About fucking time…
PM Jacinda Ardern says funding for school Shakespeare festival to continue
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says funding for a school Shakespeare programme will continue, stepping in after Creative New Zealand declined it.
Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand’s application for $31,000 was declined by Creative New Zealand, which said “the proposal did not demonstrate the relevance to the contemporary art context of Aotearoa in this time and place and landscape.”
The centre is behind the annual Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival, where high schools around Aotearoa perform scenes from the Bard’s plays.
Some 120,000 students have performed in the festival since 1991.
Creative New Zealand’s decision led to accusations it was trying to “cancel” Shakespeare, though it said other proposals simply aligned better with its priorities.
Ardern had previously said she disagreed with Creative New Zealand’s decision, telling Morning Reportshe was not one of the decision-makers at the independent funding agency and would not always agree with all the decisions.
She revealed today she was committed to making sure the programme continued, and acknowledged the significant level of interest in the saga.
…this entire fucking fiasco has highlighted just how bad Labour’s political management has become.
This story was out Friday, it’s taken Tuesday for the Prime Minister to cauterise it, but it should never have gotten this far, because her Office should have fucking moved on this Friday morning and have the solution done and dusted by Friday afternoon so that it didn’t mutate into the culture war ammunition that it became.
The PMs Office failed the PM by not having their radar on and seeing what this could become.
They did not comprehend how this could twist because they are too far inside the safe bubble world of Wellington.
Somebody should be sacked for allowing this to get this far!
If you can’t see how cancelling Shakespeare for crimes against wokeness would go down in the general public, you probably shouldn’t be advising the PM eh?
Creative NZ needs to have the snot smashed out of them for creating this ticking time bomb in the first place and the PMs Office need a reshuffle and requires some head kickers for the election.
This should never have been allowed to become what it was, it feels like the PMs Office is tired and in desperate need of new blood and energy.
This should have been a flashing red warning sign rather than ignored because the issue was stupid The PMs Office didn’t bother doing anything about it because their superiority complex blinded them to the threats of cancel culture.
That level of elitism needs to be dumped or we will lose 2023.
Fucking morons!
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If she was smart she would have also announced that in the 2023 Budget 31K of funding would be removed from Creative NZ’s budget and transferred to Education.
It is simply moving numbers around but sends a direct message to Creative NZ but also to those who are growing fed up with this wokeness that the Government will act directly against it.
Yup a back down on this one but unless there is meaningful change made this is just one hole plugged in a dike that is now leaking like a sieve . .
The left have already lost 2023 – what remains is by how much and whether Ardern is at the helm.
What best can we hope for? FtT you may be right but surely you wouldn’t get pleasure from it happening as you suggest, because I can only see pain afterwards and I’m not into sadism or self-flagellation. Think up a better scenario will you, and put your agile mind to working out how it might be achieved. God I need a lift in spirits, can you do it?
Greywarbler Can I respectfully suggest listening to the overtures to Wagner’s ‘Mastersingers of Nuremberg ‘ and lovely ‘ Parsifal’, Vaughan Williams ‘ Lark Asending’, and helpful Berocccas are currently on special at NWS. Marama may even do a plug for them, waving tubefuls in front of the Beehive, time and hair permitting. The Shakespeare debacle was something we didn’t need, but at least it has highlighted nasty undercurrents which could have simmered away unnoticed. Kia kaha.
Snow White: “Vaughan Williams ‘ Lark Asending'”
Somebody I know of had that played at their funeral. Somebody else told me that they want “Song to the Moon” from “Roussalka” played at their funeral. Personally, I favour the last duet in Monteverdi’s “Il Ritorno…” where Penelope finally recognises Ulysses: “or si, or si, tu reconosco…” Sublime music.
Read somewhere that Nicola Benedetti was advised to watch larks in flight, so she’d know how to play that piece. I remember the larks on the Taranaki farms of my childhood: they don’t fly straight up, but in an ascending spiral, more or less. Hence the way Vaughan Williams wrote the music.
