Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa Bill

I call Ross—Grant Robertson.

Oh! There is a Speaker’s ruling about that, Mr Chair.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): A deliberate mistake—Grant Robertson.

No relation, whatsoever—I will just put that on the record—none at all. I just want to speak briefly—no; a lovely man, Ross—to clauses 1 and 2, and to unravel the mystery for my colleague Rino Tirikatene of the commencement date. The Ministers who have sat in the chair tonight have been rendered mute. Therefore, they will not be standing up to speak to Supplementary Order Paper 258 in the name of the Hon Christopher Finlayson, so I will help them out. The Supplementary Order Paper actually amends the commencement date to be: “This Act into force on the day that is 3 months after the date on which it receives the Royal assent.” It is probably a good idea that that amendment is on that Supplementary Order Paper, because the current commencement date is 1 October 2011 and, let us be honest, this bill is not going to get the Royal assent until 2014. By that stage it would be 3 years out of date and, to me, that sums up an out-of-date and out-of-touch Minister who is responsible for this bill.

Mr Finlayson has taken the time to come to the Chamber for previous parts of the bill and spread around a bit of hate on this side of the Chamber. We find it hard to understand because the Minister himself has made a good personal contribution to the arts, of which he should be proud. [Interruption] Yes, he has. He has actually made a good personal contribution outside his role as the Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage towards supporting the arts; he just cannot allow anyone else to make a contribution that gets recognised. In many ways the commencement date of 1 October 2011 sums up the Minister: trapped in the past—stuck somewhere between Beethoven and Neil Diamond for his preferred musical style. The Minister is trapped back in 2010 or 2011, when he had this bright idea to turn Creative New Zealand and the Arts Council upside down and to come up with this one body to rule them all, on which there would be four representatives for Māori and two for Pasifika, who will now be faced with a job that I believe is unfair to them, to be part of this.

So the amended commencement date gives 3 months to sort out all of this bill. I predict it is actually going to be quite hard work, because, despite the long period of time, what we have learnt as we have gone through this debate is that the wording of the bill is particularly unclear in the area around community arts councils, and I do not think that it is well understood. The Minister has told us that the committee that will get formed under clause 11 of the bill will effectively be Te Waka Toi anyway. It now cannot use that name, or at least the name is protected under this bill. There is a lot of confusion, and I believe that a commencement date of 3 months is actually probably not going to end up being quite long enough.

I do not want to prolong the debate on this part too much, but suffice to say that the slow, out-of-touch Minister believes that we are in a golden age of the arts, but if he was at the film awards tonight in Auckland, he would be hearing all about how that is not true that artists in New Zealand are succeeding despite this Minister and his regime, not because of it. This bill, unfortunately, is a sad testament to a very slow Minister who is shuffling the deckchairs within the Arts Council and failing to provide the support that artists in New Zealand need.

I just wanted to speak to the title and commencement clauses of the Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa Bill. I want to put on record how grateful I am to my colleagues Grant Robertson and Rino Tirikatene for enlightening us about the commencement date. It has left me sitting here pondering what would have happened if, in fact, this bill had gone through—if the Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage had not woken up and put in Supplementary Order Paper 258, which changes the commencement date. Clearly, it is not going to be coming into force on 1 October 2011.

I do note that the wording on the original bill would have sufficed. I am not really sure why the Government Administration Committee changed it, although I am sure that there is an explanation somewhere. The original bill said in clause 2 that “This Act comes into force on a date to be appointed by the Governor-General by Order in Council, and 1 or more Orders in Council may be made appointing different dates for different provisions and different purposes.” That would have sufficed. That would have got the Minister off the hook. But the select committee made a recommendation that it commenced on 1 October 2011, and the Minister has had to wake his ideas up and bring in a Supplementary Order Paper to this House.

I was also interested in the history of this bill and why we are debating such a bill on the second day before the House rises for Christmas—why we are in the Committee stage of such a bill when this bill has been around for a very long time. So I looked it up, and the bill was introduced on 25 June 2010. That is 3½ years ago?

💬 Hon Maryan Street: Yes. Almost to the day.

Almost to the day. It had its first reading on 18 August 2010. It was then referred to the select committee. What is interesting is that then there was a very short time given for submissions—well, probably 4 to 5 weeks. But there was a big push and a rush on. The select committee did its job and reported back to the House on 29 November 2010. The second reading was on 25 May 2012. Now, here we are, as I said, right on the border of 2014, and we have this bill going through with amendments from the Minister because the bill should have actually been starting 2 years ago and clearly has not.

It sat on the Order Paper from 22 May 2012 right through another year and a quarter before the Committee of the whole House began this debate, which was on 24 September 2013. Again, it languished for another 3 months, until 3/12/13, when the Committee stage started again. Today, which is the—what is the date today?

💬 Grant Robertson: The 10th.

The 10th, yes—another 10 days before we manage to almost conclude the Committee stage of this bill. So it is bemusing that we have these bills brought to us. I think the next one, the Airports (Cost Recovery for Processing of International Travellers) Bill, will be the same, and actually has the same kind of history, and I will be happy to talk about that as well.

It has the same kind of history where we have the sort of languid Government that introduces things in a great hurry and has to have them happen and then leaves an organisation like the Arts Council or Creative New Zealand in a void for 2 or 3 years, not really knowing what is going to happen—funding is dependent on it, people’s jobs are dependent on it. People who are representatives on Te Waka Toi and the Pacific Arts Committee also will have been languishing and wondering when this is going to happen, and trying to carry on as best they can in the meantime. This is not to mention, of course, all the community arts organisations, which will have known that this is hanging out there, that this has been here since 2010, and that there is going to be a big change. They will have been wondering, as they do already, how their funding is going to work out, whether they are going to get enough funding, whether there are going to be more cuts—as there have indeed been under this Government—and whether the arts will continue to be the low priority that this Government has made it. Thank you.