RNZ Concert must play on

If RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson and music content director Willy Macalister acted in isolation with their proposal to disembowel RNZ Concert, then they clearly do not understand their audience and should be asked to resign on the grounds of incompetence.

But I suspect they were responding to a Government ideological shift in the arts and culture sector. We see action to dumb down or undermine so-called “high culture, exemplified by the RNZ Concert issue, but also reflected in the destruction of 60,000 books in the National Library, reducing access to National Archives and Creative NZ’s action in shutting down New Zealand Review of Books/Pukapuka Aotearoa, the only journal devoted exclusively to coverage of New Zealand literature. This illustrates Creative NZ’s increasingly prescriptive approach, which requires organisations to tick ethnic, age and social boxes if they want to receive adequate funding.

Perhaps the biggest worry is that the Government appears to be going along with proposed changes to the Copyright Act, which will seriously diminish writers’ and other creative artists’ control of and reward for their intellectual property. The Labour Party has traditionally been a champion of the arts and it is distressing that Jacinda Ardern, as Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, either does not know what is going