Robertson Grant: Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRobertson Grant: Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 10 December 2013. Volume:695;Page:15416. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): Oh! There is a Speaker’s ruling about that Mr Chair.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): A deliberate mistake—Grant Robertson.GRANT ROBERTSON: No relation whatsoever—I will just put that on the record—none at all. I just want to speak briefly—no; a lovely man Ross—to clauses 1 and 2 and to unravel the mystery for my colleague Rino Tirikatene of the commencement date. The Ministers who have sat in the chair tonight have been rendered mute. Therefore they will not be standing up to speak to Supplementary Order Paper 258 in the name of the Hon Christopher Finlayson so I will help them out. The Supplementary Order Paper actually amends the commencement date to be: “This Act into force on the day that is 3 months after the date on which it receives the Royal assent.” It is probably a good idea that that amendment is on that Supplementary Order Paper because the current commencement date is 1 October 2011 and let us be honest this bill is not going to get the Royal assent until 2014. By that stage it would be 3 years out of date and to me that sums up an out-of-date and out-of-touch Minister who is responsible for this bill.Mr Finlayson has taken the time to come to the Chamber for previous parts of the bill and spread around a bit of hate on this side of the Chamber. We find it hard to understand because the Minister himself has made a good personal contribution to the arts of which he should be proud. [Interruption] Yes he has. He has actually made a good personal contribution outside his role as the Minister for Arts Culture and Heritage towards supporting the arts; he just cannot allow anyone else to make a contribution that gets recognised. In many ways the commencement date of 1 October 2011 sums up the Minister: trapped in the past—stuck somewhere between Beethoven and Neil Diamond for his preferred musical style. The Minister is trapped back in 2010 or 2011 when he had this bright idea to turn Creative New Zealand and the Arts Council upside down and to come up with this one body to rule them all on which there would be four representatives for Māori and two for Pasifika who will now be faced with a job that I believe is unfair to them to be part of this.So the amended commencement date gives 3 months to sort out all of this bill. I predict it is actually going to be quite hard work because despite the long period of time what we have learnt as we have gone through this debate is that the wording of the bill is particularly unclear in the area around community arts councils and I do not think that it is well understood. The Minister has told us that the committee that will get formed under clause 11 of the bill will effectively be Te Waka Toi anyway. It now cannot use that name or at least the name is protected under this bill. There is a lot of confusion and I believe that a commencement date of 3 months is actually probably not going to end up being quite long enough.I do not want to prolong the debate on this part too much but suffice to say that the slow out-of-touch Minister believes that we are in a golden age of the arts but if he was at the film awards tonight in Auckland he would be hearing all about how that is not true that artists in New Zealand are succeeding despite this Minister and his regime not because of it. This bill unfortunately is a sad testament to a very slow Minister who is shuffling the deckchairs within the Arts Council and failing to provide the support that artists in New Zealand need.