By GILBERT WONG
The Heart of the Nation report is looking severely bruised, but if the Government sought a quick knockout before moving on, it will be disappointed.
Convener Hamish Keith, who was overseas when the report was released and heavily criticised, has returned and intends to seek funds to continue to travel the country and conduct regional forums for those involved in the creative sector.
"I still stand by the report and I have an enormous amount of confidence in the cultural sector. There are unbelievable strengths there and I want to continue the process of regional forums that was the process we used to shape the report."
Keith accepts Associate Culture Minister Judith Tizard's reluctance to restructure the arts bureaucracy.
"That's fine and in hindsight we should have delivered the report in two stages. A strategy report, followed by a document on how to achieve those strategies. I do feel that the very important discussion on what we do as a nation with the cultural sector has been muddied by an irrelevant debate on the structure."
To Keith and other panel members, more important issues have been ignored. The report proposes to deal with the often-voiced complaint of the "invisibility" of the cultural sector by ensuring that as part of their charters National Radio and Television New Zealand be required to appoint dedicated arts journalists to their newsrooms.
"The arts isn't part of the daily media menu and that, for better or worse, is how we make our heroes and role models. In spite of that lack of coverage, 75 per cent of young New Zealanders think they will find heroes and role models in the creative sector, as opposed to 85 per cent who think they will come from sport."
He says cultural news and debates commonly appear as major news in France, Britain and the United States. "They occur here, too, but they're not visible. If they were the public interest would be engaged and better served."
The way the country treats its heritage also drew scant attention.
"There are 6000 heritage sites with only 90 under the control of the Historic Places Trust. We shouldn't treat them passively but actively. We should be digitalising the national archives, they are an enormous resource that is not available to anyone except scholars. Digitalise it and we make it accessible for our citizens. It becomes a resource that helps us celebrate our heritage and identity rather than something dusty we drag out once a year. It becomes a way of imagining the future."
Keith says the creative sector's size and reach are often underappreciated. Culture is much more than the NZSO and the ballet.
Keith, who was in the United States and France last month, says,
"New Zealand is being plastered all over the world by Lord of the Rings. The kind of value that represents is incalculable and the film industry is part of the cultural sector. Culture is not just something that happens in the dark in theatres. There's architecture, multimedia, software."
And those who work in the creative sector are forerunners of 21st-century work practices. They have multiple skills: an actor can appear in Lord of the Rings and on stage with the Auckland Theatre Company. A costume designer might work in film, theatre and dance.
The report sought to separate organisation support from support for individuals. "Historically, the creative individual is the last to be dealt with. We need to look at their vocations and the industry and enterprise aspects of what creative individuals do. We should isolate the raw material which is people and work to assist and enhance the skills of all the creative individuals - artists, film-makers, costume designers, historians. There's a kind of concept that the only resource is money when the right advice is sometimes all that's needed."
A co-author of the report, arts consultant Michael Volkerling, has been in Strasbourg to study cultural policy at the Council of Europe. By e-mail, Volkerling maintains that the Council of Europe's recommendations for the development of cultural strategies for member nations mirror many of those made in the HotNation report.
They include:
Council of Europe: "Heritage must be maintained as a living part of society, since culture like nature, uses its past to fuel its future."
HotNation: "Heritage is not remote and moribund but a cultural resource continually reinvented to meet present needs."
Council of Europe: "The collections of museums, libraries and archives should be a series of linked databases."
HotNation: In the report, a new organisation, New Zealand Heritage On-line, would make the national archives and museum collections available as a digital resource.
Council of Europe: "Reinforcing and promoting cultural life in all its variety is the best way of promoting a national identity."
HotNation: "We have many national identities that we define as 'primary cultural assets'."
Council of Europe: "The images of a society which appear on television are crucial to cultural identity. Broadcasting must deliver opportunities for a diversity of viewpoints and for local and regional characteristics: whether linguistic, topical or artistic."
HotNation: calls for "a pluralistic concept of broadcasting which conceives of a multiplicity of audiences."
Council of Europe: "The infrastructure of buildings and institutions now absorbs most of the resources set aside by government and their agencies for culture. Inevitably individual creativity and innovation suffers. If the intention is to leave a creative legacy for the future, government would be wise to review the balance between resource allocation for cultural institutions and nor non-institutional creativity."
HotNation: A troubled part of the report identified a similar pattern of investment and called for a "move from a decade of construction to a decade of creation."
Volkerling writes: "HotNation may have not got it right with its proposed restructuring (though so far nobody has clearly explained why). But the Council of Europe has one final message for those in government. 'Government will not be able to realise their aims unless they create (structures) which match the reality of the way culture works in society.'
"Is the best means of advancing our cultural future an underpowered monocultural ministry? Don't we owe it to ourselves to do better? We should not be guided by short-term cultural politics, but by the spirit of the Heart of the Nation process."
Heart of the Nation still beats despite rejection
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