‘None of your business'

Now, THAT would have been the perfect title for Malta’s entry to this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. Not only is it a natural refrain in its own right – sung by virtually anyone who’s ever been asked how much of other people’s money he or she might have pocketed or spent – but it is also intensely relevant to both Malta’s current political situation, and the state of the Eurovision Song Contest itself.

For in case no one’s ever noticed, both those considerations are pivotal … if the intention behind our annual participation in this contest is to actually win the damn thing one day. But then again, I am beginning to doubt if that is really the intention. We certainly haven’t tried very hard over the years, have we? In fact, we seem to have done the clean opposite: doggedly choosing only the most pointless and meaningless of apolitical songs, to represent Malta in a competition that has only ever been won by hugely political entries.

Naturally, I won’t be drawn into a debate about whether Ukraine’s song was indeed an accurate reflection of what happened in the Crimean peninsula last year; the point is that her song made a political statement that clearly resonates with the EU-approved international sentiment of the moment. It was written with the specific intention of pissing off a certain Putin, Vladimir ... and anything that pisses off Putin is automatically music to Europe’s ears. 

Simple as that, really. And the same could be said for pretty much every winning Eurovision entry ever … going all the way back to 1973, when Swedish legends-to-be Abba won the damn thing with ‘Waterloo’.

I mean, ‘Waterloo’, for crying out loud. The battle, not the station. If that’s not a political statement, I don’t know what is: even as the European Economic Community consolidated (roughly) into the ‘European Union’ we know today, Sweden won with an anthem about the one man in history who might actually have succeeded in uniting Europe into a federal whole …

Just compare that to every song Malta has ever entered to the same contest. No offence to Ira or anything (God knows she put up with enough of that over the last week or so…) but, ‘I can’t get enough of your love’? ‘I feel like I’m walking on water’? 

I mean… who cares?

And that, lest we forget, wasn’t even the song Malta actually voted for. The one we had all agreed upon, as I recall, was about an old world lizard species characterised by zygodactyl feet, a prehensile tail, and the ability to rotate its eyeballs independently in each socket. Oh, yes, and it changes colour, too. Which, I suppose, could be interpreted as a metaphor for certain politicians I can think of…

But still: aptly enough, we changed the song, and with it the colour of our entire participation.  I guess ‘Chameleon’ just wasn’t bland, obscure and pointless enough… we needed to come up with something of even less relevance to European reality today.

So a small word of advice ahead of next year’s Eurovision Song Contest. Basing myself on the experience of winning countries in the past, I would say there are two basic ways to secure victory once and for all. The first (and most obvious) is to get ourselves invaded or annexed by another country. It worked for Ukraine; no reason it shouldn’t work just as well for us, too.

The good news is that there is still plenty of time to arrange it all… and we do need plenty of time, because apart from persuading an amenable hostile country to declare war on us – no easy task, when you don’t actually possess any natural resources worth stealing – you also have to write a song about the experience afterwards. 

And writing songs is long and laborious work, let me tell you. Just look at ‘Walk on Water’: it might be just one line of lyrics repeated on an endless loop… but it was still officially written by about 16 people, comprising some 12 different nationalities in all. 

The bad news, however, is that getting one’s country invaded normally involves a certain amount of death, destruction and general unpleasantness all round. And seeing as how it is always the same old handful of people who compete for the Eurovision spot, year after year… it is by no means inconceivable that Malta’s entire musical talent pool might be accidentally wiped out during the invasion. 

And who’d be left to write the song then, aye?

No, no, much easier to fast-forward directly to option two: i.e., to come up with a song that actually says something about today’s political reality for a change. And while I haven’t come up with the lyrics or the melody yet… there is an obvious song title staring us all in the face.

I’ll have to be honest and cede the authorial copyright to Ms Anne Fenech, who came up with the name (which could easily double up as the main chorus) on a live TV discussion programme this week. But what better title for a Maltese Eurovision Song Contest winner than… ‘None of your business’?

Yes, indeed. It applies to all spheres of Malta’s political reality today… and, with a few small tweaks to the lyrics here and there, can just as easily be applied to European political reality as a whole.

But let’s just take a look at a few of the ways in which ‘None of Your Business’ would perfectly reflect the increasingly ubiquitous reply to all our questions … not least, concerning the funding of the Eurovision Song Contest itself. 

