Faith fades in St Helen of the Arts

Arts editor GILBERT WONG writes that the year began high in promise for the culture community but soon came down to earth.

Here's a list of words and phrases we won't hear Prime Minister and Culture Minister Helen Clark utter in public again: Holocaust, Closing the Gaps and Heart of the Nation.

The first came from an errant associate minister, the second and third from policy that foundered.

The contrast in mood between the end of the year and its start, when Clark took on the formerly low-profile cultural portfolio, could not be more pronounced. Then there was a giddy anticipation from the cultural sector, which behaved like an ignored child showered with attention. Clark was St Helen of the Arts.

As the year ends, the reality has sunk in that if politics exhibits any art it is the art of pragmatism.

There will be no miracles, no sudden Renaissance flowering. The cultural confidence Australia showed off at the opening and closing ceremonies of the Sydney Olympics remains a quality of life beamed in via satellite. The performing and visual arts in this country remain the poorest of cousins in terms of exposure and earning power.

The Government's cultural strategy for the next decade was to be mapped out by a high-concept project helmed by a team quickly dubbed "cultural high priests." The Heart of the Nation project was quickly and irresistibly dubbed HotNation - a cultural cringe if ever there was one on the already discredited Cool Britannia tag.

I suspect that I might be one of the handful that took the time to read through the 60,000 words. Some of it was undoubtedly jargon, platitudes and incomprehensible.

But there was much that made sense: create a single organisation to care for and to market our heritage; provide realistic support to the many cultural industry organisations from the architects and designers institutes to professional performing arts bodies; set up practical links between cultural organisations and the network of trade missions.

The thrust was that culture grows from the roots up, it is not a flower that thrives from edicts laid down in Wellington. Another plank was that our history is our future both in terms of identity and potential for cultural tourism. The report wanted the National Archives digitalised and access to important historic documents such as the Treaty made easier for the public.

These all make sense, but it arrived to the sound of silence, followed by sustained complaint as Associate Culture Minister Judith Tizard, nominally in charge of the report, sought to bury it - and the authors - quickly. The report, which might have seen the end of Creative New Zealand in its present form was never as radical as portrayed, but was pre-empted by the cultural recovery package in May.

Clark's injection of $80 million, which includes an added $20 million a year for the next three years, sought to stabilise existing arts organisations. The big winners were Te Papa and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra with capital injections of $12 million this year shared between them. The package also set up quangos, the Film Production Fund and the Music Industry Commission.

It's still hard to figure out why the minister would create new bodies when she was awaiting a report that would outline government cultural strategy.

The package did deliver extra money to Creative New Zealand, which now declares itself an agency for cultural advocacy and marketing as well as a funding body.

That money has let more arts organisations find a sense of certainty with multi-year funding.

The "recovery package" has stabilised the patient, but it would dearly love a change of diet from all that hospital food - and new scenery to replace those grey wards of thwarted potential.