Funding Our Culture

Many successive governments have funded the arts, cultural activities and heritage. Every now and then someone asks why or says it is not governments’ business. But their voices evaporate into the ether. The questions are not whether there should be state funding but what taxpayers should fund, how much, how and on what criteria. Governments have answered the ‘what’ and the ‘how much’ with their chequebooks and have de facto answered the ‘how’. But on each count there has been much criticism. And the criteria are murky: sometimes funding is on thinly disguised pork-barrel principles. Shouldn’t it be more rigorous? The Public Finance Act is more than 10 years old. These are the days of fiscal prudence, value for money and attention to outcomes. Departments are supposed to tie their spending to a specified goal. Isn’t it time clear rules were stated by which arts, culture and heritage funding is allocated? Moreover, the range of activities to which funding is directed is very wide: national and cultural identity, heritage and preservation, access to and participation in cultural activities, community development, quality of life and artistic productions. Each is treated separately, with no discernible overall strategy. Funding often follows the ‘fly-paper’ principle: what was funded last year or 10 years ago will be funded again this year.To discuss these issues and look for ways forward, the Institute of Policy Studies convened on 24 and 31 March 2000 four half-day roundtable forums with invited specialists, The forums were sponsored principally by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage and also by Creative New Zealand, the New Zealand Film Commission and the Museum of New Zealand/Te Papa Tongarewa. They were not intended to produce definitive recommendations; rather, to explore ideas. The forums adopted as a basis for their discussions a restricted definition of culture, the one used by the Ministry in its 1999 publication, The Government’s Role in the Cultural Sector: A Survey of the Issue: “celebrating, promoting or preserving our cultural heritage and the arts”. Though the forums also kept in the back of the mind the wider sense the Ministry also used of “every kind of phenomenon which gives a significance and integrity to our way of life” and occasionally referred to this wider concept of culture, the business end of the discussion was on the narrower definition. This did not, however, restrict discussion to ‘high culture’. The themes that emerged from the forums are outlined in this brief. They are a report by the programme director of wide-ranging and at times vigorous conversations, including their salient points. In this report are also recorded many expressions of opinion, some by individuals, some by several participants, often contested. No opinion or statement should be taken as a conclusion or position of the forums or any individual participant but only as ideas for debate. Nevertheless, as a background against which to set these distillations, perhaps two baselines might be suggested: • Funding policy should have the whole population in mind, not just those involved in or particularly interested in arts, culture and heritage. • Funding should be only for ‘externalities’, the benefits to society of an artistic, cultural or heritage activity These two baselines presume that governments act on behalf of all the people and that any funds directed to an individual or a sector of society must in some way benefit the whole of society. If the benefit to the whole of society is low, the funding would logically also be low, and if no benefit to the whole of society can be identified then a government logically would not fund that activity. A third, operational, guideline might be that there should be no direct funding of individuals or performing arts companies. To say that, however, is not to say much. Assessing and quantifying ‘externalities’ is a complex exercise of judgment, unavoidably highly inexact and open to challenge on economic, sociological and political grounds, all of which are constantly shifting as society changes