Joseph, the cliff-top grand piano and the man from Construct Furniture
The Opposition is demanding airtime on the public service broadcaster to reply to the Prime Minister’s New Year message which was, it said, partisan.
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The Opposition is objecting, in particular, to the Prime Minister’s propaganda references to the power station and so-called American university, which we know to be neither American nor a university.
In the light of what has since emerged, I think the Opposition, in its response – should it be given the airtime requested – should make far more of the fact that the Prime Minister tried to defraud the public by passing off a young scion of the Construct Furniture family as an ordinary working-class young man, who struggled and bought his home thanks to the Muscat government’s tax benefits, than it does about Konrad Mizzi’s power station and Hani Hasan Naji Al Salah’s windfall of prime land at Zonqor Point.
It is quite clear to me, from which stories get shared the most (and the most rapidly) on my website that people will tolerate corruption and shady deals but they will not, absolutely not, put up with being lied to and with any attempts at making a fool of them, especially not by politicians and those in authority. My post yesterday about the young man in the Prime Minister’s New Year video message is really the grandson of John Camilleri, a brother to 1980s Labour Minister Lorry Sant’s frontman and Zonqor Point landowner Piju Camilleri, and the man who set up Malta’s largest furniture company, Construct Furniture, was shared 4,500 times on Facebook in just a few hours.
The last post before that to be shared as rapidly was one about how Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando - executive chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology – nicked a photograph of a pile of wrapped Christmas presents from an online image bank and tried to pass it off on Facebook as the Christmas gifts which he and his girlfriend/employee Lara Boffa had just spent the morning wrapping (“Phew!”, he wrote). That was shared 2,600 times on Facebook in a few hours. I can tell you from experience that stories about a corruption scandal – however significant the implications will not be shared a fraction as often or as rapidly. It is this low-level cheating which really gets people and tees them off. They take it as a direct insult. Why pilfer a photograph of somebody else’s Christmas presents and use it to try to make out that you and your girlfriend have spent the morning wrapping bounty for friends and family? Why lie to people like that in a situation where it isn’t even necessary to prove to anyone that you have been wrapping Christmas presents when you haven’t? And does the Prime Minister really have such contempt for the people he governs that, in his official New Year message, he actually presents to the public a young man from a rich family, whose company has won several government contracts, in the guise of an ordinary working man who needed Muscat’s tax benefits to buy his first home? It wasn’t necessary to do that, because the Prime Minister’s New Year message does not need to contain vignettes. And if the Prime Minister’s communications consultants really thought that vignettes in the New Year message would be a good thing – even though the New Year message is an ‘address to the nation’ and not a Labour Party campaign video – then they should have used real and honest ones, not fraudulent and deceitful pieces of theatre.
The Opposition should go further and focus on what it actually cost to produce that New Year message, with its opening credits inspired by a crass ‘Song for Europe’ ethos. Using manpower to lug a grand piano to the top of the cliffs and then again to the upper level of Fort St Angelo does not come cheap. Nor do all those singers, dancers and a full orchestra – or the aerial shots of all of that. The Opposition will, of course, be completely reluctant to focus on the showy and inappropriate vulgarity of it all (I don’t see why, but for some reason, these matters seem to be touchy subjects) but it should not be reluctant to raise the matter of how much public money Joseph Muscat and his communications consultants spent on that flashy, highly inappropriate and vulgar production. The Opposition should point out that Muscat should have simply stood in his office and delivered a sober address to the nation in as few words as possible. It would have cost nothing and been far more appropriate. Instead, he threw large amounts of public money at proving that Malta is a nation of fanfarons whose mindset is only nominally European.