News | Sunday, 28 February 2010

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‘Minister did not mess with our work’ – arts council director

David Darmanin
Malta Council for Culture and Arts executive director Davinia Galea, who chaired the group that drafted Malta’s first cultural policy, has denied claims that the draft was in any was manipulated by the Education Ministry.
Shortly after the government-appointed working group published the draft, Labour MP Owen Bonnici last week presented an earlier, unpublished version of the document that contained a more explicit proposal on the amendment of censorship laws, and which was later omitted in the final draft.
The final draft clearly states that efforts would be taken to remove the film and theatre classification board from the wing of the Justice and Home Affairs Ministry and place it under the education ministry.
But in the earlier drafts revealed by Bonnici, the working group suggests that a self-classification system be put in place for theatrical performances – abolishing the board’s censorship role.
Bonnici told MaltaToday that he’s “given up on trying to reason out a single coherent position by the government on the theatre and film censorship issue”.
Surprisingly, the working group reacted by correcting Bonnici’s apparently incorrect reference to the classification board as a “censorship board”. Instead Davinia Galea claimed that “no censorship board exists… there is a Classification Board which however, in exceptional circumstances, has the right to censor,” Galea said.
Bonnici said the government’s stand on the issue has been confused. “One day Minister Carm Mifsud Bonnici is saying the abolishment of censorship would lead to the abuse of sensitive minorities in our country, the next day the former culture Minister Dolores Cristina is stating that the censorship laws are ‘archaic and obsolete’.”
He proceeded to ask a series of questions on why this proposal was omitted from the final draft and whether the omission had anything to do with “Dolores Cristina being asked to explain her position to Cabinet”.
Galea did not deny having omitted parts of the proposal prior to the publication of the draft. Nor did she disagree with the idea of replacing theatre censorship with self-classification as proposed in the previous drafts.
But given that the working group was entrusted to compile a policy document, and not a law, Galea said that “it was not felt necessary to state in a more specific and detailed way as to how the law would be changing.”
She insisted that the proposed strategy that was omitted “could not be included in the final draft document as this needs to be endorsed by the legislating body” and the working group went through various drafts as its “works and thoughts evolved… At no stage did government interfere in the workings of the group,” she said.
ddarmanin@mediatoday.com.mt

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