Thankfully, the end is in sight for the government’s dance of the seven veils over recognising the state of Palestine, and for Labour’s rampant indecision about the wisdom of endorsing a capital gains tax. Next week, the government will finally reveal whether New Zealand is about to become the 150th country (out of 193 UN member states!) to recognise Palestine’s right to exist. Sometime before Christmas, Labour says it is also going to announce its embrace of a drastically slimmed down version of a capital gains tax.
In both cases, the sense of anticlimax will be overwhelming, and that’s probably been by design. If you bore people enough beforehand, chances are they won’t have the energy to be mad at you afterwards. Over Palestine, a headline in Al Jazeera summed things up pretty well more than a month ago: “Australia to recognise Palestinian statehood; New Zealand may follow..” You bet. In fact, even the “It’s a matter of when, not if” soundbite used by Christopher Luxon and Winston Peters, has been a line that Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong says she has been using for the past year. On the world stage, New Zealand does tend these days to be something of an afterthought.
Why have we waited until next week’s UN General Assembly plenary meeting to announce our recognition of Palestine? The delay has looked very much like an attempt to avoid arousing the ire of Donald Trump, in the hope that Australia’s more forthright position on Palestine will be punished by the White House with a further tariff penalty, thus erasing the 5% tariff advantage that Australian exports currently enjoy over us in US markets. If that really has been the plan, it hasn’t worked so far.
Meanwhile, the pain in Gaza goes on, and on. Israel’s aerial bombardment has been intensifying, its ground onslaught is rolling on through the ruins, about 50 people are killed by the IDF every 24 hours, and 650,000 starvation-weakened Gazans have been told to get up and start walking south once again. Here is a first person account from a few days ago, issued by the UN Office for Humanitarian Relief:
On our way back into Gaza yesterday, we drove down barely passable roads, as people crowded around our convoy, visibly distraught, pleading for this horror to end. A small girl, walking alongside her father, waved as we passed. Will she survive this hell? Do world leaders who can stop this war see her as worthy of peace? Her life is in the hands of those who choose to act.
Dignity and hope have been stripped away, with every killing of a loved one, every strike on a civilian lifeline, every denial of access. Systems that support life have been systematically dismantled and destroyed. Parents struggle to shield their children from violence, from hunger, from fear. Fleeing families flood the street, clutching their children in their arms, not knowing where they will go as every option appears to have been exhausted. The race against time, against death, against the spread of famine, feels like we as humanitarians are running through quicksand. Even more so as humanitarian convoys are too often denied, delayed or obstructed by the Israeli authorities.
Yet nevertheless:
Yet, even in such hardship, humanity shines. Palestinian doctors, nurses and paramedics working around the clock, often without pay, medicine or electricity. Aid workers, from UN agencies, the Red Crescent, local and international NGOs, delivering food, medicine and clean water under fire. Ordinary people sharing the little they have with strangers. In every act of care – a refusal to let cruelty define the future. Proof that even in the darkest times, the human spirit endures.
This puts in perspective our delay in recognising Palestine, and how little will be achieved by that announcement alone.
The $70 Million piñata
Make no mistake, the incredible shrinking value of our currency has been the main reason why relatively few big name concert tours have been coming to New Zealand. For some time, our dollar has been struggling to breach the 60 cents American barrier. That’s pure poison, in an international concert business that’s denominated in US dollars.
We have the venues. Auckland and Dunedin both have sizeable stadiums (the Forsythe Barr stadium can host 35,000 concert goers) and Christchurch has a large stadium about to come on stream. Our currency remains the real problem. You can drive up ticket prices only so far, in order to bridge that yawning gap in the exchange rate.
While the cost structure of each big concert varies, some of the basics remain fairly constant. The artist gets a guaranteed return from the promoter plus a ratio (80/20, or even 90/10) of the returns from the tickets sold. The promoter may also meet travel costs (often a ratio of say, a Japan/Australia/NZ leg) the accommodation, transport, contract riders and per diems, and other incidentals.
The promoter will also have a cost sharing arrangement with the venue over matters like venue hire and security, offset a little in some cases by a proportion of the onsite merchandise sales. Since the venue can often make money on food and alcohol, any potential venue hire /clean-up costs can be discounted or waived entirely, in recognition of the promoter’s role in bringing in the punters.
