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Out Side Left

What do the people who organise slopwork meetings really want? You can find out by reading the new Combined Trade Unions circular "Delegates Call For Protest Action". The exporters, this pamphlet said, forced the Government to give them tax incentives after devaluation, the wheat-growers forced the Government to keep wheat prices up—all through what is ambiguously called "protest". Moral: Trade unions, too, can be an establishment pressure group if they do the right things. Great stuff, this trade union radicalism.

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Everybody needs a little light reading now and then, and the other day Downstage's annual report fell into my hands. Last year, it seems, they blew a few cool thousands on bringing an artistic director from overseas only to sack him inside a few months and decide they never really needed an artistic director anyway.

One would think this sort of procedure would normally make a few headlines— but newspaper editors are soft on Culture, and you can't knock a Cultural Institution like Downstage.

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The point is that Downstage is subsidised by public money through the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council and also through the Wellington City Council, both of whom, let's admit right now, arc much better at being bureaucrats than patrons of the arts on a targe scale. But this should mean that Downstage should show a little more concern about making decisions to import artistic directors than it does. Another interesting point is that Downstage, which runs at a loss, publishes a magazine called Act, which also runs at a loss (though it's difficult, not to say impossible, to work this fact out from the accounts). So that the Arts Council and what-have-you are subsidising not only a very good theatre group but a magazine as well. Why? And why does this magazine not try to run at a profit by using, say, advertising? The only reference to these interesting problems in the annual report is a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger reference to the tireless critics of Bruce Mason who unjustly criticised him for writing 90 per cent. of the reviews in Act's earliest issues.

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Talking of financial responsibility, though, odd things happen in Students' Association finances, too. Executive was told at its second meeting that the acting president had finally worked out what the new constitutional provisions on finance meant. Somebody had to work it out sometime, I suppose. And now they've decided it's O.K. for Exec. to appoint a finance committee after the first finance committee (appointed at an unconstitutional Exec. meeting) never met because ?it was unconstitutional. Life is gay—if you're an Exec. member.