PRIME TIME FOR NZ ARTS
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is a passionate advocate for the arts. In her portfolio of Arts Minister, her priorities are to ensure wider access for all New Zealanders and generate sustainable careers in the creative sector. Lizzie Franks reports.
“I love theatre, I love film, I love live music,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern enthuses. Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, a multi-award-winning live show by Christchurch’s Tusiata Avia, was “just fantastic”, she says, and she’s looking forward to seeing Taika Waititi’s satirical black comedy, Jojo Rabbit, a few days after this interview. “But my ability to see as much as I’d like is somewhat limited at the moment,” she laughs.
In October 2017, New Zealand’s newly elected prime minister announced she would also be taking on the role of Minister for the Arts, Culture and Heritage. In opposition, she was Shadow Minister for the Arts and Culture. “Being the arts minister gives me a good excuse to get to a few things here and there,” she says.
Ardern acknowledges her genuine passion for the arts is something of a rarity among political leaders and is on a mission to change the perception that “the arts is simply nice to have”. It’s critical to “our sense of identity, our wellbeing, enacting our conscience on issues”, she says.
“Under the past governments, we’ve seen this sentiment that the arts wasn’t critical, wasn’t core, wasn’t necessary, particularly during times of economic downturn. We have to stop thinking about our creative sector in that way.”
Ardern says her priorities as arts minister are to “create wider access for our communities, and sustainable careers”.
In 2019, her government released a Wellbeing Budget that included the biggest funding and investment boost on record for mental health, $NZ1.9 billion, and an extra $NZ87.490 million across the next four years for the arts, culture and heritage sector. It identified a need to increase wages for artists. “We can’t say we value our art if we don’t value our artists,” Ardern told the media on its release.
“There seems to be a sentiment that if you work in the arts, particularly in film and television, you are somehow lucky. Even if your wages and conditions aren’t what they should be, you should still consider yourself lucky. We’ve got to remove that notion entirely. These are jobs that involve a huge commitment, with long hours, that people are relying on to feed their families.”
One of Ardern’s first major announcements as prime minister was that her government would make changes to the ‘Hobbit Law’, which prevented film workers from collectively bargaining because they were contractors, not employees, within her first 100 days in office. “That was about us restoring something to its rightful place,” she says.
The Employment Relations (Film Production Work) Amendment Bill, as it’s officially called, was passed in late 2010, when the International Federation of Actors (the global union for actors of which Equity NZ and MEAA Equity are affiliates) attempted to campaign for union contracts and residuals for the New Zealand actors who were to be employed on the $US500 million Hobbit project when it was shooting in Wellington. This was in line with what actors from Australia, the UK and the US would be receiving. US studio Warner Bros threatened to pull the film from New Zealand and make it elsewhere.
During the dispute, Warner Bros executives visited Auckland for two days for private discussions with then Prime Minister John Key. They left with an additional $US25 million in tax concessions, beyond the approximately $US75 million already agreed on. In the days following their visit, the ‘Hobbit Law’ was rushed through parliament. At the time, Labour said the move “reduced NZ to a client state of a US movie studio”.
“I was in parliament at the time and I remember it being an incredibly divisive time for the sector and incredibly rough for those involved,” Ardern says.
Equity NZ described it as a “deeply unfair” law for workers. Jonathan Handel’s book, The New Zealand Hobbit Crisis, highlighted it as an “unusually dramatic example of corporate leverage exerted against a nation-state and its workers”.
In early 2018, the Film Industry Working Group (FIWG) was set up by the Ardern Government’s Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety, Iain Lees-Galloway, to find a way to restore rights for film workers in New Zealand. The FIWG is made up of 13 members, including Equity NZ, Film Auckland, BusinessNZ, Weta Digital and the NZ Council of Trade Unions.
When asked if there was a risk that better conditions for screen workers could result in studios filming elsewhere, Lees-Galloway replied: “Interestingly, whenever we talk about what makes New Zealand competitive with other locations, wage rates and costs almost never come up. People talk more about the skill level of the people who are available in New Zealand, the flexibility, quality of the locations, investment that’s gone into technology and research … those are the things we are competing on.”
The FIWG’s “unanimously agreed” model, which included improved rights for film workers, was put to the government in October 2018. The group’s facilitator, lawyer and former political journalist Linda Clarke, said reaching an agreed set of recommendations was an exercise in collaboration and compromise: “The screen sector is on a much stronger footing going forward.”
A new law, based on the group’s recommendations, will be introduced by the government in 2020. Lees-Galloway described it as a “win-win” that allows companies to remain competitive in an internationally fluid market, while providing more protection for workers.
Equity NZ described it as “hugely significant” for actors.
“Building a consensus around this was really important because, unfortunately, governments come and governments go,” says Ardern. “We want to make sure we have created something that will be long lasting, that won’t be undone.”
The other long-lasting change the prime minister is keen to see is greater diversity and the inclusion of Māori in storytelling. At the Power of Inclusion Summit in Auckland in October 2019, she told attendees: “Our world is rich and diverse, and we need it reflected both on the screen and behind the screen… We all know inclusivity stems well beyond issues of gender. In order to have a truly inclusive industry, we must support and cultivate voices and communities with stories that have not been traditionally told as frankly as they should.”
Ardern says there needs to be acknowledgement of how much work is left to do on this front. “We won’t create change or address our own inadequacies unless we are able to talk about them openly.”
No one could accuse Ardern of not being open about what she wants to change when it comes to the role of arts in New Zealand society. In 2018, she wrote this for an opinion piece in Big Idea: “I want to see a country where the creativity and joy that comes from the arts is available to the many, not reserved for a privileged few. I want to see a country where the arts flourish and breathe life into, well, everyday life. I want to see a country where the arts are available to us all and help us express ourselves as unique individuals, brought together in diverse communities.”
“That’s 100 per cent what I believe and what guides the work I’m doing every day,” she says. “When you’re carving out a new path and being a bit disruptive to the way things have been done before, of course it’s going to be challenging. But I think there’s very strong support for new stories, new ways of doing things… and a new form of leadership.”
Lizzie Franks is the editor of The Equity Magazine. This article was originally published in the 2019 Equity Yearbook.
