Government's Role in the Cultural Sector: a survey of the issues
Minister | Foreword | Introduction | Involvement | Why Involved? | Policy | Patron | Conclusion | Appendix

The government’s historical role in the cultural sector: a brief survey

The Historical Outline

1.

The bare chronology of central government’s involvement in the cultural sector over the nation’s first 100 years includes long periods of relative inactivity, but also shows developments that can now be seen as milestones. The era begins with the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. The establishment of government in Aotearoa at this time requires it to interact with the Maori people and culture. The missionary-influenced Protectorate Department (1840-46) and the Native Department (1861-1893) are founded to provide for the administration of government’s interests in regard to Maori. From the earliest stages this requires communication skills which have to be learned by both sides. Government agents and missionaries alike learn the language of the tribes in order to execute their respective programmes of cultural dissemination, including the spreading of the gospel and the enactment of article two of the Treaty - the establishment of land law. Maori learn to read and write in both languages. These requirements of communication result in important records of census, registration, history and regulation that provide to the present day a vital base of information for government and Maori.

2.

As early as 1858, with the establishment of the General Assembly Library, government demonstrates an awareness that the young nation requires a focal point of historical research - that some part at least of what we would now call our cultural heritage is the active concern of government. (Decades will pass, however, before the government begins to take adequate measures for the protection of its own archives.)

3.

The mid-to-late nineteenth century is a period crucial to the relationship between the government and Maori, largely in questions to do with land: war, claims, sales, division, survey and record. The Maori response to government over land is matched by the development of a relationship with the spiritual contribution made by the missionaries. Maori become clergy in the mainstream churches and develop their own churches, Paimarire and Ringatu. In 1867 Maori enter parliament and begin a new era of government’s relationship with and patronage of Maori culture. By 1906 the third version of a department for Maori affairs is established. In this Native Department the mana and wairua of Maori people find some expression.

4.

By the start of the twentieth century, the government has established a tradition of acting as a cultural patron, though mostly in an occasional ad hoc fashion. It has commissioned official histories, a function that continues today; it has provided a site for what would become the National Art Gallery; and, most substantially, it has founded the Colonial, later the Dominion Museum. It has played a part in presenting New Zealand culture in international exhibitions. Important records of sacred tribal knowledge are deposited with the Dominion Museum as a collaborative exercise between ethnographers within and outside the Museum, politicians and traditional Maori leaders. The Journal of the Polynesian Society becomes a major academic record. A Maori Antiquities Act has been passed.

5.

A pattern of limited support for organisations and initiatives whose origins are mostly outside government continues in the first third of the present century. Grants to regional art societies and the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, which are used to build up collections, are prominent among a series of smaller, ad hoc grants for cultural purposes mostly provided by the Department of Internal Affairs. Special provisions for Maori are enacted, including the Maori Purposes Fund, the Ethnological Research Fund and the Maori Arts and Craft Board. These are consolidated in 1933 to establish the Maori Purposes Fund Board. Over the same period, the government becomes more deeply involved in the development of New Zealand’s cultural institutions. Legislation is introduced to provide for the construction of a National Museum and National Art Gallery building capable of accommodating the expanding national collections. Government subsidises the construction of the Auckland War Memorial Museum and its Otago counterpart. The Turnbull bequest, leading to the establishment of the Alexander Turnbull Library in 1918, gives the government a further significant role in maintaining and extending New Zealand’s heritage.

6.

Although the initiatives for them are largely to be found outside government, these developments represent a partial acknowledgement on government’s part that it has a role to play as the guardian of New Zealand’s cultural inheritance. Other decisions in the early part of this century reflect this recognition: the government preserves graves from the New Zealand Wars; it responds to requests for assistance with the preservation of historic sites.

7.

In the first decades of the century the government becomes active as a regulator of New Zealand life in areas that impinge on cultural activity. Key censorship legislation, replacing earlier measures, is passed in the 1910s, including an Act providing for film censorship. The Copyright Act of 1913 remains in force until 1962. As early as 1903, the New Zealand Wireless Telegraphy Act provides for the regulation of sound waves. The advent of broadcasting technology in the early twenties prompts a swift regulatory response from government, followed by moves to establish a national infrastructure and service.

8.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century Maori leaders steer the relationship between government and Maori in a multifaceted way, relaying to a rural population the national and international issues of the day. There is a strong dialogue between government and a traditional, non-governmental leadership, a communication which is recorded in Maori newspapers and has an audience in the wider Maori community. A new-found sense of unity in the Maori world is consolidated via the communication of such issues as health, education, housing, the proper retention of tikanga and knowledge, participation in the economy, an international presence and a concern for the survival of Maori culture and its people.

