Delahunty Catherine: Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 29 January 2014. Volume:696;Page:15679. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. He mihi nui—[Interruption]The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): Order! There are two members interjecting on each other.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY:Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker.Tēnā koutou e te Whareitēneipō.[Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. Greetings to you collectively the House this evening.]I would like to start my speech in this third reading with a couple ofwhakataukīOne of them is: hetoiwhakairo he mana tangata [artistic excellence is human dignity].The other one which is more appropriate to the Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa Bill is “It’s a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”The Green Party is opposing the third reading of this bill with regret. We are passionate supporters of the arts and getting the best possible structure for the administration of arts funding and arts promotion. We think that every form of art from murals on the street to the TeMatatini competition Pasifika Festival in Auckland Shakespeare in the Park Play It Strange Trust Arts Access Aotearoa—you name it—deserves its share of the funding as well as opera and sculpture. The highbrow and the lowbrow are all part of what makes us a creative country. Although I did not agree personally with everything Helen Clark did we cannot deny that she backed the arts like no one else as a Prime Minister or even as a Minister for Arts Culture and Heritage before or since. That is a legacy we should be proud of rather than trying to tear it apart.However we have four issues with this bill. The first is the change to the structure of the Creative New Zealand bodies into a single body which will have 13 members. The concern that has been raised with us is that Te Waka Toi will be subsumed into a single body and lose its identity and ability to provide tangata whenua artistic achievement. Te Waka Toi will be replaced by four members who will be “qualified” by their knowledge of tikangaMāori andMāori art—four out of 13. The argument has been made to me by some people I respect that this is timely and appropriate. It is said that we have matured as a country so thatMāori art and artists will never again be marginalised by being subsumed into a single arts body.However I am not sure that the national cultural consciousness has matured to that point. It is very optimistic. It is not what we have heard fromMāori artists.Māori artists have told us in simple language that they are still struggling to get a share of the resources and that they would prefer to keep the iconic Te Waka Toi because it is their waka. It is their waka and it is for them to say what happens to it. That is actually what Te Tiriti o Waitangi means. It means that to uphold article 2 the Crown does not second-guess tangata whenua and decide to disestablish their specific and unique arts body without their full endorsement. The Green Party stands by that principle and we are yet to be convinced that those four out of the 13 people on the board are an expression of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.It is certainly true that the Government Administration Committee had a very small number of submissions which made the job of the rest of us harder. It is difficult to evaluate the merits of a bill when there has not been much input but we need to face the reality that some people will never come to the select committee to make a submission. They are actually intimidated. That does not mean that their voice is not important. We need to approachrōpū and networks in the arts sector and gather their views listen to what they say. The select committee is not the only place where we should gather opinion and it is not necessarily the best place to gather opinions from many sectors. The select committee is only one place and the select committee remains a veryPākehā very formal—except for theMāori Affairs Committee—and very parliamentary Westminster way of assessing an issue so I know why some people did not show up.Of equal if not greater concern to us is the disbanding of the Pacific Arts Committee replacing that with two Pacific representatives on the single body. Theseunfortunate two people are meant to represent and be the advocates for the huge diversity of Pacific communities in Aotearoa which includes Polynesians Melanesians and Micronesians. And within each part of the Pacific there are many different countries and ways of approaching art. It is quite correct to assert a wide diversity within that label of “Pacific Islander”. I would like to pay tribute here to a great Pacific arts promoter who was also a great friend of mine whom we lost less than 2 years ago Mr JimVivieaere from Mangaia in Rarotonga and to acknowledge all the struggle and legacy of curators like Jim who in forging the Pacific arts identity always respected that diversity. I know that the preference of those arts leaders and curators was for clarity around the role of Pacific art and a particular resourcing of that and around the value of a strong independent committee. If that is lost some of the power to support the emerging Pasifika artists—because the emerging artists are the most vulnerable—as well as the well-known artists of Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa will be diluted and undermined. And there are also other migrant cultures that need to be provided for. So rather than subsuming everything into one group we believe not so much in a tiered system but in a double-hulled waka where the waka is joined and everybody has their own place and they come together to discuss things but they have their own committees if that is their choice.There are also real concerns from small communities and rural communities about what exactly is proposed for community arts providers. Like Grant Robertson and others I have struggled to get clarity about what the goal of these provisions is because they are really opaque and weird—that is the only way to explain them. It would appear to be a centralisation and an opening up of local arts funding to anybody from other parts of the country and that is not going to help community arts. I am putting a caveat on that because none of us could really get it clear what is being suggested for community arts providers and that is going to be bad law. If we cannot get it and it is not clear to us how the hell is the community going to understand it? The community arts are the seedbed of some of the great talents in Aotearoa as well as playing a critical role in making smaller communities culturally vibrant. When a national talent like BellaKalolo and her band showed up in my valley in the tinyKauaēranga Hall last year fresh from their appearance at Glastonbury it was an amazing moment for us. I felt the power of Creative New Zealand which had helped such tours animate our small communities.When my partner started working on a community project with nationally renowned artist MichaelSmither in Thames painting the footpath along by the sea I had first-hand experience of the value of artists who work in the community as the community now comes by every day to check on what they are doing to talk about it and to engage with it. This is very much about our small town expressing itself. There are many volunteers—people are not paid but there are donated paints—but there is a need for some support for the management of it. But if art is alive and reviving our community there does need to be local and specific community arts funding. Some wonderful people are trying to restore kapahaka in the Hauraki at the moment but they are struggling to get cash for the most basic things. I think that the role of Te Waka Toi and others can be important for that. The problem that has been identified is that community arts providers will not be able to ring-fence their funding for their local area alone. If the small and unsophisticated have to compete with a large urban voice we will see the unravelling of community arts in the regions. That is actually where quite a few people live and quite a bit of culture lives and quite a bit of reality actually develops. And much of the content of the greatest art that we produce comes from those communities let alone the people.Finally the fourth point that we were concerned with was Minister Finlayson’s dismissive approach to 3-year strategic plans for the new Arts Council. If the strategicplanning approach is an apparent waste of time—and I can agree with the possibility that strategic planning can be a waste of time if it becomes an end in itself rather than becoming a road map to ensure direction and coherence—let us not dismiss the idea of a coherent plan just because some strategic planning can be very badly managed and inward-looking. We are actually talking about the whole country and we would like to see a coherent strategic plan.So overall we are disappointed that the restructuring has been designed but it is very unclear who will actually benefit except people who want—as the previous speaker Jacinda Ardern said—to get rid of committees and ban words like “community”. Therefore we are not able to support the bill at this point. I was interested in the previous speaker’s comments about language because language is very powerful in the arts community and what language Minister Finlayson will accept. In my office we have other rules about language. It is not so much about banning words; it is about making whatever we communicate understandable to everybody we are talking to and everyone in the community and making sure that everything that we say is about respecting and welcoming people to participate—not trying to intimidate them by using Latin and words of more than one syllable. If we are going to have a country where everyone can participate we need to look at ourselves in this House and ask how we are communicating. Art is about communication. This bill does not cut it. We cannot support it. Kia oratātou katoa.