I have yet to see an Austin Powers film. I am told that the film sucks. It features a typical American comedian who makes you cry rather than laugh.
There are things I shun with a passion: the other English language newspapers to start with; and most important of all, the blogs of witches and obese columnists.
And as Austin Gatt continues to prove to us how completely insensitive he is to the dynamic of business and living in today’s world, I would really love to think that Austin Gatt had the same awful sense of humour as Austin Powers.
Listening to what Dr Gatt has been saying is crucial if we are to understand the mindset of this man.
Here is someone who does not give a toss about public opinion and what the majority believes.
Here is someone who has the benefit of having a prime minister who is a prisoner of Brussels and does not really care about all the repercussions on small business and big business alike.
And here is a man who is effectively Prime Minister, and has made the real PM look like a second-class ventriloquist.
Here is a man who really and truly is a Mintoffian in Nationalist clothing.
The MSCESD – chaired by one of his lieutenants, the well-known yes man Sonny Portelli – is not only a talking shop, it is a mockery of public consultation. Yet no one has the guts to stand up and send the Minister to revisit his democratic credentials.
That subsidies are intrinsically problematic is not in question. But who is blame for the subsidies?
In the last 21 years I believe we have had a Nationalist government... not a Labour government, nor a yellow government, but only a PN-led administration.
For the last 21 years we have had a management approach to this country based on the premise that money is not a problem.
We have seen Mintoffian policies retained and inculcated in the government system. And as we have looked on in disbelief who have failed to ask:
Who continued to subsidise the Malta dockyards?
Who continued to issue stipends to students?
Who continued to subsidise electricity and water?
Who gave public land out for peanuts to hotels?
Who subsidised industry?
Worse still, Austin Gatt decided to opt for a hedging agreement with the result that the price the Maltese taxpayer forks for oil is currently way, way higher than the spot prices of oil.
If Dr Gatt was running my business I would have called him in and given him the sack and no amount of gruff talk or vulgarity would have changed my mind.
I am not impressed by Gatt’s vulgarities. I, too, can insert the Maltese equivalent for “penis” and bark out expletives to impress. I, too, can walk like Clint Eastwood and dress up in jeans.
I am not impressed. And many Nationalists are similarly disgusted by his antics.
Yet, what is more surprising is that the mere suggestion of hedging oil way back in 1998 was akin to saying I want to change my religion.
In 1998, hedging was a dirty word associated with Labour’s bad politics. Today it is a nice word and anyone who suggests otherwise is a moron, a freak and liable to be labelled forever as the enemy of the people.
As Austin progresses with his wave of tariff changes he believes that we will take it in our stride and say well, there is really no way that we can object to it.
Yes, that is what people who have neither scrotal sac nor spine usually say. Or people who are so blind, that they believe that the Nationalist party is Divine, always right, and therefore can continue robbing Peter to pay Paul at will.
But truly we must all realise that nothing is cast in stone.
The Nationalists are not immortal. They have only been around for a few decades and anyone who believes that nothing ever crumbles and disappears should really start looking at the history of politics.
Today, Austin Gatt has reconfirmed his complete detachment from the social conscience of yesterday’s PN.
Austin Gatt gives the impression that he is above it all. As he walks his Charles Bronson walk, he believes that he can get away with being rebuked. He wishes to give the impression that he is such a strong and insensitive character that everything is beneath him, even the sufferings of small business and people. His tariff structure will break people’s livelihood and push prices up.
He brushes all criticism aside, whether it is MITTS, conflict of interest, insensitivity or brazen comments. He is untouchable.
I am not impressed.
He questions if GRTU chief Vince Farrugia has the balls to counter him and to order the self-employed to protest, and carry out civil disobedience by not paying the increase in tariffs. Well, we will have to see if Farrugia has the balls or not.
What we all have that Austin cannot query us about is our vote.
We should do as all Nationalists with a reasonable amount of grey matter will do in the next European parliamentary: i.e., not to vote for any of the PN candidates, or not vote at all.
And do not take your chances too far. Do not believe that your luck goes on forever.
The Americans this week bombed Syria and killed some eight civilians on Syrian territory. The Syrians summoned a press conference and barked words and phrases against the Americans. Then everyone went home and returned to doing what they did before: the Americans bombing civilians, and the Syrians hiding in their bunkers hoping the policeman of the world does not choose another target inside their country.
The above story, if it is a story, takes me to Mile End.
The Labour party very much reminds me of the Syrians. They bark and shout words, and then do nothing. They can do nothing.
Instead we see a Joseph Muscat who has plunged himself into a myriad of peaceful missions within in his party, in the attempt to pacify the militants and the moderates and the right and the left.
It is mission impossible.
And instead of taking to the streets, Muscat is waiting to be told what to do and worse still, taking up his time with funny reports.