Government’s Role Expands

9.

Towards the end of these first 100 years, as the centenary of the Treaty of Waitangi approaches, government begins to focus on its cultural role as never before, and its interventions, mainly through the Department of Internal Affairs, begin to multiply. The government commissions centennial histories, it holds literary competitions, it funds nation-wide events that showcase the range of New Zealand’s cultural achievement. A reformed broadcasting service, becoming increasingly important as a cultural medium, provides a core of players for what will become a national orchestra.

10.

This surge of activity provides a momentum that continues through the 1940s, again centring on the Department of Internal Affairs. By the end of that decade the government’s cultural involvement has become more extensive, continuous and systematic than before. Both the Orchestra (1946) and the New Zealand Literary Fund (1946-7) have been established. The government has, by 1945, established a National Library Service (incorporating the Country Library Service started in the previous decade), and the National Film Unit (1941). It has commissioned war histories. Internal Affairs has a cultural section (1946), administering a fund that, from some of the profits of the Art Union lottery, is used to make grants to art societies, the Auckland-based Community Arts Service, the New Zealand Drama Council, music societies, choirs, orchestras and museums. It also provides grants for individuals for overseas travel and study, thereby significantly expanding the range of influences operating on New Zealand’s cultural life.

11.

This funding is further regularised and made, in modern terms, more “transparent” in the 1950s. National companies in the performing arts are supported towards the end of the decade, followed by the establishment, under Internal Affairs, of an Arts Advisory Council and, in 1963, the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council. This is the first of a series of funding agencies to support the development of the cultural sector at “arm’s length” from government. That is, the agency is established under an autonomous board charged with developing and implementing policy, within a broad statutory framework and a total sum of money appropriated by government. Government’s preference for this principle of ownership serves both to protect the arts from political interference and to insulate governments from the ill will arising from unpopular funding decisions.

12.

During the 1950s and 1960s policies with a significant cultural impact are promoted by the Maori Affairs Department. Community policies establish the Maori Women’s Welfare League (1951) and give recognition to the contribution of Maori women. The League also ushers in a new element of Maori leadership and support for the arts. The Maori Affairs Department produces Te Ao Hou magazine, which communicates Maori initiatives and encourages new writers to emerge who lead the debate on cultural survival. The Arts and Craft Institute Act (1963) is passed. This period also sees the creation of the Historic Places Trust (1954) and, with the passing of the Archives Act in 1957, National Archives.

13.

The establishment of the Arts Council is followed in later decades by the creation of two other “arm’s length” agencies. The New Zealand Film Commission (1978) provides at last for the development of a feature-film industry capable of limited but continuous production, after decades of isolated achievements. The Broadcasting Commission (1989), later known as NZ On Air, is established after two decades in which broadcasting is repeatedly restructured. The “arm’s length” model, by now prevalent, provides the government with a mechanism for supporting New Zealand content in a broadcasting system that has become highly deregulated. Te Mangai Paho (1993) fosters Maori language radio and television. The public broadcasting fee, some form of which has existed since the 1920s, provides the funds for these initiatives.

14.

Of the other sources of public money made available for cultural purposes, the proceeds of national lotteries remain crucial for the Arts Council and, later, the Film Commission. The advent of Lotto in 1987 greatly increases the sums available for distribution. By the 1990s lottery profits are providing the bulk of both agencies’ income. The New Zealand Lottery Grants Board becomes a key source of support for cultural heritage projects. Much of the sector comes to depend on a changing mixture of lottery funds and government appropriations.

15.

The Arts Council is extensively restructured, first with new legislation in 1974, which creates Regional and Community Arts Councils. The Maori and South Pacific Arts Council is established in 1978. Arts Council legislation in 1994 introduces a new structure made up of a governing Council and two arts boards, one of which, Te Waka Toi, supports Maori arts.

16.

In 1974 the Maori Affairs Act, in setting out the functions of the Department of Maori Affairs, includes the first articulation of what becomes a major Maori cultural objective of government: the preservation of language, customs and other aspects of Maori culture essential to the identity of the Maori race. There follow important developments in the retention of the Maori language, including the Kohanga Reo movement of the 1980s and the establishment of Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Maori, the Maori Language Commission, in 1987.

17.

