Government's Role in the Cultural Sector

Why is central government involved in the
cultural sector at all?

4.1
As was noted in the Foreword, it is not the purpose of this paper to return to first principles - to ask, in effect, whether government should be involved in the cultural sector at all. Instead, this paper surveys the policy issues relating to the nature and quality of government’s involvement. First, however, it is useful briefly to summarise the principal reasons that can be discovered for government’s interest in the cultural sector.
4.2
In the broadest terms, it can be said that government has an interest in securing for New Zealanders the benefits produced by cultural activities. Like the benefits of good health or physical recreation, the benefits of participation in the nation’s cultural life are familiar to anyone who has ever enjoyed them - which is, at one time or another, almost everyone.² They need only be stated briefly:

Cultural activities satisfy our desire, whether as individuals or as members of communities, for aesthetic experience.
They provide experiences that are satisfying and rewarding in themselves, and that directly enhance our quality of life.
They engage parts of our minds not so fully engaged by other activities; they help us to develop our full capacities, including our capacity to be creative in other areas of life.
They provide means of self-expression and communication.
Through images and narratives they provide ways of understanding experience - our own and others’ - that are not otherwise available to us.
They help us to question conventional ideas and to re-examine our own individual and social history. In so doing, they enhance our ability to participate in social and civic life.
They contribute to other goals of public policy such as good health and social cohesion.
They satisfy our desire for communal experiences.
They provide us with reflections and expressions of ourselves as members of our various communities.

4.3
In seeking to secure these benefits government may be said to have aimed at a set of outcomes, although it has not proclaimed them. They may be expressed as follows:

Creativity and innovation in cultural expression.
Widespread appreciation of and participation in cultural activities.
Recognition of the Treaty of Waitangi in the development of effective bicultural approaches within cultural organisations and programmes and in cultural policy generally.
Effective protection and management of New Zealand’s material and intellectual heritage, and the study and ongoing reinterpretation of that heritage.
The continuing evolution of a sense of national cultural identity that embraces the cultural traditions and practices of all New Zealanders.
International recognition and appreciation of New Zealand’s distinctive cultural achievements.

4.4
The creative and intellectual potential released by cultural activity produces resources enjoyed by the nation as a whole: its stock of ideas, its ability to examine itself critically, the images and narratives that it holds and enjoys in common, the material and intangible riches that make up its cultural heritage. Government’s investment in cultural activity contributes to its goal of achieving social cohesion in the fullest sense, not simply by binding the nation together, but by ensuring that it has the capacity to examine its past, to grow and to change.
4.5
In aiming to achieve outcomes such as those listed above, government has contributed to the maintenance and development of distinct forms of cultural identity. It has not sought to impose or construct an identity, but to support some of the activities necessary for an identity to be expressed.
4.6
One may recognise the value of such benefits as are outlined above, and acknowledge the desirability of achieving the outcomes just listed, but nevertheless ask: why does the government need to be involved in achieving them? If there is a demand for cultural experiences, even those of the richest and most intense kind, will the market not supply it?
4.7
The experience of New Zealand, as of other developed countries, has been that some degree of government intervention is necessary in order to realise these benefits and outcomes. There are several interlinked reasons why this should be so.

