Dialogue: Bureaucrats foul up arts progress

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Twice in the past few months I've tried to discuss with intelligent people who don't live in Auckland my concerns about the fairness and wisdom of having the entire New Zealand infrastructure for literature and the arts isolated in one small city and within the palisades of a stifling bureaucracy. In both cases, I couldn't even advance an argument before that deep resentment of Auckland broke out.

In the first case, a Wellingtonian said immediately: "Oh, so it's back to the Auckland-Wellington thing, is it?" No point in pursuing the conversation.

In the second, a South Islander said: "Look, everybody hates Auckland."

"Everybody doesn't," I said, "because most of them live up here."

I mention these encounters to demonstrate the extreme difficulty and probably the futility of what I'm about to do, and that is to suggest that the development of literature and the arts is severely hampered by an inward-looking and ridiculously defensive Wellington bureaucracy.

Now I have lived in many places in New Zealand and have no regional loyalty, except that my team is the Highlanders. But keep in mind that two-thirds of the population lives north of Taupo.

Let's look first at the politics of literature, in which I was once deeply involved.

The New Zealand Book Council is a self-appointed, self-perpetuating group of Wellingtonians who represent no one. Their amorphous membership (anyone who wants to join) is national but no one outside the Wellington palisades intrudes on the meetings of the 17-strong committee.

This council has been declared "infrastructure" by Creative New Zealand (CNZ) and gets recurrent funding at a high level. It doesn't do the hard graft of politics so it is a bureaucrats' pet.

The New Zealand Society of Authors (PEN Inc or NZSA) has 950 members, all of them published writers or in some way associated with the business of writing. Its committee meetings have representatives from all over the country.

It provides fundamental services to members, such as a mentoring programme, the vetting of contracts with publishers, and gives hard information on grants, scholarships, and other subjects.

But it is not "infrastructure," according to Creative New Zealand's arcane definition, and it gets much less funding, sometimes accompanied by a subtle, back-of-the-hand, unwritten admonition that it might not last if NZSA members foment criticism.

You see, the problem is that the NZSA is involved in the hard politics of writers' well-being and freedom of expression, and it's based in Auckland where most of its members live well outside the palisades.

(A CNZ staff member has privately said it was a "mistake" to move the organisation to Auckland. That's the way they think.)

I'm a past-president of the NZSA but haven't held office for some years. Senior members will, however, be very nervous when they read this because of the way CNZ was set up in the early 1990s.

The influence over policy and grants which had been largely influenced by writers' representatives was effectively transferred to the bureaucrats. It was ruled by the ideologues of that time that writers should be kept at bay to avoid them capturing the system.

I'll tell you a joke. Owen Marshall, a mature, sensible man and in my opinion the finest short story writer we have, is on the Arts Council because of his stature as a writer - but he chairs sessions on dance to avoid his "capture" of literature. Well, that's not really a joke, it's the surreal truth.

In fact, the result of this is the "capture" of the system by bureaucrats. At one time writers' representatives would go to Wellington fairly regularly and talk to the top Arts Council administrator. Nowadays, they go to Wellington to listen to lower-level bureaucrats.

The present system derives from the slightly mad horror of so-called special-interest lobbyists the National Government inherited from the Roger Douglas years. They could not see that if you disqualify lobbyists from the relationship they should have with governments and their bureaucrats, you reduce the knowledge that goes into the institution and hand all the power over to the bureaucrats.

I don't blame this Government for this mess but I really think it has an obligation to do something about it as soon as possible.

A start would be to remove the organisation to Auckland where most of the writers and artists live.

CNZ chairman Peter Biggs once gloried in the advantage of the Arts Council model for funding by saying it was at arm's length from the Government. Well, it would be even more superbly arm's length if based up here.

It won't happen because no air will get into the argument. It will remain hermetically sealed within the corridors of the capital, supported by the negative, often puerile resentment of Auckland by people who live away down south and who don't seem to understand that their own interests would be better served by Aucklanders, who are relatively indifferent to wielding power and would be more likely to look at things objectively.

And now I'll tell you a real joke. A Christchurch writer a few years ago did a fairly primitive but reasonably accurate statistical analysis of where to live for the highest probability of getting a literature grant. CNZ pooh-poohed the claim. The writer moved to Wellington.

PS: Soon, I'll write some more about the inequities in the funding system for literature, the arts, culture and heritage.