Editorial: Let's enhance our image

When the dreaded monthly utilities bills arrive, with no show of paying them, sometimes I leave them in the mail box to stew until I feel up to apportioning the compounding shortfall.

When the awful day comes, you can imagine - or, if you too are fortunate enough to live in the Northpower area, you know - the delight of grimly ripping open the electricity bill only to find instead, the unexpected relief of glorious credit, thanks to the godsend of the annual Northpower dividend.

Northpower, which maintains lines in Whangarei and Kaipara - and contracts lines maintenance throughout the motu - is wholly owned by the Northpower Electricity Power Trust. One hundred per cent of shares in the Trust are owned by consumers. Its dividend can be reinvested in the company or redistributed to consumers via credits on power bills.

Recently a Whangarei District Councillor contentiously proposed that NEPT should consider retaining half of the dividend in a charitable trust to fund public amenities.

The public gave the idea a good hiding and, uncharacteristically for a professional contrarian, I am with the public all the way this time. Understandably arts organisations took a keen interest in the idea.

I'm all for vibrant arts ventures, however, in practice, of any public funding invested in arts organisations, very little, if any, ever trickles down to the individual artists upon whose work these bureaucracies totter.

Instead public funding covers administrators' fat salaries, premises, vehicles, catering and printing, while artists must subsist on little clouds and pay to display their work. This is called "exposure" - something mountaineers die of but artists are expected to be grateful for.

Arts organisations are not alone. Routinely public funds disappear into management and infrastructure before ever reaching intended recipients.

Consequently, any relief which reaches individuals before it's swallowed by organisations is refreshing. Long live the Northpower credit.

Meanwhile there's the germ of a wild idea for promoting mass creative employment and distinguishing our community in a photographic exhibition by Peter Grant - Pakistan's Magnificent Vehicles - at Hangar Gallery in Kamo until June 30.

Traditionally, in Pakistan, trucks are modified and then hand-painted by artists in a phantasmagorically detailed profusion of colours, patterns, symbols, poetry and words of wisdom. Artists work at truck stands all over Pakistan, each with their own distinctive styles, earning around six or seven dollars a day on a job that never runs out.

It doesn't sound like much but if a Northland artist tried to boost finances by say, hand-painting greetings cards, and if each beautiful picture took two days and sold for around six dollars (which they do), they'd be earning half as much. That's the kind of lipservice we pay to analogue arts here.

Obviously one answer, in a region endlessly crying out to be noticed, where frankly, vehicles are aesthetically downright boring - testaments to our worship of bland, glossy, corporate branding - is to develop a local folk tradition of decorating them with riotous, symbolic, hand-painted local imagery.

Even charged out at the disgraceful, minimum, hourly, elderly-care rate of pay it would beat local artists' current incomes by miles.