Putting the rough details to one side, the artists $USD guarantee and their ratio of the ticket price returns tends to be the deal makers/deal breakers. If the taxpayer is going to step in and help out in times when the currency is low, there should be a sunset clause such that the government subsidy gets withdrawn once the Kiwi dollar hits 65 cents against the greenback – because 66 US cents is where the Aussie dollar is sitting right now, and they’re still managing to attract big shows.
Moreover…if the punters -as-taxpayers are to be subsidising these shows, is there going to be any relief on ticket prices? To date, there has been no hint of a quid pro quo mechanism on ticket prices. It is also unclear what the eligibility criteria will be for the New Zealand cities who will be competing for these funds. Will the money be allocated on a “first come first served” basis until the fund is depleted? In all likelihood, Auckland – always a political priority in any election year – will get the lion’s share of the funds, and the ‘feel good’ benefits of the concert activity.
All this underlines a point made in a previous Werewolf column. Events reliant on disposable income do not create wealth. They merely shift wealth horizontally across the economy such that money being spent in hotels, bars, and restaurants in central Auckland will be money that’s not being spent in hotels, bars, and restaurants elsewhere in Auckland, or in Hamilton, Tauranga and other points south. The same brutal logic applies with convention centres. They don’t add to the nation’s wealth, they merely re-distribute it.
Meaning: there has to be more transparency about how this money is to be allocated, what existing shortfalls in promotion budgets it will meet, and for how long the subsidy will exist – assuming of course that this isn’t just a one-off Auckland slush fund, available only in election year.
Christchurch for instance, might be hoping/planning on getting X number of big concerts per annum to defray the sizeable running costs and debt burden that the Te Kaha stadium has imposed on the city. If so, it may come as a nasty surprise if the competition for staging big shows isn’t a level playing field. Unwittingly, taxpayers/ratepayers nationwide may be being used to enhance Auckland’s appeal as the only feasible option for big name concert acts.
Footnote: Is this $70 million going to be a handout, or will it operate as a rebate, to meet costs assessed as valid by MBIE? If there are no compliance criteria, how can we know whether those costs aren’t being dialled up to eleven? If the government aims to go down this road, our film business experience in administering the Large Budget Production Grant Scheme could be helpful in detecting what is, and isn’t, a valid concert production cost.
For example: on international travel, will the New Zealand leg impose added costs, or does Trans-Tasman travel get treated as a freebie within a Los Angeles/Tokyo/Sydney/Auckland package deal – and how would we ever know? It would be so easy for some promoters to offload an inordinate share of the costs onto the New Zealand tab, in the sure and certain knowledge that our government will be mug enough to pay it, no questions asked.
Cultural tourism, via music
Over the past decade, Lisbon has come to rival Barcelona as a magnet for global tourism. Reportedly Portugal is now also the number one re-re-location choice for Americans seeking to flee their country. Unsurprisingly though, Portugal has yet to find an international crossover form of the music – fado – most closely associated with the country. In stark contrast next door in Spain, Rosalia has built on her foundation in “new flamenco” to become a global superstar, all the way to Shibuya crossing and back again.
No-one like Rosalia has yet emerged from Portugal. (Maybe fado’s introspective songs about feckless men and heartbroken women can never be made to work on the dancefloor.) In the meantime, fado’s greatest exponent continues to be Amalia Rodrigues (1920-1999). Her signature song “Barco Negro” has an interesting back story, in that the original Brazilian lyrics reportedly touched on social relationships under slavery, and made references to Yemenya, a Yoruba goddess of fertility.
The Salazar dictatorship in Portugal banned that version, so the lyrics to “Barco Negro” were rewritten in the version recorded in 1954 by Rodrigues that we know today. The song virtually created the template for fado’s songs of love betrayed, in this case by a wandering sailor. Here, by courtesy of Google Translate, is an English translation of this timeless lament:
In the morning, how scared I was that you’d find me ugly! I woke up trembling, lying on the sand, but soon your eyes said no, and the sun penetrated my heart. [Repeat]
Then I saw, on a rock, a cross, and your Black Boat danced in the light. I saw your arm waving, between the already unfurled sails. The old women on the beach say you’re not coming back:
They’re crazy! They’re crazy!
I know, my love, that you never left, because everything around me tells me you’re always with me. [Repeat]
In the wind that throws sand against the windows; in the singing water, in the dying fire; in the warmth of the bed, in the empty benches; inside my chest, you’re always with me…