Instead of a focus on strangling individual and small group cultural exporters, the Joint Select Committee of Parliament on Cultural Diplomacy should direct its attention on constructing and streamlining the export entertainment industry.
Approached in such a manner, it will lay down the human and physical infrastructure to engender growth and even greater creativity in the industry.
When such is achieved, the expectation must be that additional streams of government revenue will then become available.
It cannot be that the few hundreds of our artistes, having individually and collectively gone abroad and used their wits to lend their talents and skills to build the markets for carnivals and entertainment centres to utilise T&T-created products, will now be hijacked and bullied into making bits and pieces of tax payments.
Ironically, while such an approach is advocated, at home, government spokespersons have consistently said that many individuals and businesses earning top revenues continue to devise methods to avoid completely and cheat the taxman; and this is while the tax-evaders thrive on the infrastructure created with tax dollars.
This newspaper is not advocating that special groups of income earners should be made permanently free of paying their way.
Instead, we are suggesting that the State and the established private sector construct the core of the entertainment-cultural industry at home and abroad. Then, on that basis, it will be relatively easy to devise and implement a system of taxation to earn revenue from export entertainment.
There is nothing new about giving incentives to construct revenue-earning businesses. For decades, tax exemption systems have been awarded to foreign investors. That those systems have not always been efficient, and that a few multinational corporations worldwide have exploited the tax-free period, and then transferred their operations elsewhere, just means that governments have not been clever and insightful enough to construct systems without leaks.
Having learnt from such experiences, and the fact that in developing the cultural industry, we are talking about nationals resident here, but looking for opportunities abroad to share their cultural products, is a major departure from granting tax holidays to foreign corporations.
We must also be cognizant that when our cultural artistes go abroad and sell their products to foreign consumers, and so too, to feed our Diaspora communities in the North, that is a form of diplomacy. It sells Trinidad and Tobago abroad, and cannot be accounted for only in immediate dollars and cents.
The stories of foreigners coming to know of T&T through a couple generations of our cultural and sport ambassadors abroad are well known. Go to India and say the name Brian Charles Lara, and everyone can make a connection; so too with Dwight Yorke, Dwayne Bravo, Sparrow, Machel, and a couple dozen other sporting and cultural ambassadors.
The advice, therefore, to the JSC, governments, et al, is for an effort to construct the export industry of culture, sport, and our intellectual ambassadors. Simultaneously, the need is to sharpen and deepen our diplomatic contingents abroad to lend support to such export products. It is a far superior approach to any attempt to hijack a couple artistes hustling a dollar abroad. It is therefore heartening that Culture Minister Randall Mitchell yesterday clarified it is not a plan Government plans to pursue. Hopefully, he will now guide the JSC on the right path.