CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON (National) : National will support the first reading of the Public Lending Right for New Zealand Authors Bill and its referral to the Government Administration Committee. The bill does, however, require a great deal of work, and I will touch on that in the course of my speech. We have heard from the Associate Minister this afternoon the official history of the Authors’ Fund since, say, 1973, but I want to give members the real history—the real oil.
National recognises the huge contribution of authors to New Zealand’s culture. Indeed, it is fair to say that in the last 20 or 30 years there has been a real explosion in all types of writing, and this bill represents one way in which that magnificent contribution can be recognised. It is fair, as we finally get to talk about the public lending right in this House, that I recognise some great writers and some great New Zealand authors, like Dame Fiona Kidman, who is a wonderful New Zealand writer, and Owen Marshall, who is our greatest short story writer. I mention those writers because they both served on the Arts Board of Creative New Zealand with me and made a huge contribution in their 3-year terms. Karl Stead is another one who has made a great contribution to New Zealand literature. He too served for a very brief time on the Arts Council, but he resigned in disgust after one meeting because of the state of the Authors’ Fund. I will also mention good old Tony Simpson, who works for the Minister of Agriculture, and Philip Temple, who worked long and hard to see the establishment of the public lending right in New Zealand.
I also recognise some great historians. I particularly want to mention Dr Barry Gustafson, who was once a member of the Labour Party, but saw the light. He stood for us in Birkenhead in 1987 and is the author of a wonderful book on New Zealand’s great former Prime Minister Sir Keith Holyoake. It would be inappropriate to go through some of the great writers without mentioning New Zealand’s pre-eminent historian Dr Michael Bassett, who has just published an outstanding book on the Lange years. As Mr Groser and I were sitting and contemplating this issue before I was called to speak, I was wondering who this Government’s Michael Bassett will be. Who will tell the real story of the Clark Government?
Hone Harawira: Shane Jones.
CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON: I initially thought that it would be Mr Maharey, but then I do not think he would be an appropriate choice because he specialises in polysyllabic sociological claptrap, and anything he would write would be unreadable. I agree with Mr Harawira. Mr Groser and I reached the conclusion that it would have to be Shane “I am surprised I am not the leader yet” Jones, because we think that Mr Jones will tell the story.
The starting point for a discussion about the public lending right is former Prime Minister Norman Kirk, who introduced the Authors’ Fund by Cabinet minute in 1973. Norm was an odd mixture. Apparently when he was Prime Minister he used to shoot at pigeons from his third-floor office. But that marks a great contrast with New Zealand’s very own Senator Joe McCarthy—the current Prime Minister. Norm shot at pigeons, but, as we know from yesterday’s question time, the Prime Minister prefers to shoot herself in the foot.
Initially, the Authors’ Fund was administered by the Department of Internal Affairs, then it was transferred to the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council, and then over to Creative New Zealand when that body was formed in 1994. The Authors’ Fund should never have been administered by Creative New Zealand, because it is anomalous for a grants funding agency to administer that kind of fund. Moreover, it is fair to say that the Society of Authors used to get very annoyed with Creative New Zealand because the administration of the fund was messed up more often than not.
The next stage in the narrative is to talk about a person of whom everyone in this House is, or should be, fond: me. I was chair of the Arts Board in 1998, and I used to dread my meetings with the Society of Authors, because all its members would ever do was to complain about the Authors’ Fund and that Creative New Zealand had never administered it properly.
Hon Shane Jones: You gave them great cause to complain.
CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON: So I commissioned a report, I say to Mr Jones, into whether New Zealand needed to have special legislation—whether we needed to have a public lending right Act. That report was completed towards the end of the 1990s by Geoff McLay, who is now an associate professor of law at Victoria University. Geoff McLay is a very fine copyright lawyer; he is probably New Zealand’s leading intellectual property academic. Indeed, he is the co-author of the leading text on the subject. Mr McLay reported to Creative New Zealand and recommended, among other things, that New Zealand follow both the United Kingdom and Australia in recognising the public lending right in a separate statute. That comprehensive report made a number of detailed recommendations on a variety of subjects related to public lending rights.
Labour has been lobbied hard by authors, because its 1999 manifesto promised there would be an overhaul of the Authors’ Fund. But nothing happened. Like many of Labour’s promises to the arts community, it was all show and no substance. The Prime Minister has always used the arts to promote herself. She is renowned for turning up at functions, giving a quick speech, and then leaving. One of her more notorious recent performances was at the music awards. But she has been hopeless when it comes to the policy detail, and that is why so many areas of the arts require comprehensive reform. They have been neglected for far too long.
Nothing happened regarding the Authors’ Fund for years. Then, after I came into Parliament in 2005, I thought it would be a good idea to have a regular round-table meeting with representatives of the New Zealand Society of Authors. That turned into an excellent opportunity for an inter-party dialogue with authors on issues of interest. I note Ms Kedgley is in the House, and she is a member who has appeared at meetings. Tony Simpson, representing the Progressive party, has appeared, as has the Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, Judith Tizard, and indeed Mr Hide, the ACT member, turned up last year, as well. I always recall the first time the Associate Minister turned up at one of those meetings. She was very dismissive about public lending right legislation and when someone asked her a question about the statutory recognition of the Authors’ Fund, she snapped at that person that there was no point because it was all covered by section 31 of the Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa Act. But if she had bothered to read the McLay report on the adequacy of section 31, she would have learnt that we had slipped behind the United Kingdom and Australia—the countries to which New Zealand can be most compared.
So why is there legislation at this time? The answer is that when nothing has been done for 8 years, after promises to do something were made in 1999, and when one knows that authors are particularly annoyed and that the Opposition spokesperson on the arts has a particular interest in the subject, something needs to be done very quickly. So all of a sudden we found that the Labour Government had rediscovered the public lending right and had become interested in this issue.
This bill is the fruit of all its hard work. We have only to look at clause 10 to see that the work is inadequate and probably breaches the Legislation Advisory Committee guidelines on primary and delegated legislation. Indeed, clause 10 is one of the laziest clauses I have ever seen in any legislation.
Dail Jones: Appalling!
CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON: I hope that Mr Dail Jones will be making a contribution, because he will agree with me that to leave all the key questions to be answered by clause 10 is simply unbelievable. Those matters should not be dealt with by regulation. Labour cannot even define an author or a book. What a lazy piece of work this bill is! It is an insult to our talented and hard-working literary community. After 8 years authors deserved something better than this bill. The resale royalties legislation is misconceived, but at least there is some detail in it. This bill is a disgrace in terms of lawmaking and, as I said, I think the literary community deserves a much better piece of work than this.
I am pleased that finally we have had the bare bones of public lending right legislation introduced into this House. I very much hope that I will be able to play some part on the Government Administration Committee in considering the bill, because the subject has been of personal interest to me for many years. But there is a lot of work to be done if we are to knock this legislation into shape for the literary community.
