MICHAEL BASSETT: WHOSE AUCKLAND FESTIVAL?

As I was looking over the programme for next March’s Auckland Arts Festival I was struck by the large number of events with a Maori theme. Open the cover and the introduction is headed Toitu Te Reo with a large piece of text in Maori. Then Ihi. Wehi. Mana featuring a group of Maori adorned with stick-on chin tattoos. Then He Manu Tioriori follows with a further long burst in Te Reo. Then ONO with Moana & the Tribe, featuring another column of Te Reo. And there’s a “free” Whanau Day for the citizens of Tamaki Makaurau! 

Yes, there’s a couple of Pacific Island items to leaven the heavy Maori diet, but there’s little planned to showcase the cultures of Auckland’s principal residents. These days, Asians outnumber Maori in Auckland by more than two to one; Europeans outnumber Maori by four to one. There’s scant recognition of these facts from the programme except for a couple of concerts by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. The growing significance of talented Kiwi-born Asian classical musicians seems to have passed the organisers of Te Ahurei Toi Tamaki by.

I looked to see who was funding the festival. Amongst a long list of the great, the good and the generous, not a Maori name in sight. No iwi, despite their substantial income streams these days. Instead, Auckland Council, Creative NZ, Foundation North and the Australian Government feature in the list of funders, along with a few commercial groups that stand to benefit financially from attendance at events.

This set me thinking about why Maori themselves demonstrate so little support of their own cultural events. Then I remembered that they take only a small interest in the education of their young. Otherwise, Maori wouldn’t be the biggest group of low school attendees, and spectacularly the worst at getting their children vaccinated. Parental failings among Maori are legendary, and the costs of Maori crime in the courts and prisons exceed those of other cultures combined.

Somewhere, somehow, governments and people of goodwill have managed to create all the wrong incentives for Maori to succeed in modern day New Zealand. Don’t blame colonisation. There are simpler reasons. It has become all too easy for people to flop on to welfare and to laze away the hours. As Lindsay Mitchell has shown, the welfare rolls keep ticking up, even under a centre-right government. More than a third of the Maori babies born in 2024 were born onto a benefit. Ministers have become notoriously unwilling to lean heavily on parents who fail the children they often fecklessly bring into this world. Jacinda’s “Be Kind” message is having disastrous consequences. Many of the welfare benefits that Maori take up are intended to enable their children to thrive. But there are not enough sticks or carrots to ensure parents act accordingly. And despite the big settlements achieved by many iwi, they seem to put little into education, or ensuring that Maori kids abide by the law. Life wasn’t meant to be a self-indulgent free ride for anyone, and yet things like the coming Arts Festival seem to encourage the notion that all that Maori have to do is lie back and others will tell them that they are the greatest.

Why do the great, the good and the generous part with their money so easily? Surely if one is invited to contribute towards an arts festival, one would assume that the festival celebrated everyone’s culture, and not relegate those of the major groups of the population to obscurity?

Asking these questions, fastens the spotlight on the woke who for several years now seem to have been entrusted with putting the Auckland Arts Festival together. The programme for next year lists a collection of administrative figures, all with fancy Maori titles like Kaiwhakahaere Matua, Pou Tikanga, Kaihapai Hotaka etc.  They claim to be engaged in “mahi towards better accessibility and education opportunities for our audiences.” “Human connection and manaakitanga will always be at the heart of what we stand for”. Then, brazenly, they add: “We truly believe that the festival has something for everyone”.

Codswallop!

It’s high time someone in authority – probably Auckland Council should be the one – ran a slide rule over the dispersal of public and private money on the scale involved with this upcoming festival. A good place to start would be a careful monitoring of the numbers attending this bogus Auckland Festival and some robust analysis afterwards.