Friday, May 16, 2014

Cutting the cake

So what does the latest budget mean for the arts? Not so much minus whatever the rate of inflation was last year. Most of the arts money comes via the Ministry of Culture and Heritage with Culture getting the biggest share because it includes Broadcasting and Sport. There’s also about 6 million for general stuff like admin and policy.

The big chunks go to broadcasting with $132 million and sport and recreation with $84 million. High performance sport gets just over 69% of that -- high performance art, not so much. Museums (including art museums) get a fair whack at $53 million. Then there's feeding our national war obsession that's going to cost us $21 million. Presumably this will include the salary of ex Te Papa CE now Special Adviser on Military Heritage Michael Houlihan. There’s also nearly $8 million to write about wars gone by and other history stuff.

OK we have finally arrived at the arts, well Performing Arts anyway. They get $20 million while something called Arts and Film gets $21. We assume these are the two halves of Creative NZ’s funding.

Then it’s Heritage NZ with $13.5 million, Gen Admin and Policy $6 million, Film $4.1 million, Maori $360,000 and Cultural Diplomacy $220,000. Of the last two, Maori took a 72 percent hit on Protecting Taonga and the art diplomacy people who brought you Te Papa's Oceania exhibition a few years ago were slashed 69 percent.

Meanwhile the Australia Council (their Creative NZ) has been cut $30.5 million over four years in their budget announcement. That’s $10.4 million for the first year and about $6.5 million for the following three.


Image: cake cutter