Joanne McNeill: Govt paints a sorry picture

Joanne McNeill.

There's a fine line between art and life, and vice-versa.

When reality jumped out of willingly suspended disbelief into the realms of all flesh and slit the throats of actors in a school production of Stephen Sondheim's musical Sweeney Todd last week it reminded me of Brian Patten's poem The Projectionist's Nightmare - about a bird finding its way into a cinema, flying down the beam and smashing into a sunset garden scene in which two people were being nice to each other.

Real blood, feathers and intestines slithered down the likeness of a tree. "This is no good," screamed the audience. "This is not what we came to see."

Quite apart from the wonderful metaphor about escapism, you can just see the imminent collapse of the entire enterprise. Grand old cinema showing cracks fails building inspection, closes down.

Likewise school drama - henceforth all plays requiring prop weapons will be off the curriculum (there goes most of Shakespeare), health and safety inspections will raise the cost/difficulty of mounting productions whereupon drama departments will join school swimming pools drowning in the too hard basket.

Life transcended art too when a 1941 CF Goldie portrait of Wharekauri Tahuna entitled Noble Relic of a Noble Race sold for record price.

Goldie's Maori sitters were paid models, dressed with studio props to illustrate what the painter and others of the time thought were the anthropological remnants of a dying race. It was a patronising colonial viewpoint which is why, while Goldie's impressive photo realist technique has been wildly popular, his work has not enjoyed critical acclaim.

However, the descendants of Wharekauri Tahuna are very much alive and concerned about their ancestor, the image of whom is to them no mere likeness but a live part of the spiritual continuum to successive generations.

This is the tricky part of painting people. It is intimate. There are no standard models. There is no one who isn't someone particular.

It's a tricky part of democracy too; no one can be written off. We all count. In the painting's case, colonial attitudes have changed, turning the tables by making the painter seem rather more of a relic than the figure he intended his model to portray.

In the so-called real world of political economics though, the kind of sleight of hand more properly employed to create artistic illusion is deployed with increasingly deceptive verisimilitude, inexplicably to popular acclaim.

Thus last week the National Government managed to "sell" Kiwibank while at the same time retaining full ownership.

This is a semantic money-go-round of a similar order to their apparent ability to maintain a surplus and record debt at once, and to welcome off-shore trusts while denying New Zealand is a tax haven where the wealthy - scandalously, some of them cowboy politicians avoiding the very taxes their countries levy for the collective social services such as health, education and infrastructure of which they are supposed to be stewards - can evade paying their fair share.

Simple - smile while shifting numbers into different columns and giving them all new names.

If only it were so easy at home where the combined compulsory tax burden far outweighs all other costs.

Sigh. Back to the drawing board.