What the bloody hell were the Ministry of Culture thinking when they allowed Fairfax to cut costs and send hundreds of our precious photos to America???
Fairfax’s photo nightmare: I told you so
Fairfax Media’s decision to ship up to eight million historic New Zealand news photographs and negatives to Little Rock, Arkansas, for “digitising” has proved perilous. Two years on, the digital archiving is yet to be completed, an unknown number of the photographs have turned up on eBay.com for sale and Rogers Photo Archive (RPA), the company involved, is now in receivership facing at least 10 lawsuits totalling more than $94 million.
Fairfax Media has gone to court to recover the archives – which also include the photographic records of the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, and other Australian publications. Observing from the sidelines is the Ministry of Culture and Heritage which allowed the export of this taonga, even though, under the Protected Objects Act, it had the power to refuse the export of photos more than 50 years old.
This follows a decision by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage to enforce upon Kordia – the Government owned transmission company – not to consider social and cultural issues when setting the prices for TV frequencies so that when the analogue switch off occurred many regional TV stations simply closed down.
The silence from the Ministry over the killing off of public broadcasting is another sin they need to add to their list of hate crimes against NZ culture and heritage.
By destroying our culture and heritage, The Ministry under National have more in common with ISIS than a department set upon preserving and expanding our culture.
The are serious questions that need to be asked about this Ministry
What is the point in a Heritage Covenant if know one obeys it or enforces it?
Well, when your notion of a great nation is the cultureless wasteland of the USA, where public education is disembowelled and the only college degrees regarded as being worth a damn are business and law… (and yes, I’m talking to you Key and Joyce), is anyone really surprised?
Fuck poetry. Fuck art. Fuck theatre. Oh, and fuck history too. God knows we’ve obviously not learned anything from that particular font of knowledge, right John?
So stop moaning, peasants! Eat your fucking Happy Meal and watch another episode of X-Factor! It’s all you deserve, you mewling peons!
It always comes down to saving a buck – they call that “false economy”
New Zealand has become really good at this over the past 30 years. No one seems to understand that the cheapest deal is not (hardly ever) the best deal.
But New Zealanders are possibly the most tight bottomed nation in the world. They will spend $100 on petrol to reach a Pack n Sav that saves them $10.
I agree with much of what you’ve said, but your example of $100 of petrol, to save $10 at the supermarket is far fetched. If they spent $100 soley on a round trip to the supermarket.
Taking petrol at $2.129 per litre (for the most expensive petrol – highest octane available, from the most expensive petrol station), you get near enough to 47 litres as makes no odds. If we then pick a pretty poor number for fuel efficiency of 9.4 litres/100km, that is still around 500km round trip. I doubt many people travel that far to get to any supermarket, and if they do, it isn’t to save $10.
Cultural cleansing comes to mind here!
cultural desecration and dehumanisation was also a feature of Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia .. and the Chinese Cultural revolution…it is a way of homogenising a society and rendering it ripe for oppression and exploitation and worse….just as rapists and war crimes often involve the turning of victims or a culture into objects and caricatures …in order to destroy their humanity and value ….and then abuse and violate them…and attempt to destroy them
makes you wonder what this government has planned for New Zealand….if it is setting about destroying New Zealand’s cultural heritage
…note also that Te Papa will no longer be publishing books on New Zealand’s heritage….this is despite recent awards for its heritage and history publications
All the resources and knowledge of digital archivists that already work within the Culture and Heritage umbrella (TVNZ archivists and Nation Library archivists to name but 2) but “oh god no!” we have to have a contractor – and a foreign one to boot! And it’s a big fat cock-up!!
Once and for all, you bloody libertarian, neoliberal, freemarketeers – private enterprise can NOT do it BETTER!!!!
AND it’s a f*cking insult to the public SERVANTS who are able to do the bloody job with competence but instead get made redundant because of said outsourcing (note: not ‘bureaucrats’ – who seem to consist of the bloody lot who’re crapping on said sevants)
Just watched this awesome movie ‘The Yes Men Fix The World’ which uses real-time satire to get the real message out there. It was really brilliant. I can’t wait to see the next one ‘The Yes Men are Revolting.’
https://youtu.be/OazUh0Ym8rc
Watched that a while ago, and have a couple of the copies of the spoof New York Times that they produced.
Heartening to watch.
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