By Janet McAllister from the NZ Hearld, 19 February 2011 www.nzhearld.co.nz
Want to know something the Government doesn’t want you to know? National is quietly reneging on its 2008 election promise to maintain a successful business training scheme for people on the dole. How surprising: one would think they would champion a scheme that is proven to turn beneficiaries into business owners, creating jobs for themselves and potentially others. Particularly in a time of high unemployment.
Could the problem be that the scheme in question, Pathways to Arts and Cultural Employment (Pace), is aimed at the creative industries? That for all our celebrated film and fashion success, creative businesses are still not taken seriously as money earners by the Government? No, that can’t be right’ John Key would have turned away Warner Bros quick smart if so.
Let us be clear here: Pace is not designed to support painters starving in garrets while they turn out what might be their masterpieces. Instead people including experienced web designers, graphic artists, curators, musicians, actors, film editors, advertising creatives and, yes, even journalists, attend several intensive fulltime business planning courses during the time they are assigned to the scheme (now six months, whittled down from a year). Over the past year, Pace participants in Auckland have found work as television production assistants, freelance clothing designers, camera operators, industrial product developers and so on.
Yet, according to Minister for Social Development Paula Bennett, Pace participants are “turning down available work to follow an artistic dream” and “now is not the time” to be doing that. I’ve never heard journalism called an “artistic dream” before, so I’m chuffed. Cheers, Paula!
School leavers, take note: the Government doesn’t want you applying for any of its funded design or writing courses, let alone its performance or art schools. Those things only foster artistic dreams – read: unrealistic luxuries. Skip those three to six years of tertiary study and go directly to your local supermarket applying for “available work” instead.
For – and again, I quote reports of Ms Bennett – people on “welfare” should “get a job – any job – because that’s the first step to a better job”
Is house cleaning the first step to a solicitor’s practice for an unemployed lawyer? As Jacinda Ardern, Labour’s spokeswoman for employment points out, “It will be a waste for everyone if someone with skills ends up in an unskilled job that someone else might need.”
Pace participants work in a large sector, a sector which NZ Trade and Enterprise still lists as a “growth” industry, and where freelancing is often the norm.
With a few business skills, the potential for self-employment is enormous.
A musician on Pace might be encouraged to teach guitar while the client base for their recording studio builds up: an actor might decide to look for regular singing gigs in between television work.
Pace doesn’t suit all artists – some are happier with part-time jobs which are completely different from the art practice, harbouring their creative energies for their own visions, not their clients’.
The scheme’s goals are not artistic but economic: participants are taught how to identify, market and exploit money=making potential within their creative skill sets. But, like a good employee being performance-managed out of a job because secretly her manager doesn’t like her mismatched earrings, time is running out for Pace. According to media reports, Pace courses could once be found in 13 centres, but are now only offered in Auckland, Hamilton and Dunedin.
The scheme started in 2001; two years later, it had 2027 members and 1200 former participants were working in the creative industries.
Last September, participant numbers had dwindled to 376. But while participants have decreased by over 80 per cent, the scheme’s cost has decreased by only 40 per cent, from 1.1 million in 2003 to a projected $660,000 this year. Thus, the scheme gives far less value for money now than before the Government’s deliberate neglect.
Pace is now under review. No doubt the numbers above will be used to attack the scheme itself, rather than its current management.
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