D’ Esterre. My funeral has the poem, “ Trees “ sung by the utterly glorious Paul Robeson. But that is cultural appropriation, and the whanau could be compromised, even though, if my memory serves me correctly, Robeson himself was hounded out of the USA by the dogs of MCCarthyism now being emulated by the Arts Council of New Zealand.
Guess I could settle for “ The Best Things in Life are Free “ sung by transgender mulattos to be on the safe side.
“ Roussalka” is ethereal (like the Overture to “ Parsifal “) but it’s lovely exponent the inimitable Anna Netrebko has declined to disavow Putin, so I must tread politically carefully here, and in any case I do not want a funeral. I may just pop off and ascend whirling straight up to heaven like an old lark…
Snow White: “…Robeson himself was hounded out of the USA by the dogs of MCCarthyism…”
He was. Segregation prevented him giving concerts, as I recall. And he was subsequently welcomed in the USSR, which endorsed his performing, and made much of the fact that he’d been effectively persecuted out of the US.
When I was very young, the nuns told us about it. I think they were opposed to the Jim Crow stuff that still applied in southern US at that time. They were anti-communist, of course, and I think they were shocked that the hated Communists could display such acceptance.
In my view, if you’re to have a funeral (I don’t want one, but offspring say that I don’t get to choose, cos I’ll be dead), have any singer (or poetry) you like, no matter their political views, acceptability or extra-curricular behaviour. What’s important is the quality of their composition/performance, and your own preferences. Bugger what the young think: what the hell would they know?
I surely don’t want a Mickey-Drip funeral, but I won’t get to choose that either…
Sorry – the black swans are ready to enter the lake and all the poor decisions of the last 40 years are going the haunt us for largely a decade. There are positives though:
1). The advent of a sustained and deep recession will likely kill Wokeborg as people will have more pressing needs such as food, clothing and shelter.
2). Both governments and corporates will be forced to shed non essential jobs such as diversity officers, change managers and customer insights analysts.
3). Products will need to be re-designed to be higher quality and more durable. That will become a better selling point than the “bells and whistles”.
4). People might finally wake up to the con-job the WEF,UN, Corporates are foisting upon the world and we might see a few wealthy people fed to the masses.
5). Trump or a surrogate will win in 2024. This action will begin the great unravelling of neo-socialism/liberalism as the middle class look to an alternative political system that doesn’t weaken their position.
So some light at the end of the tunnel.
Greywarbler: ” I can only see pain afterwards…”
Isn’t pain what we’ve had since 2017? Things surely have got a lot worse, especially for the poorest. This lot takes the cake for sheer, blinding incompetence, with a side order of egregious wokery.
Roll on the next election.
The PMs office is being advised by Neal Jones and Clint Smith. So its unsurprising they dont have their blinkers off. If your main “pulse on the nation” is twitter, then you shouldn’t be advising the Pms office
Wellington is different, let’s be honest The fact they went against the grain and voted woke for mayor kind of states why Labours advisers missed it. They probably thought cancelling Shakespeare as “progressive”!
OMG the sky’s falling!!
For god sake listen to some of the comments. The PM should have instantly reacted to a 30k decision for some theatre sport event! It wasn’t about a decision to stop teaching Shakespeare in schools or even stopping the event going ahead either, but some wanker nobody makes some stupid remarks and Ardern should have dropped everything and reversed an independent decision. This sort of pearl clutching is ridiculous.
Wheel. “ Some wanker nobody makes some stupid remarks “. Correct. And I want those stupid remarks explained. Never underestimate the power of the stupid and the damage which they can cause.
In this case the nobodies demonstrated their ignorance of a literary giant and perversely used this ignorance to make ridiculous unsubstantiated claims against him, positing New Zealand Maori as the victims of William Shakespeare.
This leads us into insane territory where any criticism can be dismissed as racism when they in fact are the racists, and the victim is an ancient culture from which they cherry-pick to suit themselves.
