Dialogue: Clark had no mandate to spend our taxes on arts

By MICHAEL REID*

A picture is worth a thousand words, but is a Maori logo worth $831,000? That is what it has cost Te Waka Toi to develop the new Maori-made mark.

And Creative New Zealand plans to spend a further $350,000 a year after the mark's introduction for administration, management and promotion.

What many people have not woken up to is that this huge cost - more than a $1 million in the first year alone for this one project - has come out of the public's pocket. That is how Creative New Zealand is financed. Basically, it is the result of Helen Clark's multimillion-dollar injection last year into the arts.

The rationale for this rests on a strong belief that the Government should be taking a major role in strengthening cultural identity and creating what Hamish Keith calls "a cultural economy".

In this case, identity means Maori. However, though officially we are a bicultural nation, on the street we are multicultural. It is a fair bet, though, that few other cultures that have established themselves here will get more than the merest sniff out of Creative New Zealand.

Government support for the arts is now regarded as a normal feature of central and local government spending in most Western nations. But it is only in the past 50 years that this has become common.

In Britain from the 16th to the 20th centuries, if artists wanted to survive, generally they had to look to wealthy private individuals. The state's patronage did not go much beyond imposing architecture and statues to grace the front of buildings.

These days, few private individuals or organisations would be willing to support some of what passes as art, so the Government has stepped in, to the point that in New Zealand we are now seeing huge state spending on the arts. How did this come about?

It had its roots in May 2000, not long after the Government had been voted in, when a Heart of the Nation panel of cultural high priests was established to come up with a plan to support the arts and culture.

Panel members were selected by Helen Clark as the Minister of Arts, her associate Judith Tizard and consultant Mr Keith. According to Ms Tizard, the committee was not supposed to be representative of the country or even the wider cultural sector, but contained good strategic thinkers. "We are looking at people out there trying to do it," she said.

The result has been support for the arts on a scale previously unknown in New Zealand.

Was there an electoral mandate for this hand-picked panel to allocate a vast number of tax dollars to the arts? Hardly. Even more importantly, is there a constitutional reason for doing so?

It might be said that state funding of the arts is in the public good. But trying to define what constitutes public good can lead to heated debate. There can be no justification for the state and state agencies financing the arts on the grounds of defending or purveying the public good because no such unified notion exists. Witness the debate over quotas for New Zealand content on television, and the arguments over the pulp culture approach adopted at Te Papa.

Incidentally, in her role as Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, Ms Clark directly appoints the board of Te Papa. So in effect she becomes a powerful guardian of how ordinary New Zealanders view themselves and their past.

We can only assume that she is, therefore, all in favour of the crass displays that Te Papa parades as art and history, for example the T-shirt display and, of course, the infamous Virgin in a Condom.

The lesson in this is that state involvement leads to control, and ultimately restricts freedom by sanctioning what it considers legitimate.

The arts carry a lot of emotive power, and to hitch one's political wagon to them, especially in 21st-century New Zealand where we are constantly reminded of identity and the collective struggle to make the world notice our creativity, is, indeed, a popular move.

Labour has responded to this more effectively than National, and present initiatives may be based on altruistic motives, but the issues of where state involvement leads us remain.

The Maori mark, we are told, will guarantee the authenticity and quality of art. Only time will tell whether that is so or whether the definitions of quality and what constitutes Maori art have been captured by a minority few.

Even so, there is no real justification for spending large sums of taxpayer money on it when there are more pressing needs in health and education, for example, where the money would more directly benefit all New Zealanders.

* Michael Reid is a senior researcher with the Maxim Institute, a social research organisation.