The new culture minister says his first task in office will be to reduce the “cumbersome” censorship rules that almost everyone who deals with the ministry complains about.
All 18 cabinet nominees outlined their plans in speeches to the Majlis last week before they were voted on.
Most of the outlines were fairly general and short on specifics.
Culture Minister Ali Jannati acknowledged that he had been away from the Culture Ministry for many years and said his first task would be to get reacquainted with the ministry, its personnel and current policies. Then he said he would write a list of priorities and work through them one-by-one to devise solutions.
He said he would be thinking early on about the censorship rules that have journalists, movie directors and book publishers complaining both about interference and about dense bureaucracy.
Jannati said, “We will try to prevent and to reduce as much as we can some of those cumbersome rules.”
Oil Minister Bijan Namdar-Zanganeh said his top priority was to get oil production capacity back up above 4 million barrels a day, where it was before he left office in 2005. He didn’t explain why that was a higher priority than trying to sell the oil Iran is now pumping and storing because it doesn’t have buyers.
He also said a priority was developing the oilfields that Iran shares with its neighbors, who are generally sucking oil from those fields while Iran does little. But every oil minister since the 1990s has said that developing the shared fields was a priority and little has been done.
Economy Minister Ali Tayeb-nia, who got the largest vote of confidence in the Majlis, said the government has trouble finding enough cash with which to make the monthly welfare payments to every citizen. He said the new government would be presenting the Majlis with proposed revisions to the welfare law to address that problem. But he gave no hint as to what those amendments would do.
Telecommunications Minister Mahmud Vaezi said his first priority would be to speed up the Internet. Iran suffers one of the slowest broadband services in the world. Vaezi did not say what he would be doing about the Ahmadi-nejad Administration’s vaguely described plans to develop an Iranian Intranet that many fear is intended to supplant the World Wide Web.
Intelligence Minister Mahmud Alavi criticized existing security measures as harsh and intrusive and promised to adopt “softer” policies that “will not interfere with the private lives of citizens.”
