So now we have a fresh, piping-hot scandal on our hands (“another week, another skandlu”). Joseph’s Taghna Lkoll government has left us breathless, but not in the way that he promised. We’re out of breath because we can’t keep up with the deluge of I-can’t-believe-this schemes, and the way the government keeps pushing that envelope beyond the boundaries of all basic decency and correct practice, and then asking us what all the fuss is about.
Have you noticed what I’ve just noticed, though? Muscat has stopped using those insufferable tu quoque retorts when challenged about his government’s latest misdemeanours. For the first year or so, when he found a microphone stuck beneath his chin and a reporter wanting to know why he or other members of his government had done this or that, his response would be a sarcastic smile and an odious comparison to something – irrelevant in the context – that his predecessors in the Nationalist government had done. Instead of explaining his own actions, he would choose the fishwife response of ‘Ghax ma tarax x’ghamel huk.’
It was a continuation of his response style in Opposition, and it left Nationalist politicians, and journalists generally, lost for words and unsure how to respond – not because there was nothing left to say, but because they were so astonished that a prime minister would respond like somebody at a bar-counter.
Now his ‘why don’t you see what the others did’ and ‘I did like X did when he…’ retorts are just not an option any more. The rate at which the shockers are tumbling into the newsrooms and tumbling out of the newspapers has left the prime minister bereft of smart remarks. So he has taken to hiding instead, popping out when he thinks the coast is clear.
So now we have the latest one: Marco Gaffarena and his heist on public funds, for a heist is exactly what it looks to be. When Michael Falzon, the parliamentary secretary responsible for the government’s Lands Department, was confronted about it by a newspaper, his reaction was a version of the prime minister’s “What’s all the fuss about?” This is normal practice, Falzon said; we can’t investigate businessmen for making a profit. Then he added that the story only made the news because of the man’s surname.
Well, hardly – the story is news whatever the surname of the person involved. The only part his surname played was in flagging up the case. If Marco Gaffarena had been called Marco Borg, or Marco Caruana, or Marco Camilleri, the chances are that no alarm bells would have rung in any department, nor would the press have picked it up. And a good story would have gone by unreported.
After that initial blasé response, playing it cool, Michael Falzon now tells us that he has ordered an inquiry. But guess what, the prime minister has ordered one too. And nobody would have ordered anything if the press hadn’t kept at it, and if the public had not been so cross about it, palpably cross.
However, the prime minister is in no position to talk, because in this case it is he who is at the other end of the tu quoque response. The man who bailed out the bankrupt Café Premier, who has promised to give a large tract of ODZ land to a fishy Jordanian businessman and possible party donor, in the face of massive and unprecedented public opposition, is not quite the best person to talk about inquiries into how Marco Gaffarena struck gold with the Lands Department.
Poor old Lawrence Gonzi, who the Taghna Lkollers at dinner parties in Koller Land called corrupt and a liar, who they discussed with contempt before the last general election. Where do you even begin with these people? They are beyond description. Every other day we receive information of cronies put on the public payroll, of abusive deals done, and now even of the government guaranteeing an €88 million bank loan for the power station consortium it quite obviously selected before the last general election – and then discovered too late that it didn’t have the financial firepower to deliver.
What can we say? Taghna Lkoll.
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