As part of a $175 million arts package, a new $7.5 million ‘Careers Support for Creative Jobseekers’ programme was announced today, building on ‘the most successful aspects’ of the former Pathways to Arts and Cultural Employment (Pace) programme, which ran from 2001-2012. Former Pace recipient Henry Oliver writes on what he learned on what became colloquially known as the ‘artist’s dole’.

I owe my career to Pace. Well, kind of.

In 2004, I was 22 with a fresh Bachelor of Arts. I’d known a BA wasn’t a path to steady employment but hadn’t anticipated that it could sometimes be antithetical to employment – it seemed like some recruiters of menial jobs didn’t want to hire people with degrees in things like philosophy and film studies. We were lazy, daydreamy, unreliable.

With no career opportunities, I enrolled to do a Masters in cultural studies (before it became a right-wing conspiracy theory), but two weeks before the semester started, was overcome with doubt and promptly quit. I joined a band called Die! Die! Die! and for the next three years, we played shows in every town in the country that would have us and eventually, tiny clubs and dive bars around the world.

The band wasn’t lazy, daydreamy or unreliable. From the beginning, we practised at least four days a week when we weren’t on tour. When we were, we did it relentlessly, playing everywhere we could, as many times as we could. Unlike other bands I’d been in, it wasn’t a hobby. It was fun, but it wasn’t for fun. It wasn’t a job because it didn’t pay. It was a vocation. And, in many ways, it was possible because of Pace.

I heard about Pace from other musicians. They called it the “artist’s benefit” or the “artist’s dole”. It was like a secret someone whispered in your ear, then you passed it on. I’d be told by my Winz case manager that they hadn’t heard of it or that it no longer existed. “You’ve got to get this guy,” someone told me, offering the name of an in-the-know case manager whose name I’ve long forgotten. “He’ll sort you out.”

After being transferred from the Queen St office to the Ponsonby office and getting a “good” case manager, getting on Pace was straightforward. Dealing with Winz, you have to know what you’re entitled to and ask for it relentlessly. You need a benefit mentor to tell you how it works and what you can get. And the privilege of thinking you deserve it. Die! Die! Die! toured so much, it was easy to show that we had a “pathway to arts and culture employment”. “We aren’t making enough to make a living now,” I’d tell my case manager, “but it can’t be long until we will be.” It wasn’t a lie so much as an over-indulgence of the naivety it can take to pursue a career in the arts.

Instead of the “Job Club” I had to attend on the regular dole – where we sat in a boardroom reading the classified and showing our supervisor the two jobs we would apply for that week – I’d sit in a room full of musicians and actors and painters, and one by one we’d talk about our opportunities and listen to someone talk about how to budget, how to make a basic sheet, how to find new opportunities, and how to “monetise” (the first time I heard that word) our creativity.

At the time, I thought it was all bullshit –  I just wanted to play aggressive music at horrifying volume. But being on Pace taught me how to make a living from my own creativity. It gave me the opportunity to do it with a $200-a-week safety net. It gave me time to learn about how to live on an intermittent income, about balancing work that pays well with work that provides creative opportunities. It taught me how to hustle, how to find and create opportunities, how to work hard and be dependable in an industry where many people don’t and aren’t.

When I quit the band, I thought I’d said goodbye to all that. I went back to university and became a lawyer. But after three years I was ready to give up on that too. I’d been freelance writing on the side and wanted to try to make a career of it. By then, Pace was over, but my time in the band provided a blueprint of how to do it – hustle, find and create opportunities, work hard and be dependable. And I’ve been able to make a living writing and editing until recently – when I was made redundant by Bauer Media, along with 236 other people.

When you’re living it, you quickly learn that without government support, New Zealand would barely have any artists who aren’t hobbyists. The market just can’t sustain it. But that’s true of a lot of things in New Zealand: film, television, even farms. So I’m glad that Pace is back, to give people the opportunity I had – to at least attempt to turn their creative or artistic aspirations into a sustainable career. I just hope you don’t need to know someone who knows someone to find out about it. And I hope it’s not only offered at Winz’s Ponsonby office.

The prime minister yesterday announced a package including $25m to ‘provide artists whose projects are funded by Creative NZ with jobs.’ An even more substantial investment in the creative arts will help drive our post-Covid recovery, argues Paul Millar.

