Wagner Nicky: Copyright (Artists’ Resale Right) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Wagner Nicky: Copyright (Artists’ Resale Right) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
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NICKY WAGNER (National) 
: 
 I rise to speak to the Copyright (Artists’ Resale Right) Amendment Bill. I will consider the operation of such a scheme and explain why under this legislation it just will not work. 
At first view the idea of droit de suite or an artist’s resale royalty appeals as the previous speaker was saying. After all most New Zealanders who enjoy the visual arts are keen to reward and support artists. It is well known that economic success in the world of visual art is unusual and that the vast majority of New Zealand artists struggle to make ends meet. Instinctively the idea of a struggling young artist selling his or her work for peanuts and later having to watch the art dealer make a fortune out of the artist’s creation disturbs the Kiwi idea of fair play. 
Making a living in the art world is not easy and payments for ongoing work are irregular and incomes are low. We all know artists particularly the young the talented and the passionate whom we would like to see earn a decent living. I really like the story of artist Michael Smither one of our most renowned and top-selling artists who has created his own DIY resale royalty scheme—and it works for him. After finding that some of the paintings he originally sold for about $150 to $400 back in the 1960s and 1970s were being resold for up to $100000 he created a very simple contract that required buyers of his paintings to return 5 percent of gross resale value of the work to the living artist. The contract is simple and straightforward and it pertains only to the first sale of the work and only whilst Mr Smither is alive. Mr Smither has had no problems promoting his scheme. He found that 85 percent of potential buyers happily agreed to the contract and as far as he was concerned the other 15 percent whom he thought were trading in his art only for profit were not worth dealing with anyway. His paintings even with their own resale royalty have retained their value and have in fact been in huge demand. 
Over the last 5 years Mr Smither has sold over 100 paintings under his resale contract and although not a large number have been resold so far all the vendors have voluntarily repaid the resale royalty. Mr Smither is also confident that he is able to track the resales. His scheme is simple and cheap and it has proved to be very effective. He would therefore favour a voluntary code of practice that works rather than an unproven legislated royalty scheme. 
Recently I was talking with Don Binney who has created a similar resale scheme for his work. He found that although the contract at times made the original sale more complex as buyers grappled with the concept they were still purchasing. But at the time of our discussion he had not had any resales. 
It is great to see these artists creating simple effective systems that work for them and their buyers. But that does not mean that a Government-legislated scheme will be equally successful. A Government-legislated droit de suite is a totally different animal. Whereas Smither’s and Binney’s DIY systems are simple and effective the scheme proposed by the Copyright (Artists’ Resale Right) Amendment Bill is complex expensive and most likely ineffectual. It all boils down to the size of our art market versus the cost of regulating and the size of the bureaucracy needed to recover and redistribute the royalties. 
Art sales data is difficult to quantify but it seems that the entire New Zealand visual arts sales through dealers or at auction is only about $15 million a year. So even if all art works included a 5 percent royalty the whole scheme would have a maximum collect of $750000. But when we exclude artworks that are sold for the first time and all art works under $500 just how much money would there be in the pot? When we deduct the cost of monitoring collecting and distribution how much money would actually get to the artists? That is the key issue. Some estimates are as low as $300000. That will not go very far. Three hundred thousand dollars to support all New Zealand’s visual artists? It will not do anything. In fact it is pretty close to the amount that the Ministry for Culture and Heritage pays to one person at the top of its organisation. Who will head the organisation that collects the royalties and how much would that person be paid? Then there is the problem of who is likely to benefit from the little amount of royalty there is likely to be. Payments from similar schemes overseas tend to favour the already successful and the dead. In France for example the vast majority of the droit de suite levy goes to a handful of families of dead artists including the heirs of Picasso and Matisse. In Germany the royalties are paid out to about 500 artists out of an artistic population of 12000. 
It should be noted that one of the reasons that the Australian Parliament voted against a resale royalty recently was that 20 percent of the art auction sales in that country that would have attracted a royalty would again have gone to prominent and deceased artists such as Arthur Boyd Sidney Nolan and Brett Whiteley. It should also be noted that as long as Australia does not have an arts resale scheme it would be very simple for New Zealand art sales to transfer to Australia. There is a risk that the Australian art sales network would be strengthened at the expense of New Zealand’s and with absolutely no benefit to our artists. I certainly do not fancy supporting the outsourcing of art sales overseas. 
Although we are all keen to support the visual arts and although a method of funding that would support working artists by providing a more reliable income is attractive this scheme gives me no assurance that it will do anything significant for New Zealand artists at all. In fact the size of our arts market means that under present legislation this scheme will be a bureaucratic disaster with costs eating up the majority of the royalty revenue and resulting in tiny payments to a small number of artists. This bill is a Clayton’s bill. Like so much of Labour’s legislation it promises much but delivers very little more than bureaucracy and red tape. It would be expensive impractical and inefficient.