It is time that the people demanded something be done about the parlous state of Archives New Zealand and the National Library and of public policy towards literacy and the text generally.
In earlier columns I have drawn attention to the way that the public role of the text is being downgraded. (August 2018, June 2019, January 2020, January 2020) The columns have drawn a lot of feedback reflecting the public’s concerns. It might be useful to bring together the various policy points in them.
1. Fundamentally, as the 2017 Labour Manifesto promised, Archives New Zealand and the National Library should be standalone entities outside the Department of Internal Affairs and separately reporting to Parliament. The rest follows:.
2. Recognising the central role of archives in the constitution of a democracy and its prior role in relation to the Official Information Act, the Chief Archivist should be an officer of Parliament. That means that Archives New Zealand should be an independent institution. (One consequence could be that eventually the documents which constitute the Treaty of Waitangi would be housed in Parliament where they belong.)
3. The case of the National Library outside the Department of Internal Affairs in part reflects the department’s poor stewardship while it has been responsible for the Library (similarly for Archives New Zealand). In any case, culturally the National Library is more like Te Papa than a standard government unit hidden in a department like the passport office.
4. The assertion of the statutory independence of the Chief Archivist and the National Librarian should explicitly state that the background of each officer must include a record of professional activity relevant to the purposes of their agency, thereby ruling out ‘leadership’ from generic managers. (Actually, it would be a good principle to include in the proposed Public Service Act. But even if that were done, the principle needs to be also specified in the relevant legislation.)
5. The statutory guardianship committees of Archives New Zealand, the National Library and the Alexander Turnbull Library should be appointed by Parliament rather than by the Government. (Currently the members are appointed by the minister on the recommendation of the officials who have little interest in independent guardians; hence their anodyne performance in recent years.)
6. The Public Finance Act should make separate provision for the treatment of heritage assets (I called them Autonomous Kaitiaki Entities; AKEs) including separate identification in the accounts and with a separate audit. (That would include archives and books and the like, but also conservation assets.)
7. The National Library should be charged with a ‘Reading New Zealand’ campaign aiming to increase the engagement of all New Zealanders – children and adults – with books and other text. (Aside from such engagement being at the heart of civilisation and democracy, it would also result in people connecting more intelligently with social media. Books New Zealand – the old NZ Book Council – already has such a program but given their funding its reach is limited. They would surely welcome a more public commitment.)
8. The responsibilities for the funding activities of the old Literary Fund should be transferred to the National Library from Creative New Zealand, the latter having failed in its stewardship. (In any case, support for literature fits better with the wider scope National Library proposed here.)
9. Government must fund the activities of Archives New Zealand and the National Library adequately. (Hopefully the more independent guardian committees will report to Parliament on the adequacy or otherwise.)
10. The funds for the Public Lending Right (payments to authors with books in public libraries) should be substantially increased and be indexed to wages and book numbers.
I invite you to print out this list, crossing out anything you disagree with. For one reason or another, the government bureaucracy will hate every manifesto item and resist the implementation of each of them: ‘Yes Minister’, ‘wont’, ‘cant’, ‘c’est impossible’.
Post the list on your noticeboard and see how much progress there has been in a year’s time. Use it to assess how much the people are in charge and how much the bureaucracy is.