When Covid-19 forced the postponement of the popular international literary festival WORD Christchurch, director Rachael King turned disappointment into an opportunity “to do something different” by focusing on New Zealand books and writers and giving them “the limelight they deserve”.

It was an astute move given the reported boom in post-lockdown sales of New Zealand books.  But then King – herself a talented novelist – does have experience in pivoting promptly in response to a crisis. Following Canterbury’s earthquakes she expanded WORD’s biennial festival into an ongoing events series that grows more dynamic year by year.

Many others also responded creatively to the earthquakes’ challenges. Gapfiller, Life in Vacant Spaces and the Festival of Transitional Architecture captured imaginations and instilled hope. The Christchurch Art Gallery, the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra and the Court Theatre proved equally flexible and inventive. As the then-director of the Christchurch Art Gallery Jenny Harper put it, “Art has shown itself to be nimble and agile and able to cement a feeling of regeneration.” Christchurch earned its place on Lonely Planet’s 2013 list of the world’s top 10 cities for its mix of “Kiwi inventiveness, creativity and resilience“.

That mix is also embedded in the city’s new Toi Ō Tautahi – Arts and Creativity Strategy, which sees the creative arts as being “about bringing wider benefits to the city—improving people’s wellbeing, sense of identity and connectivity, activating and bringing life to the city, attracting visitors and boosting the economy”. This strategy recognises “the role the arts and creative sector have and can play in healing, connecting communities and finding innovative solutions to a range of issues”.

There are excellent reasons to make this strategy, or something like it, Aotearoa New Zealand’s manifesto for creativity in the post-Covid world. The Ministry for Culture and Heritage reports that, “Economically, our cultural institutions, organisations, artists and creative minds make a significant contribution to our economy, with GDP of more than $11 billion before the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Susan Bidwell’s review of the international literature on “the arts in health” finds ample evidence “from both quantitative and qualitative studies that participating in creative arts can result in significant benefits to psychosocial health, including improved self-esteem, confidence, self-efficacy, improved social connections, and overall quality of life”. The historian and biographer Michael King wrote that “literature is one of the few things that makes sense of life, when life itself does not…. It is our writers more than anyone else who have been asking and answering questions about who we are and where we belong.”

Our children’s creativity is one of the first things we celebrate. The world must contain millions of scrapbooks of pre-school paintings collected by proud parents, and there are probably enough videos uploaded of children singing, dancing, acting and playing instruments to burn out a YouTube server farm. Some of these children go on to become students at the University of Canterbury’s Ilam School of Fine Arts and School of Music. Watching them grow as artists is tremendously rewarding, and a testament to the commitment of the academics training them. There are talented young artists like these right across the country.

Many will have something extra, not just talent, but originality, willpower, dedication, a tremendous capacity for hard work, and the courage to take risks. If they become successful artists they will have learned to be entrepreneurial, resilient, passionate, full of self-belief, and able to cope with disruption. They will persevere in the knowledge that success isn’t guaranteed, and that their next show might be their last. Their work will promote wellbeing, create a sense of community, contribute substantially to the economy, and, as a form of cultural capital, will have the capacity to enhance our reputation on the world stage.

Artists want to make art, so let’s imagine ways to move beyond the existing structures and support them to produce work that also aids our recovery and enhances our wellbeing. What if we funded the NZSO, or one of our other orchestras, to base itself in Queenstown for a month in the ski season, and marketed vacation packages that included excellent skiing, fine dining, spectacular scenery, and evening concerts by world-class performers? What if kapa haka groups, theatre companies, comedians, musicians, and dancers were funded to travel to every town and city in New Zealand, and take the best of our creative arts to the regions? What if, as our borders slowly open, we market high-end art tours through the nation, stopping at galleries and craft workshops big and small, with artist talks along the way?

What if artists were funded to give master classes, public talks, studio and gallery tours? What if film makers and creative writers were supported to find ways to tell our Covid stories, document our challenges and triumphs, help make sense of life in the era of the pandemic, and ask and answer questions about who we are and where we belong? Start-ups such as small artist-run galleries were an important part of Christchurch’s post-quake period of creativity, with University of Canterbury Fine Arts graduates involved in a number of ventures like the Dog Park Art Project Space. With Covid predicted to impact negatively on prospects for young people entering the workforce, would support for young artists to develop creative projects be a better option than expecting them to wait for work on a jobseekers benefit? These are some of the ways we might further leverage the immense taonga that is our creative arts sector to drive recovery while supporting artists.

