THE Urban Council has been getting a lot of flak from the media as well as the community for the way it has been spending or planning to spend money on 'educational trips abroad'. It is certainly a healthy situation that councillors can now be openly challenged for their actions when in the past councillors acted without consultation. However, let us not err in the wrong direction. Sometimes when we are told things, the teller of the tale has an axe to grind. The Democratic Party members of the Urban Council certainly sounded very noble when they told the press that they were against the council's 1995-96 annual study visit to North American because they could not support such extravagance. Do councillors need to travel abroad to better serve the community? The answer determines whether the trip is a junket or a duty visit. The Urban Council is in the process of drawing up its five-year plan for arts and culture and one would think that a visit abroad would convince the councillors that: Money spent on the arts is a long-term investment for the welfare of the country. Arts management is different from government administration. There is no doubt that when it comes to investing in the arts, councillors are tight-fisted. A trip abroad would convince them that quality does not come cheap and that investment in the arts is needed if the quality of the arts is to be improved in terms of building arts facilities and programming events for these facilities. The Film Archive is near completion, but which councillor has ever seen a film archive? And if this is the case, how will the councillors know what is a good archive? They could ask the heads of the Urban Services Department (USD), as they usually do. The USD has advised them it is unnecessary to appoint a curator for the Film Archive, because one of their own lads can do the job just as well, which shows how reliable the USD is as an arts adviser. This is surely why the councillors should go on this trip - to discover that there are other and more enlightened ways of administering the arts than leaving it in the hands of the USD which have been running it in a safe but uncreative way for the past three decades. This trip is necessary; but is it extravagant? Not if one looks at the itinerary which involves so many visits to cultural institutions that it is really more work than play. And if we are all to buckle our belts tighter in these hard days, why have Democratic Party members in the Regional Council joined the visit to North America (which costs about the same amount of money) and why are they planning to join another one to Australasia? Come on, Party Whip. You cannot condemn extravagance on the island and allow it on the peninsula. Nor can you condone the spending of $250,000 on improving the media skills of Urban Councillors in these hard days. VICKI OOI Chairman International Association of Theatre Critics
