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: 24 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13670. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): Going back to where I was before I was rudely interrupted by the Minister for Arts Culture and Heritage the Minister has some issues I might say with the fact that the Labour Party has chosen to take the arts so seriously that it has our fantastic spokesperson in Jacinda Ardern and two associate spokespeople me and Darien Fenton. I have to tell the Minister that we took this decision carefully because we needed three spokespeople to match his three different personalities. So that was why we did it—just so—Jacinda Ardern: It’s not quite enough.GRANT ROBERTSON: We know we cannot quite cover all of them but that is why we have done that.When I was speaking earlier on I was speaking about the change that has happened as the Minister notes under clause 10 of the Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa Bill. I was talking at that point about the Pacific Arts Committee. The Minister got up and said: “Isn’t it fantastic there is now going to be two people on the Arts Council who are going to be representing the Pasifika communities?”. What he fails to tell the Committee is that currently the Pacific Arts Committee has seven people on it—it has seven people on it. That enables the Pacific Arts Committee to reflect the diverse nature of the Pasifika community in New Zealand. So we now move to a situation where there will be two people who will be put in the position of having to do that. In its submission to the Government Administration Committee—which was a very long time ago so the Minister may not recall this—the Human Rights Commission actually raised this as a concern. It said that it was concerned that there would be a loss of effective advice from the broad range of people who are part of the Pacific Arts Committee.Clause 10(5) which the Minister is terribly proud of has been changed in a useful way by the select committee to acknowledge the importance of having people who understand not only Pacific arts but the traditions and cultures of the Pasifika community. So that change was made by the committee. What I would be suggesting to the Minister is that he does run the risk with these changes of losing that representation of the diverse range of Pacific cultures.The same applies too to Te Waka Toi because yes it is true that there are now going to be four people on the Arts Council who need a knowledge of Te AoMāori and tikangaMāori but the reality is that Te Waka Toi currently has seven members on it. So it also has seven members who will now be reduced down to four within this wider organisation. Again the Human Rights Commission said speaking specifically to clause 10 that it was concerned about the “loss of the distinctive identities and practices of Te Waka Toi …”. That was the same concern that we got when we spoke to community arts organisations around New Zealand.The reality is that there may well be some structural changes to Creative New Zealand and to the Arts Council that would be useful but what we have failed to be convinced by is the Government which has taken 3 years to get this bill back into the House actually coming forward to say: “This is how we are going to make sure thatMāori arts and Pacific arts in New Zealand continue to be promoted.”There were suggestions made during the select committee process by the Human Rights Commission and by other groups about how it would be possible within the structure that the Minister is proposing for there to be that specific recognition of the diversity in identities and unfortunately that has not been taken up by the Minister. So we do not believe that clause 10 of the bill does continue to provide the kind of recognition of New Zealand’s diversity that we would like to see.The Minister has justified a lot of this change as reducing bureaucracy. Well if the Minister wanted to do one thing to reduce bureaucracy within the arts sector he could take a look at the application forms that are required by Creative New Zealand—35-odd pages of repetitious content required every year by arts practitioners right around the country. Or if he wanted to talk about reducing bureaucracy and improving the operations of Creative New Zealand he could actually start thinking about how we could get funding into the regions. If we actually look at the submissions that came in on this bill in 2010 we see that a number of them came from regional arts organisations that were calling out for an Arts Council that had some representation from the provinces and the regions. That is not guaranteed within this bill.Those regional and community arts organisations were essentially saying that “Creative New Zealand is not listening to us any more. It’s not in touch with our communities.” So if the Minister really wanted to reduce bureaucracy and get money out to the regions so that arts could flourish he would have more regional funding rather than centralising it in the way that he has. Instead the best he can do is come to us with his committee of 13 and say that that is the way we should turbo-charge the arts in New Zealand.I would love to be standing here today debating a bill that had a vision for the future of arts in New Zealand. We would be able to support a bill like that. But unfortunately this bill does not provide that. It merely limits the participation of communities likeMāori and Pasifika.