackboots territory, really, and likes to be surrounded by uniforms and in charge of them as police and army minister, he favours control. He finds the idea of a press being allowed to say what it thinks about anything, including him and the government, of which he forms part, to be repugnant. How dare we mock, laugh at, joke about and criticise the magic passports scheme which will put money into his (ministerial) coffers? That shouldn’t be allowed.
And now, to top up his credentials in the world of freedom of expression and the importance of real news to a public that governments like to keep uninformed, what has Manuel Mallia gone and done? He has gone and declared officially open the bureau of a Chinese news agency in Malta. Exactly what was he thinking other than how lucky the Chinese dictatorship is to have full control over all news and own its supply. Imagine, he must have been thinking, what he and Joseph Muscat could do with a situation like that.
What is a Chinese news bureau other than yet another outpost of the Chinese communist dictatorship? All news bureaux in China are state-owned and ‘news bureau’ is a misnomer. They deal in propaganda, not news, which is probably why Manuel Mallia is so sympathetic to their endeavours and does not see his involvement in that bureau’s official opening as the public statement which it is. That is another illustration of how he does not understand the workings of the media. “Maltese minister opens news bureau owned by Chinese dictatorship” makes a fantastic headline and Mallia is lucky he isn’t operating in a country where such headlines are routinely written.
Xinhua, whose news bureau Manuel Mallia opened, is owned by the Chinese state, which means the Chinese communist dictatorship. There is no free press in China – which appears to be just how Mallia likes it – and so it follows that there are no independent news agencies or bureaux. The Xinhua news bureau is just another tool which exists to shore up a one-party dictatorship, not to scrutinise the Chinese government and hold it to account. And yet, our very own Minister of Broadcasting, for that is what Manuel Mallia is too, says that he looks forward to collaborative support of existing ties between China and Malta. “The setting up of this bureau will definitely provide an extremely useful and valuable information link which will support all the other, already existing, links that our two countries enjoy,” Mallia said at the opening. Damn shame the people of China don’t get to share in any of this enjoyment. Really, this is the stuff that might have inspired George Orwell.
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