The historical sequence provides other milestones in the second half of the present century. The National Library is established in 1965, later becoming a government department in its own right. Its rehousing in 1987 is government’s largest capital project in the cultural sector, up to that time, since the 1930s. The regulatory protection of New Zealand’s movable heritage (“antiquities”) and its historic places is tightened and extended, and in the nineties is under further review. Schemes to encourage cultural production and access are set up, such as the New Zealand Authors’ Fund (1973) or the scheme for the indemnification of exhibitions (1986). The 150th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1990 provides the occasion for major projects, such as the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, and the launch of a fleet of waka, a project which renews the crafts involved in waka building.

18.

The sense of historic occasion surrounding 1990 is also a spur for the government to proceed with the establishment of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. As an institution, the Museum replaces the National Museum and National Art Gallery in 1992. Its building on the Wellington waterfront, opened in February 1998, is the largest capital project in the cultural sector yet to be funded by central government. Following the pattern of its earlier grants towards the construction and renovation of the Auckland and Otago Museums, the government in the 1990s makes grants for the capital development of these institutions. The grants are made following the establishment of a Policy for Government Assistance Towards Capital Projects at Regional Museums (1994).

19.

Two other developments should be noted as this summary approaches the present day, both suggesting a new level of recognition of the cultural sector by government. A ministerial portfolio “for the Arts”, later to be known as Cultural Affairs, is established in 1975 and serviced by the Department of Internal Affairs, the department responsible for implementing many of the government’s cultural policy developments since the 1940s. And in 1991, following public consultation, a stand-alone Ministry for Culture and Heritage is formed, taking over the policy functions previously performed by the Arts and Cultural Heritage Division of Internal Affairs. The Ministry receives a mandate from Cabinet to advise the government on all cultural issues. Its funding responsibilities, however, are limited to seven cultural-sector agencies. The many other diverse involvements of government in New Zealand’s cultural life are allowed to remain where, at various times over the decades, they have come to be placed.

What was Government Responding to?

20.

These, in briefest outline, are some of the key developments and initiatives revealed by looking at the chronology of government’s cultural commitments. What were the broader trends in New Zealand history and society that led the government to make these commitments?

21.

It should first be recognised that New Zealand’s cultural development, in the first 100 years especially, was for the most part the work of individuals and communities outside central government. Much of Maori cultural development, from the nineteenth century until well into the twentieth, proceeded without specific interventions by government, though it was profoundly affected by the wider decisions of government. Perhaps the most identifiably independent development is the establishment of the Kingitanga, when Te Wherowhero, a rangatira of the Waikato, was crowned King Potatau in June 1858. Later, in 1867, four Maori seats were created which would bring an important element of Maori leadership into government. These elected leaders themselves, however, maintained a steady dialogue with traditional leadership outside of the government. Maori did not look to government for the support of their culture but for the means to deal with the impact of Pakeha culture, in the broadest sense, and of government action on the land and on the Maori people. Despite such measures as the Maori Purposes Fund Board, Maori culture continued to evolve through the thirties beyond the influence of central government, in a period when cultural leaders tended to reject the idea of government assistance for Maori culture. Maori preferred instead to have priority given to survival issues such as health, employment and education.

22.

Cultural facilities such as museums, art galleries, and libraries, established in the nineteenth century generally at the initiative of groups of local citizens, remained the responsibility of local authorities, as they do in most respects today. Many of the cultural decisions of successive governments were made in response to trends that were already becoming apparent in what we now call the cultural sector. Government waited for these trends to become established before acting. In the nineteenth century, for example, the emergence of New Zealand’s cities from pioneering conditions was accompanied by an increased public interest in art. Art societies were formed, the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts was founded, collections began to be built up and galleries established. The government’s response was to support the Academy’s initiative in founding a National Art Gallery (1892), later to be housed alongside the Dominion Museum. Its assistance to regional galleries was and remains limited.

23.

A similar pattern, though over a briefer period, can be seen in the 1950s, when a series of arts organisations and companies on a national scale began to be formed - the Federation of Chamber Music Societies, the New Zealand Players, the New Zealand Ballet Company, and the New Zealand Opera Company. These developments were not the result of government action, though they may have been hastened by the government initiatives of the forties. They were the work of committed groups and individuals. But the new level of cultural activity they represented, and their need for stable development, were factors in prompting government to establish the Arts Advisory Council, the immediate predecessor of the Arts Council. The Arts Council in turn was to foster the development of national and regional arts companies in the following decades, and the growth of a New Zealand repertoire. This activity was further encouraged by the support given by universities, business and, unevenly, by local government.