I don’t care if they make us look like barbarians to the rest of the civilised world, but I do care that European culture and its associated values are being dismantled piece by piece, for reasons that are far from transparent. The PM’s stepping in where she says she doesn’t gives her another undeserved opportunity to look good to both the bemused and the distressed, and frankly I don’t really care about that either, the bigger picture is more ominous.
And a component of this ‘bigger picture’ is that we have NZ European kids having ‘Maori assimilation’ forced upon them in schools (I have 6 kids at either primary or secondary school) while on the other hand Northland artist Lester Hall has be forced to call it quits due harassment from Maori for using ‘Maori influences’ in his works . .
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/northland-artist-lester-hall-calls-it-quits-after-sustained-and-nasty-attacks/GO6S63ZY7VZLV2PVJ5TCL5WCYI/
James+Brown. What’s going on in the contemporary culture of education is more than ethnicity issues. Pre-schoolers are taught to reference their vulvas, so that they will know the correct terminology to use if they’re fiddled with. Primary schoolers are encouraged to explore their gender identification to help stop them becoming confused about it. Third form mums are being admonished by their daughters for not being sufficiently gender fluid. It’s seems extreme, and it is being pushed by the department now inexplicably replacing the unblemished office of the much- needed Commissioner for Children.
The experience of the Auckland artist shows that racial prejudice is an unsealed two-way street. I expect they’ll be making bonfires of James Baxter’s books next, Pakeha, poet, with more noble ancestors than many, imbued with Maori culture and immersed in the spirituality which prevailed, during his time, if not now.
The really really dumb thing is that inflicting an unpopular culture war on the population going in to an election year where the woke left is at reasonable odds to lose, is going to result in, in physics terms, “an equal and opposite reaction” from the incoming government, where the public now cheer on a proper clean out of the “Public” Service for proving what the right told us all along: woke bureaucrats are the enemy of the public, not their friends.
Ooooh, they don’t like it when they are called Taliban. Much whining in the marsh. And everyone is racist too. So there.
This Shakespeare fiasco has highlighted the entrenched racism and discrimination in our country.
Creative NZ is now saying in the media that they are shocked by the racist emails they have had about this issue.
They can’t see their role in triggering this response. Most people don’t like the idea of something being cancelled because of the need to decolonize. Do they not realize that this political purification of the arts generates the backlash? And should public servants be talking to the media about the correspondence they receive.
This stuff will lose labour the election and rightly so
Jacinda is a Minister of the Arts, Culture and Heritage Portfolio – so really no excuses.
A second point I would make is that transfering the cost to Education is not
addressing the ethical problems within the arts funding structure.
Or are we to accept Arts, Culture and Heritage funding based on racial criteria?
Good hope labour keeps Doing dumb fuck stuff like this, get these dumb dogs the hell out.
Go Shakespeare. Long may his poems and plays reign supreme throughout the world.
I am of the left persuasion, however a bit lost about “NZ decolonisation,” something which I have only heard about recently and question its purpose for NZ’s future.
Cancel culture, woke culture, its just censorship, with its underlying aim being to stop the people from speaking out against government actions. On the surface, this palarva looks like it is directed at, this, that and the other, but its ultimate aim is stop criticism of government actions.
I don’t agree that it is a Labour problem. CNZ is autonomous and governmental influence would be limited. The people in CNZ have to go. The bizarre decision to employ a radical Māori academic who by nature is anti-Shakespeare as an advisor should be lambasted. This academic should have no influence on CNZ as I suggest it is a conflict of interest.
Cantabrian. But surely the decision to employ a radical Maori academic by nature anti-Shakespeare is what Ardern meant by saying that her government would be transparent in what they’re doing ?
It’s a Maori V Everyone Else thang. Don’t think that the fact that all the Arts Laureates this year were all Maori , including c-grade dauber Tame Iti, has gone unoticed. Chosen by an almost all Maori panel.
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