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Some of you may have seen the attempt by the National Party to set up a blog. Much to our surprise (not!) instead of being mentioned on our blog, there could easily have been a post about it on Fail Blog but there was one post that caught my eye. With my two passions being the arts and politics, it is often rare to find a post by anyone that contains the two issues. The Hon Christopher Finlayson wrote about the connection between the National Party and the arts community, a relationship that all but exists.
If you want to check out the post it is here, but I don’t want to spend too much time on it as it is about time that Labour’s contributions to the arts are recognised.
The Fifth Labour Government invested $90 Million into the industry within New Zealand and the boost that Mr. Finlayson talks about in his post can be attributed to down to this allocation of funds. We have seen as massive expansion in the film sector, but I think most importantly we have seen many events that have given the dance industry a stable base in New Zealand.
DANZ (Dance Aotearoa New Zealand) was set up in 1997 as a charitable trust, but since then has come forward in leaps and bounds and is now our leading dance organisation. Since 2005 DANZ has had NRO (National Recreation Organisation) status with SPARC, Sport & Recreation New Zealand, recognising DANZ as the peak body for leading the recreational dance sector. If we are to have any chance in catching up to the Arts in Aussie then we need to make sure that we don’t look past dance in New Zealand and I am proud that under Labour this never happened.
If we are looking at how we can create jobs, we need to look at the jobs we can create in the Arts industries as people will always watch movies whether it is a recession or not. It is people that produce shows and movies that have a lot of money in society and are ones that are not feeling the recession as hard as others. We can expand our film industry a lot more and that opens up dance, music and acting opportunities.
This is a very interesting topic and I hope that Labour take the step in proposing a strategy to the Government to ensure that we are growing arts for the benefit of all New Zealanders.
-Live Rouge
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