How much money did we spend on Eurovision this year? It seems a reasonable question to ask, seeing as it is to date unclear whether the rumoured 1.5 million spent – here and there varying to 5 million, depending who’s doing the wild speculation – even came out of taxpayers’ money at all.

And yet, when PBS chairman Tonio Portughese was asked that very question this week… well, he may have used different words, but the overall significance was the same. Personally, I’d almost prefer it had he told us ‘none of your business’. After all, the expression has more flair and panache than: ‘Sorry, but I can’t tell you because the information is of a commercially sensitive nature…’

But both work just as well. The PBS chairman cannot tell us how much (if any) of our own money was spent on this Eurovision, because the information should be privy only to people who have a direct commercial link to the company in question. 

Hmm. Evidently, Mr Portughese does not include among that category the actual shareholders of PBS: a national corporation that (regardless of Eurovision) is kept afloat by government subsidies. We might be funding PBS directly through our taxes… yet, strangely, that doesn’t give us a right to know how our own goddamn money is being spent. 

Even more strangely, we all simply accept this absurd non-answer without question… even as rumours concerning an ‘unlimited budget’ gain credence by the minute… and even as University academics step forward to complain (not unjustifiably, if the rumours are true) that we spent at least twice as much on the Eurovision each year, as we do on academic research. 

But no matter how legitimate the demand for information may be, there is no escaping the pervasiveness of the ‘none of your business’ answer. Indeed, we can hardly expect any better from the chairman of a public corporation… when the highest-ranking politician and political appointees behave exactly the same way. 

So far, both Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri have responded to legitimate questions concerning the extent of their undeclared wealth – and, more pertinently, its provenance – in exactly the same way... if not in the exact same wording.

‘None of your business’, we have indirectly been told, concerning apparent revelations that the man who would become Energy Minister had somehow accumulated 6.2 million in ‘personal revenue’ … before going on to declare not even one-sixth that amount.

Konrad Mizzi now claims that the ‘personal revenue’ quote – lifted from an internal communication leaked with all the other Panama papers – was taken out of context, and refers only to profits he had ‘personally’ generated for the company as a mere employee. 

If so, the wording of the statement is certainly ‘misleading’, as he himself puts it… and journalists who interpret it otherwise can hardly be blamed, considering the glaring difference between what was actually stated in black on white, and what Konrad Mizzi would have us believe it actually meant.

But as with the Russian intervention in Crimea, it is not even all that important to go into such detail. The fact remains that none of these questions would have been asked at all, had Mizzi not made considerable efforts to transfer his wealth (however it was made) to jurisdictions where it could easily be hidden. And besides, questions like this wouldn’t even need to be asked, had Mizzi done what was expected of him in the first place, and resigned when the scandal first emerged.

None of our business indeed... But like I said earlier, credit must go to the genuine auteur of that rousing refrain. For just as it is ‘none of our business’ whether ministers make honest and accurate declarations of their private assets, or how much of our own money was spent on pointless extravagances … it is ‘none of our business’ how a party that hopes to one day be in government actually manages its own finances.

To be honest, this one eclipses even Portughese’s ‘commercial sensitivity’ argument. We are, after all, talking about a Nationalist Party that has sworn to make ‘honesty in politics’ its number one priority… that talks about ‘transparency’ and ‘accountable’ as if it invented both those principles itself… and yet which stolidly refuses to be honest, transparent or accountable about the extent of its own debt.

And quite rightly, too. What business is it of ours – we, who will soon be urged to vote for that same party in a general election – whether the PN owes one million, five million, 10 million or 20 million? Why should it concern us, that we have no clue whatsoever whom any of this money is actually owed to… or under what conditions, if any, it was ‘borrowed’? How can it be anyone else’s concern, that an organisation that might one day be managing our own finances, somehow managed to make such a pig’s breakfast of its own economic management, that it cannot even quantify its own debt?

Again, I would have thought the obvious answer to those questions was provided by Fenech herself. No sooner had she informed us that the PN’s financial woes are its own affair, and no one else’s… she promptly suggested a change to the law so that the political parties would end up being financed by the taxpayer.

What can I say? Sheer genius. So we taxpayers have no business whatsoever to be asking questions about the PN’s debt... yet at the same time, if the PN has its way, we will ultimately be the ones to pay it back …

I like that reasoning, I must say. I’ll try and remember it next time I find myself facing bankruptcy …