Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-02-02-Speech-4-013"
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"en.20060202.3.4-013"2
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".
Mr President, honourable Members, thank you for your valuable views on the White Paper.
There was no vote on this. We have discussions and very rarely vote in the Commission. During the whole five years of the Prodi Commission we held votes only about five or ten times. So there was no vote, but strong support for my White Paper. I am glad to be able to tell you that. This is not only about voting. You are right in saying that we must tell the citizens that this is another political arena and that political discussion is crucial. We need to debate. We will have different ideological viewpoints on issues and the discussion will go on in the European arena. We have to help citizens to be able to follow and understand what goes on and to have a say. You will find some ideas on how to do that in our White Paper.
Finally, I agree with Mr Hammerstein Mintz. I hope we will see a pilot project where Council meetings will become open. This is also a way to end the blame game, where the institutions blame each other. In the end it is the citizens who lose out, because they are unable to follow or judge what is going on and what their ministers say in the Council. I agree that Council meetings should be open and citizens should be able to follow them. We will contribute whatever we can to make that possible. It is also the Commission’s position that openness and transparency are absolutely crucial in the context of improving communications.
First of all, action must follow. If we talk about reaching out to citizens we cannot cut down on the programmes where we actually do just that. On this point, we have exactly the same position as the European Parliament as far as I understand. We want a budget which hopefully is increased and definitely not reduced. This is also our position in the ongoing budget negotiations. We will make our views absolutely clear on that. We certainly hold the same position on that issue.
Mr Wiersma, I think you made a very valid point, because this is also about the participation of citizens. I have repeated that democracy is not just a spectator sport. It requires an engagement from citizens, but they also have to be able to acquire the basic knowledge about what is going on and how to exert influence. There is therefore also an obligation on us to make sure that there is access, for example, to civic education, where one can learn how it all works and how one can have a voice in this process.
I think the services directive is a very good example of how simply telling the story does not help if the basis is not there, if the consultation has not been carried out. In the end we will have nobody advocating the proposal. I think that this is an example of where we really have to do the repair work. This is about engaging citizens. Yesterday, one of my colleagues at a Commission meeting said that when the Commission consulted children about a proposal on children’s rights, the proposal which came back had been completely turned around. Children have another order of priorities. We learned a lot from that consultation process.
This is what it is all about. It is about the ethics of communication. It cannot be disconnected from the policy because communication can only be as good as its content. It has to be about the policy content, what we want to do to change the reality of things. However, we also have to clarify which rules and attitudes towards democracy and democratic procedure we adopt. We must also clarify how communication and the ethics of communication are an essential tool in helping us. That is what we are establishing here: the tools, framework and procedures that enable us to communicate, to have a two-way dialogue with citizens. That is what we are trying to build here.
You are correct to ask about the budget. We are only asking for a few more staff to help during the whole consultation period. It is too early to say what we need for the concrete proposals because we are carrying out consultations about that. We have to come back on the specific proposals and action plans with proper impact assessments, budgets and concrete figures. For the moment, we are only setting the consultation period and putting that in place.
When I heard Mr Bonde’s description, I wondered whether we had been reading the same document. I have to respond to the whole issue of a press agency and this is partly a language issue. We have never had any other idea than to upgrade the service that exists today within the Directorate-General for Communications. It is called ‘Europe by Satellite’. We have very few people to carry out the service that provides pictures and sound for radio and television all over Europe. We do it in 20 languages. If we want to have better quality and more facts and figures and to better cover what happens in the Council, Parliament and the Commission, then we will need more staff and equipment. As I said earlier, this is how we help regional television or radio stations that cannot afford to send correspondents to Brussels. If we are serious about providing that inside, interinstitutional information, then we need the people to do it. In the end, we will need a highly professional person to decide what is most interesting from a journalistic point of view: should we send out a team to Parliament today, or should it be in another place covering a different story? We already do that, but with very few resources.
This does not conflict with the web-TV that Parliament has already decided to invest in, which covers what happens inside the institution, but complements efforts to better communicate with citizens. This has been the idea from the outset.
The Brussels-based journalists are not happy. They see a risk of competition. I see very little competition in covering press conferences in 20 languages. I do not think this is a problem. However, everybody is trying to cover their territory. We have to be realistic. If we want the stories out there, at local and regional level and on radio and TV – which are the sources that most of our citizens use today to get information about what happens in the EU – then we need to invest in radio and TV. We are the only ones who can provide these pictures and sounds from inside the institutions. Nobody will be competing with us on that. This is what we want to do with our proposal in the White Paper."@en1
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