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Karl Schembri
Six years since Louis Galea – then culture minister – launched Malta’s first ever comprehensive national culture policy, today’s culture ministry under Francis Zammit Dimech is saying that Malta has no such policy and has launched a think tank to come up with one.
It’s as if they are governments from different planets but it’s still the Nationalist administration that is going back to the drawing board and starting everything all over again through a new so-called “road map” that will somehow reinvent the wheel, even though a whole list of initiatives listed in the 2001 document after wide consultation remain yet to be implemented.
According to Peter Portelli, the current minister’s permanent secretary, “the development of a national cultural policy has long been in the making but has never materialised”. He was speaking last week at the launch of the Valletta Creative Forum.
Yet the policy is there, and thanks to it several institutions have already been set up, among them the Arts Council, Heritage Malta, the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage, the National Book Council and the National Council of the Maltese Language.
The author and coordinator of the 2001 policy document, Mario Azzopardi, said the decision to ignore the policy beggars belief.
“Unfortunately, whoever is proposing a ‘think tank’ to contribute to the development of a national cultural policy is ignoring a very important document issued in 2001 and which experts from the Council of Europe had described as illuminating and invigorating,” he said. “It is amazing that the so-called Valletta Creative Forum, in collaboration with the Malta Arts Council and the Ministry for Culture and Tourism have opted to disregard the original cultural policy document. One should ask what happened to the three-year Strategic Cultural Plan drawn by the arts council after its institution in 2003, and why it is now relying on third parties to expose the value of the arts on a social and economic level. Such responsibility, as well as the development of the necessary infrastructure to professionalize the arts should rest squarely with the arts council.”
Portelli however described the 2001 policy as just a discussion paper.
“We’re aware of that document but it was only a draft discussion document,” Portelli said when contacted. “If someone asked me for a national cultural policy I definitely cannot give them that document. We’ll obviously work on it and update it and take up anything that is relevant.”
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