24.

In other areas of the sector, the pattern of government response appears arbitrary. In establishing the New Zealand Film Commission, for example, the government recognised the need for more structured support for a medium and art form of great cultural influence. At the same time, it gave the Commission a statutory duty to support the archiving of New Zealand’s existing film heritage. However, the actual establishment of a Film Archive that would start the huge and belated task of conserving a body of work on film dating back to 1896 was a private initiative and remains so today, with support from the Film Commission, the Lottery Grants Board, the private sector, and, at modest levels, directly from government.

25.

The historical sequence also shows a tendency for government action to be clustered around key events and anniversaries. These have served to focus government’s attention on the state of New Zealand’s cultural development, and have inspired measures of both temporary and long-term effect. Royal tours from 1868 on provided occasions for the presentation - in a carefully staged way - of New Zealand culture, including Maori culture in its ceremonial aspects. (With the Treaty in mind Maori have long held a special regard for Queen Victoria and her descendants.) New Zealand’s involvement in wars has also prompted government, along with the nation as a whole, to reflect on our cultural development. The desire to commemorate the First World War became combined in the 1920s with a growing public demand for cultural facilities and led government to subsidise the building of the Auckland War Memorial Museum and proceed with the construction of the National Museum and National Art Gallery. The commissioning of war histories, after the First World War, and during the Second, reinforced government’s involvement in preserving and interpreting New Zealand’s historical record. The war effort was particularly important for Maori, being seen as the price of citizenship. Following the Wars the government granted subsidies towards the erection of memorials as well as facilities upon many marae.

26.

But the events that have concentrated the minds of governments on cultural questions most productively have been the 1940 centennial and the 150th anniversary of the Treaty’s signing in 1990. In both eras the anticipation of the key date prompted a desire, recognised and acted on by government, to take stock of our cultural achievements, interpret our growing heritage, and attempt to project an identity for the nation as a whole. As has been seen, they were occasions for government to consider new forms of involvement in the cultural sector.

27.

The government’s interventions in the sector have at times been merely reactive or opportunistic. In the major periods of development, however, it is possible to speak, if not of a defined cultural policy, at least of a focused and sustained intent on government’s part to have a positive impact on New Zealand’s cultural life. With the centennial celebrations as an impetus, the period from the late thirties through the forties shows the government, after decades of being an occasional patron and founder of institutions, becoming interested in the quality and scope of cultural production. The measures of the forties, more numerous than those of all the previous decades combined, were the product of a period of activist government on all fronts. The government showed a new recognition of the social value of cultural activities. At the same time it recognised an obligation to foster exceptional talent, thereby laying some of the foundations for the artistic achievements that follow this period. It should be noted, however, that government’s actions at this time were largely focused on non-Maori areas of cultural activity.

28.

The government in these years demonstrated a desire to educate and stimulate that, in its control of broadcasting and film, shaded at times into propaganda. It showed a concern for the cultural component of education in such innovations as the School Publications Branch of the Department of Education and the Adult Education Act of 1947. It was aware of the development of government cultural patronage in Australia, Great Britain, and Canada, and was prepared to develop structures that committed it to the long-term support of the sector.

29.

In the following decades, the government’s patronage of the arts, through “arm’s length” agencies, was to become increasingly coherent and systematic - although, as will be seen, the principles underlying this patronage changed. Its actions as a guardian of the nation’s cultural heritage did not show the same coherence.

30.

Another influence on cultural policy, of major importance from the mid 1970s on, has been the renewed legal force given to the Treaty of Waitangi. Articles 2 and 3 of the Treaty have been interpreted in recent policy and legislation as requiring the government to take steps to foster the Maori language and culture, and to provide access to cultural funding on a fair basis to Maori and non-Maori citizens. This interpretation of the Treaty led to the establishment of the Maori Language Commission, and the accompanying decision to make Maori an official language. It is also reflected in the legislation establishing the Arts Council (Creative New Zealand), the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), the Broadcasting Commission (NZ On Air), and the Department of Conservation, and in related legislation such as the Historic Places Act 1993. These were explicitly bicultural initiatives, committing government to goals relating to Maori cultural development. As a counterpoint to these developments, support has repeatedly been voiced in the past two decades for a Maori Cultural Foundation or equivalent body - a single agency that would support Maori cultural development in a unified way.

31.

