A Creative New Zealand assessor with an apparent disregard for ageing middle-class audiences has helped torpedo funding for a touring arts programme
Music and theatre lovers in small towns around the country are challenging a decision by Creative NZ to scrap their only regular provider of the performing arts.
More than 2000 people have signed a petition this month demanding the Government reinstate core funding for the Arts on Tour programme.
Petition organiser Loretta Bush, from Alexandra, says turning off the funding tap is a slap in the face for rural New Zealand.
“It suggests we’re irrelevant, invisible and undeserving of high-quality cultural experiences,” Bush says.
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“We’re already under siege with the removal of banks and health services. The arts are what make a difference to our social wellbeing."
The Arts on Tour trust has been dispatching artists around the motu for 27 years to play in small halls from the deep south to the Far North.
The agency run from Christchurch by long-term director Steve Thomas has been supported by Creative NZ since 2005 at a cost of about $230,000 a year, employing two people on salaries of $60,000 each.
The trust applied this year for $700,000 for the next three years.
But in its latest funding round, Creative NZ dropped Arts on Tour from its investment programme, Toi Uru Kahikatea, gave it “transition” funding of $88,000 and invited it to apply in future for one-off grants.
Thomas says that’s enough to keep the tours going for a few months next year.
“The problem is there are no guarantees and we’re in a pool with 250 others just for an allocation of $75,000.”
Creative NZ has suggested the trust spend the money on winding itself up.
“It’s called transitional money – why would we do that? We’ve been very efficient with a relatively small amount of funding. We just received our six-monthly report and in every area, on Creative NZ’s own terms, we met expectations.”
Unbelievable
The news was met with disbelief when it filtered through to affected communities.
But provincial dismay was eclipsed at the time by the frenzy over Creative NZ’s move to “cancel Shakespeare”. (Translation: decline a $31,000 grant for the Globe Theatre Centre after one Creative NZ’s assessor questioned the Bard’s capacity to decolonise Aotearoa.)
A Globe grant from Ministry of Education funds was approved after hasty intervention by the prime minister.
But the less vocal heartland is still smarting.
On Stewart Island Rakiura, where many of the tours begin, veteran arts organiser Gwen Neave says the funding cut was a bolt from the blue.
“I was absolutely despondent when I heard. I thought why would they deprive little towns of the opportunity to enjoy the arts? Why withdraw something that’s been highly successful?”
To keep costs down, the touring performers drive themselves around the country in an Arts on Tour van, staying at motels booked by the agency.
They’re paid modest per diems, and Creative NZ subsidises the costs at an average $18 a head, allowing local organisers to keep ticket prices to an affordable $25.
Locals still speak in awe of seeing such luminaries as Michael Hurst, Moana Maniapoto and Don McGlashan on stage in their communities.
And over three decades an Arts on Tour support network has built up in communities around the country.
Local committees from Oban to Ōpōtiki help organise and finance the concerts, raising funds from councils and local businesses to top up the budget.
“We would have about $1800 in our account at most,” Neave says.
“But we have a deal with the ferry company that Arts on Tour artists travel free to Stewart Island, so that keeps the cost down, and people pitch in to help.“
It’s a similar story around the country.
In Reefton, local contractors and gold miners donated to the cause last year and a Buller council grant paid for a stage.
Before Covid struck, audience numbers were as high as 60, boosted by newcomers - many of them retirees leaving the cities.
Hair me out
Inangahua Arts Council president Daisy Sawyers says for a town with a population of 900, that’s a healthy turnout.
Sawyers, now in her 70s, has been selling tickets at concerts and baking cakes for touring artists for 30 years. She appealed directly to Arts, Culture and Heritage Minister Carmel Sepuloni to restore the Arts on Tour funding.
The minister must know first-hand what a treasure the programme is, Sawyers says: Sepuloni’s husband, the musician Daren Kamali, was one of this year’s touring artists with poet laureate David Eggleton and classical guitarist Richard Wallis.
The minister’s response was predictable.
“She thanked me for my long service supporting the arts but she said Creative New Zealand is an independent body and she has no influence on its funding decisions.”
Which is cold comfort for Arts on Tour supporters, but on another level reassuring: Creative NZ recently granted Kamali $73,000 towards the Ulu Cavu Wig Tour of New Zealand.
The project involved harvesting his 25-year-old dreadlocks to make a ceremonial wig in the ancient Fijian tradition.
The way in which Creative NZ arrived at its decision to defund Arts on Tour is now coming under scrutiny by arts supporters.
The job of evaluating funding applications is delegated by Creative NZ to two anonymous assessors who score them against specific objectives, including relevance to audiences, budgeting and how well they align with the agency’s aims and strategies.
Unusually, in the case of the Arts on Tour application, the two assessors were poles apart in their conclusions.
One rated the programme highly on every objective, using the words “excellent” and “outstanding” and gave it a total score of 43 out of 50.
The other damned Arts on Tour with faint praise, raising concerns about ageing middle-class audiences, a reliance on older volunteers and a hard-to-read budget.
He or she gave the programme a middling score of 28 and recommended against further funding.
Flawed process
Arts on Tour board member and lawyer Ian Hunt says such wildly divergent views suggest a faulty process.
“Where you’re measuring something against set criteria you should not be getting such a variation. In valuation work, for instance, two valuations need to be within 10 percent of each other to be considered valid.”
Best practice would be to ask the assessors to redo the exercise, or bring in a third assessor, Hunt says.
“As it stands I would have concerns that those results are not a sound basis for a decision.”
Creative NZ’s strategic advisory panel apparently had no such qualms.
It agreed with the second assessor that Arts on Tour had a “dated business model” and that there were other outfits with a “more authentic connection to community” which could do the job.
Creative NZ staff told the panel that last claim was incorrect.
In a paper tabled at the panel’s meeting they warn that there are few other arts “delivery mechanisms” outside the main centres.
“Arts on Tour is the only organisation within the Creative New Zealand portfolio that regularly presents work in rural centres and tiny towns … not funding the application will risk diminished delivery to rural and regional parts of New Zealand,” they warned.
But Arts on Tour had not met expectations for “organisational health” and had failed to monitor and report against its business or strategic plans, they said.
At its August meeting, the Arts Council conceded it would “take a while” for other organisations funded by Creative NZ to start servicing communities now served by Arts on Tour.
But with the exception of one member who voted against it, the council decided it was “comfortable” with not funding Arts on Tour.
“The proposal itself was not compelling and there were applicants who demonstrated stronger delivery to the assessment criteria,” the minutes record.
Long-time West Coast arts advocate Richard Arlidge, who served on the Arts on Tour board for nine years, says it’s astonishing that Creative NZ agreed to scrap the funding knowing there was no one to fill the gap.
“It was reckless, irresponsible. It’s funded to support the arts for all New Zealanders - that’s in its vision statement - and it has just cut off a whole section of the community at the knees.”
The online petition demanding the reinstatement of Arts on Tour funding will stay open over the holiday period, Bush says.
Creative NZ has not responded to Newsroom’s requests to interview chief executive Stephen Wainwright.
Made with the support of the Public Interest Journalism Fund
