Dialogue: Auckland writers really do miss out

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

A fortnight ago I discussed concerns many writers have over the bureaucracy at Creative New Zealand (CNZ) and would normally have left it there. However, the response of the new chief executive, Elizabeth Kerr, in a letter to the editor raises some alarm.

She does the usual labelling people do when defending difficult positions - calling me "parochial" and "prejudiced," saying I pay "scant attention to reality" - easy, cheap stuff, so let's ignore that and have a look at the evidence she offers to claim it's a myth that Auckland writers miss out.

She says, "56 per cent of Aucklanders applying to the literature committee received grants from the Arts Board (45 grants from 80 applications) compared with 48 per cent of Wellingtonians (45 grants from 94 applications)."

It has not occurred to her to ask: why is it only 80 writers from a region with a million people and easily the biggest and most active branch of the Society of Authors (PEN Inc) applied and got the same number of grants as those from a region with about one-third that population?

Is it because Aucklanders have given up applying; or because Wellington writers know the system better; or because few literature assessors come from Auckland? I don't know the answer to this and neither does Kerr but the sad, sad thing is that she doesn't seem to want to know.

I would have thought it part of her job to worry about things like that and not just cover such discrepancies with smokescreen percentages. Or must we all move to Wellington?

Kerr also says that because the NZSA does not get annual funding "does not mean they are not regarded as part of the arts infrastructure." Well, let me quote from a CNZ press release: "The professional literature infrastructure funded annually by CNZ comprises Booksellers NZ and the NZ Book Council, two complementary organisations primarily involved in the promotion of NZ writers and NZ books."

There is no mention of the pesky NZSA, which was then told informally by a CNZ staff member that it could not get annual funding because it was not categorised as infrastructure.

She also says: "All assessment committee members are drawn from throughout NZ." Well, then, according to CNZ's own figures, of the 17 literary assessors over the past five years, two are from Auckland (both salaried academics), one from Palmerston North, one from Taranaki and the other 13 all from Wellington and Canterbury. I know it's parochial and prejudiced to reveal these embarrassing facts but, dammit, there they are.

The assessors "are chosen for their standing in the art form," she says. And this is the crux of the problem: by whose judgment? Do writers and artists organisations have any involvement in the decision on who represents them anywhere within CNZ? None.

The top-heavy governance of the council and boards is politically appointed and assessors come from the staff.

Before the ideological changes made in 1994, the arts council was a consultative agency that dealt with writers' and artists' representatives on a democratic basis. Since then, writers and artists have had no say in who represents them. That doesn't mean that all the chosen members have been unsatisfactory.

Some - and among them Wellingtonians, Cantabrians, you know, Kiwis - are hugely respected. Some few have been a joke. But, because they no longer have even a consultative role in deciding who represents them or on matters of policy, rank-and-file writers and artists feel alienated and aggrieved. And, by the way, they don't want to run the cutter, they just want to be in the crew.

The other night I watched Reunion, a television programme about rugby in which commentators give opinions on players, referees, coaches and administrators.

Writers and artists know all about this because their work is subject to public review, but arts administrators are affronted by any challenge to their performance, as Elizabeth Kerr's letter shows, because they are accountable in no way to the thousands of writers and artists whose interests they are supposed to serve.

To whom do you complain about the CNZ? To the CNZ staff, of course, the same people from whom you may soon seek a grant.

I suggest the Book Council (whose rank and file members have no voting power of any sort, by the way) and CNZ staff take time off from their bourgeois lives and, no matter how distasteful it may be, watch Reunion and the even more irreverent Sports Cafe and ask themselves how they would cope with the sort of criticism of administrators that springs from the democratic impulse behind those two programmes.

Kerr uses that once ubiquitous new-right term "clients" when talking about writers and artists. Most bureaucrats have shied away from that by now, where its use is palpably absurd.

"Clients" can shop around, should be able to take their talents elsewhere, but for writers and artists there's nowhere else to go. They are "applicants" who have been turned into "supplicants" because there is no consultative process involving their representatives.

The Government and CNZ might have me shouting at them, but if they have any real interest in what's happening, they will listen carefully to the murmuring behind me from the dozens of writers who tell me I'm great for doing this but who, understandably, want to stay invisible. Who knows when they may want CNZ support?