Protecting the Past, Investing in the Future
4.8
Reinterpreting the past, preserving cultural treasures, developing art forms in new directions, fostering individual talent - these primary cultural activities require an infrastructure that commercial interests will not in every case produce of themselves. They depend on a commitment to the welfare of present and future generations that is not always characteristic of profit-making enterprises. They require the recognition that failure is often the price of innovation and development, and the willingness to pay that price repeatedly. They may involve placing controls on private behaviour - on our ability, for example, to do just what we like with our possessions when they have a wider cultural significance.
4.9
What is true of our natural environment and the policies that seek to protect it is true of our evolving cultural heritage: the government, on behalf of its citizens, has an interest in the future. Government seeks to ensure that those parts of its cultural inheritance that the nation wishes to preserve for later generations are in fact preserved; that inequalities of access to the resources on which cultural life depends are reduced as far as possible; that the truly exceptional individuals and projects that will advance the art forms practised in New Zealand are identified and fostered.
4.10
The preservation of our heritage and the quality of those things that will add to it in the future depend on the willingness of government to commit resources, put structures in place, and take other forms of action - to adopt a long-term, strategic view of our cultural development.
4.11
Government has through its actions shown that it regards the benefits of cultural activity as intrinsic goods that it is prepared to play a part in securing. In economic terms, they are “merit goods”, that is, goods that are regarded as desirable for a society to have at a level - of quantity, quality or both - higher than people are able or willing to pay for at the price set by the market. Part of the reason why they are so valued is that they are not simply private benefits. As the list in paragraph 4.2 suggests, the benefits of cultural activity extend beyond the individual to society in general. They contribute to the levels of education, historical awareness and democratic participation displayed by the nation as a whole.
4.12
However, while a belief that cultural activities are goods of a special kind can be discerned in government’s historic actions, its performance in achieving good outcomes can be questioned, as the later chapters of this paper suggest.

Creating the Basis for Choice
4.13
In recognising cultural activities as producing a desirable set of benefits, government has also recognised that these benefits are not always easily gained. Achieving them depends on information, in the broadest sense. Just as skill and talent develop over time, so do taste and comprehension. As cultural consumers, we may feel that “we know what we like” and that we make our choices freely. But knowing what we like derives from knowing what there is to like. Some cultural experiences are readily, comfortably accessible to our understanding; others are challenging and difficult. The arts are learned progressively, by producers and consumers alike. This process of learning begins early in life, and can be much advanced in the compulsory phases of our education, but it does not end there. It is life-long.
4.14
Government’s interest in realising the benefits that are possible from cultural achievement has led it to support the new, the challenging and the difficult, while knowing that some of these forms of expression may turn out to be dead ends and never find an audience. Its desire to preserve and extend our cultural heritage has involved it in maintaining institutions that exist to interpret that heritage for us - to make it newly comprehensible for each generation. These actions of government have served not to deny choice, but to increase it.

Supplementing Private Funding
4.15
All the cultural activities in which government has an interest are supported to varying degrees by individual consumers and private sponsors. Yet New Zealand, with its small, dispersed population, lacks the concentrations of wealth that, in other countries, have endowed museums or sustained the labour-intensive performing arts. Even if private funding were greatly increased, it is in the nature of the cultural sector to experience cost pressures of a peculiar kind. These derive from the fact that the sector achieves only limited efficiency gains from new technology and equipment - it takes no fewer people today to play a string quartet written in 1800 - and from the steadily increasing requirements of caring for a growing heritage.
4.16
Individual and corporate sponsorship are encouraged by government in New Zealand, though without the tax incentives used in other countries. In no country, however, including the United States, have private initiatives been found sufficient to maintain the full range of cultural activity that characterises a developed society. The involvement of government at some level is invariably part of the picture. It has replaced the patronage once provided by churches and princes and, in democratic societies at least, has done so in ways that respect freedom of expression. In New Zealand it may be said that government has been involved in supporting certain cultural activities only to the extent necessary for us to have them at all.
4.17
Like the set of broad outcomes offered earlier, these reasons for government’s involvement have not been articulated by government itself. That government acknowledges them may be inferred from its actions, both in the present and over the past several decades, as shown by the historical survey included with this paper. They are historical reasons, and are not immutable. Changes of various kinds - in population, in educational standards, in technology - may over time alter or remove some of the factors that have caused government to become involved in the cultural sector.
4.18
If it is to recognise these changes and best determine what its cultural obligations should be, now and in the future, the government needs to be able to act strategically - to decide when to intervene, and how. Its capacity to do this is the subject of the next chapter.

2
New Zealanders appear to be strongly aware of the value of cultural activities: in a nation-wide survey carried out in July 1997, over 90 per cent of respondents agreed that cultural activities help to enrich people’s lives and to bring communities together. In addition, 82 per cent saw the support and encouragement of culture and cultural activities as an important role of government.

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