All those hours of listening to Konrad Mizzi’s vacuous, irrelevant, opaque, and interminable “opening statement” filibustered over something like three months proved, predictably, to be an entirely wasted consumption of mind-meltingly boring time.
I look with some half-hearted sympathy at Beppe Fenech Adami and his colleagues on that committee. I think what it must feel to be in their place realising with soul gnawing horror that no prestige of public office, no gratified sense of duty, no hoped-for future of political success can possibly justify the wasted hours bouncing against the rubber that cushions Konrad Mizzi’s abdominals. Life is too short to spar with that empty shell so utterly bereft of shame. You come to a certain age in life, like mine and theirs, when you fear the day on your deathbed when you expect you will wish to live again, more productively, the hours you had wasted on the entirely pointless Konrad “I choose not to answer” Mizzi. His company is, only very slightly metaphorically, a fate worse than death.
Konrad Mizzi never meant to answer questions on his conduct in the Electrogas deal and still does not intend to. All he has ever intended to do was and still is buying time until the legislature expires.
He’s learnt from the 2017 election that elections are like baptisms, sins are washed away and collective memory goes back to factory settings.
There’s nothing much to say that hasn’t been said before. Except perhaps this. This is the second election with Konrad Mizzi and the rest of Joseph Muscat’s criminal gang leaping like murderers over the gates of a mediaeval cemetery enjoying ecclesiastical immunity where the king’s officers cannot reach them and the king’s laws cannot punish them. Every time they do this, things at the other end of the election get worse for them.
The happiness and peace Konrad Mizzi and the rest of Joseph Muscat’s gang thought the 2017 election would give them never materialised. It will have blood they say. Blood will have blood. Their pursuit of impunity cost a journalist her life and a country the respect it used to enjoy in the rest of the world. There’s more suffering to come for this country as the real consequence of harbouring pirates will bite us even harder than it already has.
They think the election is when we give up. It will be tough, I grant you. We’ll be blamed for the election result, convicted of the guilt of insisting for the truth, charged with defiance of the democratic expression of the free will of the majority of the people. Whatever happens to us, worse has happened to Daphne. We’d feel shame to run away from our fate when she stood tall as hers consumed her.
Konrad Mizzi thinks he only needs to keep up this act of filibustering juggling for a few more days until Parliament is dissolved. There’s no need to forewarn him. We’re under no obligation to give him the comfort of advanced notice. Whether he realises it or not, this doesn’t end here for Konrad Mizzi. This doesn’t end when Joseph Muscat and his henchmen have shouted and complained loudly and threateningly about being, as they call it, persecuted. And this especially doesn’t end because the party that protects them wins the election.
This ends when they pay for what they’ve done. Perhaps we’ll be covered in mud, bruised and scratched, hoarse and for some time a little tired. But when the dust of the election settles the blue sky they expect to glow over their greying heads will still be darkened by our tall shadow. We’re not going anywhere until they go somewhere very specific that we have in mind for them. And for their accomplices.