There are two easy ways to get rich: find one very wealthy sucker or find a million very poor suckers. As a public, it’s our duty to make sure we don’t become the million poor suckers, argues Dan Taipua.

A wealth of public buildings, a poverty of millionaire developers

In the theatre of my mind, I stand on top of the St James complex with a cricket ball in my hand. From this position I can throw that cricket ball and hit the Auckland Town Hall, Civic Theatre, Q Theatre, Aotea Centre (Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre and Herald Theatre), the Basement Theatre if the ball rolls for a bit and the Auckland Art Gallery with some effort for an uphill trajectory.

Publicly controlled buildings, restored and maintained for the public good.

Meanwhile, in the theatre of public relations, the privately-owned St James is seeking no less than $30m for renovation. An investment of funds drawn directly from Aucklanders who do not own that building.

We who support the arts (and I do support the arts) will cry, “we must support the arts!”, while several existing and healthy performing venues are less than 100m from the St James’s front door. Supporters of colonial style architecture will cry, “we must support colonial style architecture!”, while the Auckland Town Hall and the beautifully-renovated Auckland Art Gallery lie in that same 100 metre radius, and a fully-restored Civic Theatre with its beautiful Orientalisms is literally across the road.

How to escape a gaping hole of sunk financial costs: Dig upwards!

I’m not an expert on the structural condition of the St James complex, but I’m familiar with the building as I worked inside the venue up until the time it caught on fire (the first of two times) in 2007. I was working on the fated night a chunk of the building simply fell from the upper levels and injured a concert-goer.

Like most punters, I enjoyed the concert experience the theatre offered and the almost-stately decor of the lobby and mezzanine areas. As a worker, though, I also saw the derelict state of the Odeon and Regent theatres, which are attached to the building but almost never mentioned in subsidy-seeking press releases. I’ve been into the basements of the complex and the backstages and the roofing and walls and in-betweens. Those spaces were a wreck 15 years ago, and it’s difficult to see how two internal fires and general decay would have improved their state.

All this is to say that lovely memories of the concert theatre, which you’ll recall you’ve only seen in the dark, betray the actual condition of the site. In my opinion, there is no way on earth that $30m will cover the costs of its repair, not even close. But once the public has committed that massive amount and it peters out, what will we do with an unfinished theatre? We know the answer is that the public will burden future costs.

The public good demands public control

Most people would see the tangible value in creating $30m worth of cycle lanes, even if they didn’t believe those lanes were a priority. Almost no one would see the value in handing me $30m to pave my own driveway, even if I promised it would offer emerging cyclists a world-class venue on which they could pedal about, creating a dynamic sense of community and fulfilling climate change goals eke noa etc. It’s still my driveway, and your $30m, no matter the claims I make about its lofty and indeterminate future uses. I will also be charging the same members of the public for tickets and booking fees, much like a theatre or concert.

The current proposition that the St James should receive funds from both local and central government is a complete reversal of how we should understand the arts and public/private support. There is a long tradition of benefaction supporting Auckland arts. Our gallery carries the names of many wealthy donors who decided to give something back. We also have an equally long tradition of the public bailing out failed commercial enterprises, resulting in a net loss of both public funds and art.

Recently the Bank of New Zealand auctioned off the most significant collection of NZ art in our collective history, with none of that art or money flowing back to the public. The deep, stinging, infuriating irony is that New Zealanders bailed out BNZ to the tune $1b in the 1990s.

Fool us once, shame on us. Fool us twice, shame on us again.