Dialogue: So where's the family benefit?

By KATE BELGRAVE

Ever the late starter on community events, I wandered down to the Aotea Centre on Friday to catch the back end of Auckland City's inaugural Family Week.

Family Week, as the family-oriented players among you are doubtless aware, was a council-facilitated affair that offered punters family activities and, according to Mayor Fletcher, generally encouraged any Aucklanders who'd dropped the ball in the priorities department to "take stock of the things that give meaning to our lives."

The notion of such a week apparently began life in the mind of one of councillor Jan Welch's constituents - a young mother who was concerned, as so many of you purportedly are, about the bog in which family values presently wallow.

The other point to make about Family Week is that it finished two weeks ago. That being the case, it might seem that I left my run on Family Week hopelessly late. Au contraire, my friends.

In my view, the true impact of a community-building event these days can be felt only when the hoop-la that heralds it has passed. Or at least, one is now so suspicious of the political motive that lurks behind any community-welding event that one no longer relates - on any level - to the average Joe who still desires those events.

Phrases like "family values" or "family week" are particularly guaranteed to send yours truly straight to sleep. Those phrases strike a person as fast-fraying vines of rhetoric that political types throw to those remaining members of the populace who'll still clutch at any straw.

I remember thinking along these misanthropic lines when Tony Blair, impregnator, appeared before cameras after the birth of his new son, drinking coffee from a mug on which all four of his children were pictured. While it was hard to believe that even the dumbest members of the British electorate would buy into such a blatantly promotional gesture, it was clear that old Tones knew they would.

To me, the whole bent episode represented a new, and largely impenetrable point in the already-seriously-sick politician-electorate symbiosis.

Anyway, that is why one feels closest to community events when they are mostly over. People stop pretending that they care more than they do at the end of an event. This means they're quieter, and you have a chance to decide for yourself whether an event has genuine resonance.

And organisers have a chance to express their own mixed feelings about the exercise they've just been through. I was not disappointed here - I suspect more of you are cynical about the true impact of these events than you're prepared to admit.

Down at the Aotea Centre one stood before the 16 paintings, carvings, danglings etc that served as the Family Culture Exhibition up to last Friday.

The display offered, of course, a heavy multicultural emphasis and embraced various melting-pot themes - all elements guaranteed to turn this honky viewer off by inspiring overriding feelings of guilt and anger in her.

(That guilt and anger ought to be the real theme of any community/family week, of course. Unfortunately, it's the theme everyone is trying to avoid.)

Anyway, I talked about the whole thing with curator Donna Tito, who seemed to understand that the arts exhibition aspect of Family Week had missed to about the same degree that it had hit.

She said that the launch had been "fantastic" and followed that up by saying that the rest of the process had been a real learning curve.

Even the mayor seemed to be hedging her bets when I harassed her, this wet weekend just gone, about the results of Family Week. She said she'd been right behind the idea from the start. She also said: "I think some of the feedback we had was mixed."

It would have been good to find out exactly how mixed this feedback was and who exactly contributed to the mix. Alas, the report on F Week is not out for another few weeks.

Jan Welch described Family Week as "really, really excellent," as well she might, given that it was her baby. Like the mayor, though, she felt it was necessary to qualify her statements by reminding me that teething problems should be sorted out next time.

Why do I suspect that nobody quite believes that?