Over the same period the government began to demonstrate an awareness that, while Maori as the tangata whenua made up one side of the bicultural equation, there were on the other side not one but many cultures. This awareness began to be shown in the 1970s restructuring of the Arts Council, with its establishment of mechanisms for the support of community arts and Pacific Island arts. It is apparent in the statutory language defining the responsibilities of the current Arts Council and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

A Developing Culture

32.

The deeper undercurrent in the history of government’s cultural role is the development of New Zealand culture itself, whether broadly or narrowly defined. To what extent did this development influence government action, and to what extent was it in turn influenced by the decisions of government? To answer this question with any precision would require a closer study of government’s historical role in the cultural sector than has yet been attempted. What does seem clear is that New Zealand cultural production increased greatly in scope in the period following the government initiatives of the 1940s, and that cultural forms inherited from Europe began to take on a New Zealand identity.

33.

One of the centennial projects commissioned by Internal Affairs in 1940 was a book-length survey of Arts and Letters in New Zealand by E. H. McCormick. This work, critically independent despite its official origins, traces a development in non-Maori writers and artists towards the beginnings of cultural independence. It contrasts an early, naïve nationalism with a dominant cultural attachment to Britain, further reinforced by the Boer and First World Wars. In the years leading up to the 1930s, writers and artists, it suggests, were in a transitional stage, “between two hemispheres”. Only towards the end of the thirties did some begin to achieve “a stage of equilibrium between paralysing subjection to the prestige of England and strident nationalism”.

34.

The arts of music, theatre and film do not feature in McCormick’s centennial survey. They are more dependent on an infrastructure that the government helped, over the following decades, to provide, and that allowed for an expansion of activity in all the arts. This expansion also reflected the cultural benefits of immigration, of access to a wider range of international influences, and of a sense of national independence identified by historians as one of the gains of New Zealand’s experience of Depression and war. The general desire for an improved quality of life following the privation of the Depression and war years was also a stimulating factor. Increasing affluence during the 1950s and 1960s, though not fully shared, combined with higher levels of education to create a demand for the kinds of cultural experiences that government action would make possible.

35.

Cultural self-confidence grew as artists and critics came to feel less isolated. The quantity and variety of New Zealand work increased, accompanied by a sense that the arts in New Zealand now had traditions behind them that could be honoured, modified or rejected. This consciousness of a cultural past in the arts was echoed by the new concern, apparent from the 1960s and reflected in government action, with preserving the nation’s material heritage.

36.

While the cultural practices that make up part of the nation’s European inheritance took on new forms and content, Maori culture by the middle of the century faced a different challenge: to avoid being either absorbed and dissolved in a homogeneous mainstream, or marginalised completely. This challenge was posed acutely by the doctrine of assimilation, dominant in government policy and education through the sixties, which took a toll in particular on the resource at the heart of the culture: the Maori language.

37.

Several factors combined to make the 1970s and 1980s a period of renewal. Assimilationist ideas were rejected by an assertive new generation. Growing Maori achievement in the contemporary arts was accompanied by the reinvigoration of traditional forms. The reaffirmation of the Treaty led to a new recognition on government’s part that the taonga referred to in Article 2 included cultural practices and the language itself. Maori artists and writers lobbied government to extend its support of the arts, through the Arts Council, to the contemporary and traditional Maori arts. The Te Maori exhibition of the mid-eighties was a milestone in the Maori involvement in the exhibition of taonga in cultural institutions. It influenced the policies and protocols of such institutions in the following years, causing some of them to recognise the need for a partnership with iwi. Its effect can be traced in the development of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa as a bicultural institution.

38.

In recent years, as Peter Simpson has noted in the Oxford History of New Zealand (Second Edition), the older tendency of non-Maori writers to define New Zealand’s identity as distinct from that of Britain or Europe has faded. It has been replaced by a focus on our geographic status as a Pacific nation, and a redefinition of New Zealand as both a bicultural and multicultural nation. New Zealand’s cultural production, informed by new international influences, has become still more diverse.

39.

In the late 1990s attempts to discover and assert an essential New Zealand identity that binds up all the nation’s cultural strands are repeatedly made, but the subject itself keeps shifting. The globalisation of business and entertainment, which brings the fear of a worldwide cultural uniformity, has become a dominant concern. For New Zealand, this is not a new phenomenon. New Zealanders were entertained by Hollywood movies for decades before the country had a small but continuous feature film industry of its own. Our television drama came entirely from overseas until the early seventies. The international popular culture that flows largely - though not entirely - from the United States has for decades been a stimulating influence not only on our own popular music or television, but on our culture in the broadest sense - our language, ideas, values.

