Little hope for brighter Creative NZ future with new government

Tuesday, 24 October 2023

Prospects for an improved culture and situation at overstretched arts funding agency Creative NZ appear bleak despite a change in government, critics say.

National failed to release any arts policies in the lead up to the election, despite arts spokesperson Simon O’Connor telling The Post Creative NZ needed to be “closely looked at” and that the party would support a national cultural strategy.

O’Connor has since lost the Tāmaki seat and will leave Parliament.

While ACT’s arts spokesperson Damien Smith floated a variety of arts policies prior to the election, similar to National, none of these were detailed in its published manifesto. NZ First has not made any commitments to the arts.

And weeks after Creative NZ’s chief executive Stephen Wainwright was censured by the Arts Council, which governs the agency, over his conduct amid flooding at Auckland Airport, there are also calls for an overhaul of its senior leadership.

An independent report investigating the airport events found that when 28 Creative NZ staff were stranded overnight in January, senior leaders acted in a hierarchical way and showed a lack of care and respect for employees, which created a rift between them.

It came off the back of a particularly difficult year for Creative NZ, which has been dealing with an unprecedented deluge of funding applications, a plummeting satisfaction rate, and separate PR crises involving the Shakespeare Globe Centre of NZ and small business network We Are Indigo.

Crucially, Creative NZ’s baseline funding level from the Government hasn’t increased since 2019. The majority of its funding comes from the NZ Lottery Grants Board – money that fluctuates each year. But last year it received a $22 million one-off grant from reprioritised Covid-19 recovery funding.

Terry Sheat, a critic of Creative NZ’s systems and the son of late arts advocate Bill Sheat, said there needed to be a changing of the guard at the agency’s highest ranks.

Wainwright is paid between $320,000 and $329,000 a year, according to Creative NZ’s most recently published annual report, while a further 32 staff are paid $100,000 or more. The agency only employs 85 people.

“The problem, as always, is that people who are cap in hand to Creative NZ for funding cannot afford to publicly criticise them,” Terry Sheat said.

But the agency is steadfast in its support of its senior leadership. Wainwright and the team “continue to provide leadership for the organisation”, Creative NZ’s new communications manager Dinah Vincent said.

The agency has finished a review of its services, started in December last year. It will release an overview in November.

But Sheat had “no belief” that the review’s outcome would change the situation for artists and arts organisations that had been “frozen out or insidiously underfunded for years”.

Vincent said Creative NZ looked forward to working with the incoming government on supporting the arts, and outlining opportunities and challenges.

But Arts On Tour’s chairperson Steve Lowndes didn’t hold much hope the arts would be freed from the subjugation of invidious lotteries money. Creative NZ’s staff needed a greater sense of public service and egalitarianism, he said.

Dawn Sanders, the chief executive of the Shakespeare Globe Centre of NZ, was pleased to see transparency around the airport debacle. She described it as “a very negative situation, which accords with the lived experience of ourselves and others”.

Sanders said Creative NZ’s systems were prescriptive and bureaucratically heavy, to the point that creativity was dictated, not promoted.

Sheat said the challenge for the incoming government was to bring about meaningful change. “Even in an election year, the two main parties were unable to come up with anything new in terms of arts policy. Did they put it in the too-hard basket, or the nobody cares basket? Either way it smacks of disrespect for the arts community.”