Nickie Muir: Little community has HAC proposal

The Hundertwasser.

When is a community arts project not a community arts project? If a community says "no" to a project twice - once in submissions and once in a random telephone survey does that make the community "anti-art" or does it mean that the project does not satisfy the criteria for calling itself a community arts project in the first place?

It's a shame the Hundertwasser chalice got handed to new councillors who had little to do with instigating it and even less to do with the process or lack of it that triggered the community division plaguing it.

The four senior staff members in council whose collective advice costs ratepayers about $1 million a year, plus that of a CEO who earns more than the Mayor of Auckland, could have served councillors better in this regard.

Once significant money was spent on scoping for HAC and a full-time funds raiser paid, a momentum built, seemingly to justify the initial spend. Difficult to discuss when some councillors rode the coat-tails of dissent using their anti-HAC stance as their sole election platform when they have showed little interest in the arts anyway.

Hard too, when respected members of the arts community confide they felt they could not speak out against a project some considered ill-suited to locals for fear of employment vulnerability. The argument that we wouldn't have the Toll rugby stadium either if politicians had consulted with the public illustrates the distrust those in power often have for real public opinion, rather than validates the HAC as a much needed economic life-saver or game-changing art facility.

Now that the rugby stadium offices are commercially leased, it's probably closer to breaking even. If this was always in the business case, there could have been a more vigorous debate and we may have either ended up with a venue that was genuinely useful for all events, or have made the conscious decision to go into the commercial property game and purpose build for that.

To say that the Lotteries grant of $2 million endorsed the value of the HAC as an arts project is also odd. They allotted twice that amount in the same round for a swimming pool on the North Shore.

The Ministry for Culture and Arts refused funding for the HAC because it failed to meet the criteria of "a qualifying permanent collection of national significance because it relates to the care of a privately-owned offshore collection". The arbitrary nature of the intended borrowed Maori artworks in its opinion did not contribute to its goal of securing curated collections of national importance. Even had the HAC met that criteria, it stated: "The project's own business plans indicate 'there is a reasonably high risk of it running at a loss of half-a-million a year'."

It noted that as the council is not underwriting any shortfalls the risks and costs will fall to the Whangarei Art Museum Trust "unnecessarily placing at risk" the permanently held collection which actually is nationally significant. A collection that unlike the borrowed works in the proposed HAC, already belongs to all of us.