40.

Against this background, the role of government in fostering forms of cultural identity has evolved to a point where it is providing some of the means, but not attempting to shape the ends. Our forms of cultural expression are being allowed to develop and change as they will, as our mixed cultural heritage produces fresh surprises. Government in the past three decades has concentrated on providing opportunities for an identity of various kinds to be expressed, through the “arm’s length” mechanisms of funding, through regulation, and through education. And, through a renewed acknowledgement of its obligations under the Treaty, it has begun to develop policies and structures that recognise the distinct cultural identity of Maori and the desire of iwi/hapu to be resourced and empowered to manage their own cultural heritage.

Reassessing the Role of Government

41.

Since the Second World War, as has been seen, the government has developed a role for itself as a provider of structured, ongoing, support for the cultural sector - though more consistently in its support of the arts than in its actions as a guardian of cultural heritage. During this period, and particularly in the last thirty years, the ideas guiding social and economic policy have changed substantially. So have notions of “culture” itself.

42.

The development of government’s interventions in the cultural sector formed part of the post-war expansion in the social and economic role of the state that was common to all Western democracies. The way that these interventions developed, traced in the previous pages, reflects, though in a more piecemeal, fragmented fashion, the pattern in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, where cultural programmes and institutions have tended to be established without the guidance of a fully articulated “cultural policy”. Cultural policy has tended to be considerably less developed in these countries than economic and social policy, and therefore to be created, by default, by policy in these areas, or at the micro level by specific, independent, cultural initiatives. This tendency is in marked contrast to the more concerted approach to cultural policy that is characteristic of continental European and Scandinavian countries.

43.

To the extent that an overarching New Zealand policy can be inferred from the developments of the “foundation” period from 1945 to the mid-1960s, it was that the traditional European forms of “high culture” should be supported so that they were available to all, and that culture should be protected from political interference. These principles can be discerned behind the establishment of the first of the “arm’s length” agencies, the Arts Council. They echoed the contemporary policies of the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada.

44.

From the mid-1960s onwards, the basis of the New Zealand government’s involvement in culture has been challenged by a variety of developments. The first was the emergence, promoted internationally by UNESCO from 1970 onwards, of a new conception of cultural policy based on a broader definition of culture, and with a goal of national and community “cultural development”. As a consequence, the equation of culture - as a domain of policy interest - with “the arts” began to be displaced by a concept that included a wider variety of forms of expression, including popular culture and the cultures of different ethnic groups. Diversity came more explicitly to be valued as a desirable quality of our cultural life. Community participation and expression became policy goals, supplementing the earlier emphasis on supporting arts practitioners. New Zealand’s establishment of Regional and Community Arts Councils and the Maori and South Pacific Arts Council were manifestations of this trend.

45.

The 1980s saw another, less decisive, shift in the emphasis of cultural policy, although one that was brought about largely by changes in economic and public-sector policy rather than in cultural policy itself. The decade saw wide-ranging reforms of the public sector, culminating in the State Sector Act of 1988. The impact of these reforms on the government’s involvement in the cultural sector has yet to be fully assessed. In the late eighties and early nineties they proved consistent with government’s attachment to the “arm’s length” principle, with its separation of service delivery from the policy-making of government. (The principle was reinforced by the placement outside departmental structures of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and the new Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.) The allocation of functions to the Ministry for Culture and Heritage - requiring it to operate as a policy Ministry, without a role in delivering services to the community - reflected the principles of the state sector reforms. The Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa has extended the principle of a funder-provider split into its own operations, by supporting the establishment of arts providers outside the organisation such as the Toi Maori Aotearoa Trust.

46.

In its economic policy, the tendency of government was to abandon subsidies to particular sectors of the economy and place a new emphasis on the “free” operation of markets. This shift in approach has brought the cultural sector under new scrutiny. It has placed a new emphasis on the financial accountability of the recipients of public funding, and on justifying support in terms of the demand that is met. But there has been no fundamental change in government’s role in the sector. Government has continued to own and establish institutions and to subsidise the production and presentation of artistic work through the “arm’s length” agencies.

47.

In 1998 the goal of greater co-ordination of cultural policy, foreseen before the establishment of the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, remains to be accomplished. The fragmented nature of its involvement in the sector has discouraged government from undertaking any overall assessment of cultural policy, whether from an economic or any other perspective. Such an assessment is necessary if government is to address the successes and failures of its historical role and develop a coherent set of priorities, objectives and structures for its involvement in the cultural sector.