Sai and Konrad: they take the Maltese public’s money and think they are not accountable to the Maltese public

This is from the print edition of Times of Malta, the day before yesterday.

Sai and Konrad Mizzi are more than delighted to take the Maltese public’s money, but then tell the Maltese public nothing, refuse to answer questions that they have a duty to answer in a democracy, and accuse their critics of wanting to destroy them.

“I have never been treated this way,” Mrs Konrad Mizzi told Times of Malta. I’ll bet you haven’t, darling. Life in a democracy is so very different to life in a communist dictatorship.

You fled China for free Europe then fled right back again when you couldn’t hack it, living in places where people can say what they like about you without being arrested by Comrade Deng and the descendants of the Red Guards.

Freedom of speech and human rights can be such a burden. It’s so much more comfortable in Beijing, where anybody who criticises a minister’s wife or demands to know by what corrupt means she got her job and how much she and her husband are creaming off the state ends up sunk in some hellish jail for years after a show trial in a kangaroo court.

Yes, Mrs Konrad Mizzi makes it obvious that despite living in Europe for many years, she hasn’t understood that democracies function very differently to autocracies, and not only in terms of general elections and the vote.

Her attitude is decidedly Chinese Communist – and that is not a racist remark as she seeks to imply, but an observation about the mindset of somebody who grew up immersed in totalitarianism and who lacks the insight and imagination to understand how things can be different.

Plenty of Chinese people know how wrong this mindset is; they are the reason I read the work of so many Chinese authors. But Mrs Mizzi isn’t one of them.

She can’t understand why she is being questioned and criticised, why people have the right to know how and why she was put on the state payroll, what she is doing, and how much she is paid for doing what exactly.

She is genuinely outraged that such questions can be asked, and angry that people are allowed to criticise her.

And guess what – I actually think she is being paid wholly or partially by China and that she is working for China too, and this is one of the reasons why her contract isn’t being released. We are assuming she has a contract with the Maltese government. Why start off from that assumption? There might not even be one.

Face it: the woman doesn’t even have an office address, and neither Ariadne Massa from Times of Malta nor Saviour Balzan from Malta Today saw fit to ask her whether she has been operating out of her Beijing bedroom for the last few months.