I am heartened that the creative arts is an area where central government has indicated a determination to lead. The support package in the 2020 budget is so the arts can “focus on the recovery, regeneration and revitalisation of the cultural sector”. The rationale for such a focus is encouraging: “The arts, heritage and cultural sector is central to the nation’s recovery and will underpin the new post Covid-19 world providing us with a legacy of stories for our future. This sector supports and reflects who we are as New Zealanders, binds communities together and brings our stories to the New Zealand and world stage.”

It is also heartening that the minister for arts, culture and heritage is the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, supported by ministers Grant Robertson and Carmel Sepuloni. It has always been the case that meaningful support for the arts in New Zealand has depended on a few rare politicians with vision and mana. After the second world war, as part of the country’s healing, Labour prime minister Peter Fraser personally oversaw the establishment of the National Orchestra, which became the NZSO, and established the New Zealand Literary Fund. In the 1970s National MP Allan Highet, our first Minister for the Arts, founded the National Youth Orchestra and the New Zealand Film Commission and actively supported the Symphony Orchestra, the Royal New Zealand Ballet, and the Arts Council.

I feel confident that with visionary investment our artists and creative industries can play a leading role in hastening our recovery, economically, socially and culturally. But for that support to be meaningful, I think it needs to build upon the just-announced funding to help the arts “get back on their feet”, with a focus on the sorts of innovation I’ve outlined above. I’d hope that such investment would be widely and evenly distributed, with every region benefitting, given that all parts of Aotearoa New Zealand have produced great artists (our Booker Prize winners, Keri Hulme and Eleanor Catton, come from the South Island).

The international impact of artists like Kiri Te Kanawa, Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, Alan Duff, Keri Hulme and Taika Waititi is all the argument needed to support even more robust investment in Māori artists. I hope the substantial impact of Pasifika artists – from Albert Wendt to Tusiata Avia, from the Naked Samoans to Fafswag, from John Puhiatau Pule to Louisa Humphrey and Kaetaeta Watson – means that in future rounds Minister Sepuloni continues to be given a strong say in allocating the budget.

But we shouldn’t assume that funding the creative sector is only the province of Culture and Heritage. Given this is an area where a little investment can reap significant returns, with an overall impact greater than some large primary industries, I would expect that the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment is also looking very carefully at ways to incentivise creative activity. Peter Jackson and Weta Workshops have shown it is possible to take something small and local and scale it up to match the best in the world.

A 2015 PWC report on the creative industries for We Create estimated the total economic impact of the music, book publishing, film and television and games industries to be $3,848 million and over 40,000 jobs – all this alongside the value of selling the Aotearoa New Zealand story overseas, especially now when the eyes of the world are on us and our response to Covid.

What about a funding scheme to incentivise getting even more creative minds – artists, composers, designers and writers – involved in businesses, or at the beginning of major new projects, particularly those underpinning our necessary move to a green and more sustainable economy? Such minds might provide a range of different perspectives and new innovative ideas for solving social, economic and planning issues, all the while telling our stories and promoting us internationally. Fostering creativity is vital for keeping pace with the changing nature of work. The Oxford Martin School, in a major study into the impacts of technology on future employment, concluded that ‘creative and social intelligence’ will be requirements for success in a rapidly automating workplace.

The remarkable and difficult weeks we are sharing in Aotearoa have taught us that for all our diversity, and despite our differences, we can unite in the face of crisis to achieve something that has made us “the envy of many nations”. But does this unity end as we move down the levels? Do we return to the status quo of work, consumption, commuting and worry as we recover, or do we feel more confident that we have it in our power to do some things better? As we enter the next stage on our Covid journey, and work towards a recovery that benefits everyone, we must not forget the importance of the creative arts.

Our greatest author, Katherine Mansfield, wrote: “Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.” Perhaps her words also need incorporating into our post-Covid manifesto. It’s not a case of “could we do it?” – by quashing a virus that’s leaving many nations struggling, we have once again demonstrated our country’s capacity for imaginative and visionary powers that more inert countries lack. We should trust and believe in that same imagination and vision when we come to recognising the power of our creative and innovative arts to help transform Aotearoa New Zealand.