The DIA’s treatment of the National Library’s music collection illustrates Parliament’s increasing weakness at reflecting the public’s concerns. Under New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements the Government’s ability to function depends upon Parliament’s willingness to fund it. I shan’t be surprised if after our election the new government’s mandate will depend on one or more minor parties’…
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This note is to promote a public discussion. It is referred to in Irish arts policy shames NZ Newsroom 23, March 2026 The Irish take their arts seriously which may explain their four Nobel Prizes in literature: W.B. Yeats, Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Sean Heaney, with James Joyce a near miss*. But great trees don’t…
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New Zealand is a small, isolated nation and needs to design itself accordingly. We should avoid uncritically imitating larger nations. Among the news websites I read is a British daily which once a week interviews a local writer on the books they grew up reading and which influenced them. That’s fifty-odd a year; most interviews…
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This was offered to a media outlet but they chose another piece. Based on the Epilogue of ‘In Open Seas’. Because New Zealand is very centralised, its central government has considerable influence over the public discussion. Thus, a change of government, as happened in 2023, may change greatly the tone and even direction of cultural…
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And even more from the book it is based upon: “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Christopher Nolan’s award winning film Oppenheimer is based on the 2005 biography American Prometheus. I really liked the title. Prometheus was the Greek god who gave mankind fire, and was punished for…
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The recognition that there is a media problem is correct, but the chosen solution is likely to be disastrous. Whether it intends or not, the government is embarked on a course to undermine Radio New Zealand. It wants to merge TVNZ and RNZ in order, it says, to strengthen the media. ‘Merge’ is a weasel…
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The burning of books has a long history. That it no reason why we should add to it. If you want to get Burning of the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack from the National Library you may have to hurry. It is in the overseas nonfiction section; many books of which are being…
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Unlike in some other places, the New Zealand Government decided that books were not essential goods and closed all bookshops during Alert Level 4. Even during Alert Level 3 you can only buy books online.
On Sunday 9 February 2020, I drafted a Pundit column, discussing the announced proposal to downgrade Concert FM. My practice is to let columns stew before posting them – in this case the plan was to put it up on Tuesday. By Monday the policy turmoil had changed markedly and I had to make major…
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The Issue John Stuart Mill argued it was better to be an unhappy philosopher than a happy pig; that all transactions and assets are not of equal value. However, the New Zealand Government system largely treats heritage assets similarly to other assets. Today’s governance needs to move past the happy-pig approach to one which recognises…
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If the Commercial Miracle of Newspapers is Over, What will Replace It? Newspapers have been a commercial miracle. For a very small outlay one got access to a surprisingly wide range of news, opinion and information. Part of the explanation was economies of scale, but the trick was that much of the industry’s revenue came…
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A recent decision by New Zealand on Air in response to the changing media technologies raises a range of issues about how the platforms are used. The announcement by New Zealand on Air that it was changing its mode of funding is a reminder of the current turmoil in the media from the convergence of…
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Is it possible to have sensible discussions in public? Last June there was a kerfuffle in the online magazine Spinoff over attitudes to intellectual activity in New Zealand. It was precipitated by an extract from Auckland retired academic Roger Horrocks’s recently published collection of essays, Re-inventing New Zealand.. The excerpt came from ‘A Short History of “The New Zealand Intellectual”’…
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For launch at Ekor Bookshop and Café, Wellington; 25 August 2016. I have just received the following email. It is from William Henry Hayes. The email address is ‘underworld’. I tried to reply but the lines are clogged by politicians getting advice. It reads Another buccaneer by the name of Voltaire – I…
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The story of our national anthems might provide guidance for how to proceed with the flag. A recent Victoria University graduation ceremony invited everyone to sing The National Anthem. As we lustily, but not tunefully, sang God Defend New Zealand, I avoided the thought that while pedants would point out that New Zealand had two…
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A book on the history of the Literary Fund raises broad questions of how our bureaucracy works. I was too closely involved with Elizabeth Caffin’s The Deepening Stream: A History of the New Zealand Literary Fund to review it. But it contributed to my understanding of some general issues; I think I am allowed to use the…
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The Ethnic Future for New Zealand Is Unknown. But It Will Be Diverse and Different The promise of increased future ethnic diversity is undoubtedly true, but often the statistical projections are both misleading and obscure the real issues. Each Population Census asks the respondents’ ethnicity. That is not their race, which is a genetic notion….
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The flag debate tells us something about the quality of design in New Zealand I am not going to tell you about the right choice for New Zealand’s flag. That would invalidate the point of the column. Certainly I shall vote for one; much of my response will be an instinctive opinion. What I shall…
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Arts and cultural policy seems to be going backward at the moment. Why? Does it matter? In his 1852 inaugural speech as Canterbury’s first superintendent, James Fitzgerald – later to be New Zealand’s first premier – said, ‘There is something to my mind awful in the prospect of the great mass of the community rapidly…
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