I wonder where ACT get their ideas from?

part 1 - part 2 to follow soon

And here we go again.

More ACTion in my life.

As you may know ACT have been on my back (eew, sorry, nasty image) for the last couple of years. This week they have been moaning about my receiving the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry and CNZ Senior Pacific Artist Award. And threatening Creative NZ for giving me those awards. I guess ACT are in good company with another political party, back in the day, who made threats against art and free speech.

Will ACT also have an art bonfire? Will they also pour petrol over all 25 years of my work: my books, my short films, my creative non-fiction, the anthologies and literary journals I’m published in, the radio doco, the poem in the Met Museum in New York, the whole cast and crew of my two plays and all the students whose minds I’ve poisoned (while teaching them creative writing)? And to make good on ACT’s threat, perhaps the whole of Creative NZ and arts funding in general should probably go on the pile of kindling too.

Let’s all stand round and listen to the screaming.

Is it just my work bound for the fire, or will other artists be roasted like evil marshmallows for their artistic freedom of speech too?

ACT has an interesting Orwellian 1984 doublethink thing going on; an extraordinary ability to defend free speech, make it a cornerstone of their political belief system - and at the same time - criticise and threaten artistic free speech. It’s clever; a bit like being able to talk out of two sides of your mouth at once. It’s special.

There are loads of artists who come under the category of ‘sick, sick notorious racists’ like I do: all of us who make art about colonisation, racism, white privilege or any number of things ACT do not approve artistic discussion of.

Playwright and screenwriter, Victor Rodger - sorry, but that’s you on the bonfire. Goodness knows how you’ve been getting away with it all these years. All those sick, sick plays of yours and your recent Arts Laureate to boot - immediately up in flames! I can think of a whole many-carriaged train full of Maori and Pacific artists and many of our other artist sisters, brothers and siblings from all across the motu whose work should be lined up for a fiery execution.

This is the end result of the kind of censorship ACT is slow-jamming with at the moment. There was a time when exactly what I’m (not) joking about here happened:

“Degenerate Art was the title of a 1937 exhibition held by the Nazis in Munich, consisting of 650 modernist artworks that the Nazis had taken from museums … Designed to inflame public opinion… Similar restrictions were placed upon music... Films and plays were also censored.^{” (Wikipedia)}

I wonder where ACT get their ideas from?