The latest, a code of conduct for the Labour party media prepared by (of all people) Joe Azzopardi, Charles Flores, Joe Vella and another person whom I shall not mention.
They told Muscat what his media should do and should not do. And really the only thing they should have told Muscat is that his media is a f***ing mess, and should start by removing their false teeth and replacing them with some canines.
All these rules and regulations about ethics is really and truly a whole load of hogwash, most especially when it comes from Joe Azzopardi, Charles Flores and Joe Vella.
The former is the producer of that circus called Xarabank, and surely is the last person in the world to preach about ethics.
Charles Flores was at Xandir Malta when it was bad – really bad – and when news had no respect for people’s intelligence, let alone ethics.
And then we have Joe Vella, the former editor of the defunct Weekend Chronicle, that Saturday Labour newspaper in the time of Dominic Mintoff, when the news was presented to us as if there were only two kinds of individuals: the workers, and the rest. Or when students were reported as “attacking workers” when in reality the students were being bludgeoned by Lorry Sant’s thugs.
Dr Muscat should stop wasting his time and start doing politics. This country needs an opposition leader, not a pussy. And if he wants to seek any advice, the last person he should ask for any is Joe Azzopardi.

7 Anthony Mifsud was a prison warden who was wrongly blamed for the escape of Louis Bartolo from Kordin prisons.
Anyone who remembers that rogue ‘il-Fusellu’ will remember Bartolo. It was he who shot him.
Mifsud was purposely framed, tortured and imprisoned in the prison he was supposed to guard. A normal episode in the pleasant Malta of the eighties.
But the news of the week was the court ruling that effectively awarded Mifsud a financial package for his sufferings. It is 26 years late and an insignificant amount.
I will not be revisiting the Mifsud saga. This edition carries a news feature of the Mifsud story and how he remained without compensation by the post-1987 administrations for his victimisation.
In all these years, the Nationalist administration ignored his pleas. In all these years successive Ministers of Justice, Giudo de Marco, Tonio Borg and Austin Gatt chose to look the other way.
In all these years, the others who had suffered under the Mintoffian regime were compensated by the State.
Even those who were the victims of criminal acts – such as Eddie Fenech Adami’s personal assistant Richard Cachia Caruana who was knifed in Mdina – were given their compensation.
In all these years, Anthony Mifsud was forgotten and none of the campaigns by the Greens, Joe Azzopardi’s Xarabank and MaltaToday could move the powers that be to show compassion for Anthony Mifsud.
Now expect to read what the apologists with double-barrelled surnames and unparalleled spite and hate for anything not Nationalist have to say about the good old Mintoffian days. They will rant on about Mintoff but say nothing about how this administration acted.
Really and truly, someone should be reminding our readers of the last 21 years under an administration that applies justice according to the criterion on whether your political colour and class means anything to them. This is the political apartheid that distinguished the privileged from the rest.
Anthony Mifsud was not privileged. And though we are told that God is a socialist and treats everyone equally, I am sure that God has of recent been converted to the Nationalist creed. I also have the feeling that there is really no socialism in either this world or the other.
So if anyone is expecting to find reason and justice in the next world please look elsewhere.
One of the three men asked to compensate Anthony Mifsud is Joseph Psaila, the man who was promoted under Guido De Marco after having been actively involved in criminal acts.
Joe Psaila’s insalubrious reputation seems to have done little to stop him from taking on the role of head of security at Group 4. Joe Psaila was employed by the new Managing Director of Group 4 Kenneth Demartino.
Psaila was notorious in his role as a police inspector during the 1980s in various human rights breaches. But soon after the election of 1987, the new Nationalist government, with Eddie at the helm and de Marco as his second-in-command, promoted him to assistant commissioner and director of prisons.
In 1990, during the trial by jury of Martin Gaffarena, a Nationalist activist accused of placing a bomb outside the Safi MLP club in 1986, it was revealed Psaila had illegally procured Gaffarena’s fingerprints from a glass he had drank from, and later placed them on a bomb.
Gaffarena spent three years in preventive custody throughout his trial by jury. Gaffarena later filed for damages for having had false accusations drawn up against him. He later won Lm34,000 in compensation in 2001.
Psaila on the other hand was employed by Skanska to act as their security liaison with Group 4. Later he was taken on by the private security firm as a director of security following the handover of the Mater Dei hospital to government.
Kenneth Demartino, a fervent Nationalist, told me when I quizzed him in front of his PR agent Malcolm Naudi, that he did not know these details about Psaila.
So the infamous columnists with aspirations to win awards for their bile pour heaps of scorn on Dom Mintoff, while the last 21 years of insensitive Nationalist governance is untouched.
It is about time they realise that just like melons are green from the outside and red inside, wicked apologists are like putrefied objects, blue from the outside and dead rotten inside!

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