Posts by Caleb D'Anvers
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I think we can have an interesting conversation about why and in what contexts artistic and theatrical communities develop in particular cities. In Christchurch, you had the sheer force of will of Ngaio Marsh, and the work of the Canterbury University Theatre Dept. (which the the University now wants to close down). In Auckland, I guess, you have a different set of social and economic contexts at work.
But anyone arguing that National gutting the public sector (yet again!) won't have a detrimental effect on Wellington's cultural and economic well-being is being willfully obtuse. According to the Dom Post today, Key's talking about a wage 'saving' of $500,000,000 over three years. That's thousands of jobs, gone. People need to start actually thinking about what's going to happen next year.
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A close relative of mine was high-up in the State Services Commission during the '90s. Her politics were Thatcherite -- I remember there being lots of ACT Party literature around her house -- but by the end of the decade she had become thoroughly disillusioned and was reading John Ralston Saul.
As she saw it, the SSC's role had become purely destructive. Its sole purpose seemed to be administering an endless series of reviews and cutbacks for Government entities. It was a kind of vindictive game -- seeing how many staff you could get rid of and how much budget you could cut while the body remained alive. Outside the SSC and Treasury, the public sector was essentially on life-support by '99, and no wonder.
Anyone who wonders why there's been an increase in state-sector staffing under Labour has presumably forgotten those years. There were as few public servants in 1999 as there had been at any time since the end of the Second World War. Far too few, in fact, to do the work they were charged with.
The idea that people are actually prepared to go back there just makes me sick. It's fuelled, as far as I can see, largely by anti-intellectual resentment. And, if it's carried through, it will kill Wellington as decent place to live. A lot of my friends -- hardworking, highly educated, extremely smart -- work in the State sector. They're the kind of people that, in the '90s, would have been forced into the more-or-less permanent exile of London or Edinburgh or Melbourne. (And perhaps will be again, come 2009 ...) These are the people who go to gigs and plays and support the galleries. Drive them out of central Wellington, and you'd be left with a very different -- and much less interesting -- place.