Council venues the water pipes of city’s arts scene
Hallelujah! On Saturday night a sellout crowd enjoyed Handel’s at the Michael Fowler Centre. The week before, a sellout MFC crowd enjoyed a concert by Orchestra Wellington featuring national treasure Michael Houstoun. Surely with attendance numbers like that our council venues are in great shape?
Sadly, no, and according to a recent report by an Australian consultancy firm, our venues are underutilised, need investment in technology, and are mainly catering to older people.
Try putting a band into the Opera House and you won’t be able to remove the seats, so you’re already at a disadvantage. The Michael Fowler Centre has excellent acoustics for amplified music, but is seated and expensive to hire, which is why bands mainly used to play at the Town Hall.
The Town Hall, for those old enough to remember when it was open, is awful for amplified music but has world-class acoustics for classical music. But for some reason, our orchestras rarely played there in recent times. Perhaps because MFC had nicer seats.
Many Wellingtonians will be scratching their heads trying to remember anything in the Town Hall because it has been closed for so long. The reason? Earthquake strengthening.
The cost blowout of the strengthening is so well known you can tell the age of a Wellingtonian the same way you can age a tree by counting its rings. When a Wellingtonian says, ‘‘I remember I was finishing university when it was going to cost only
$35 million to fix the Town Hall,’’ you can calculate their age to the nearest year.
But it’s not just the Town Hall. The $17m St James Theatre strengthening could blow out to more than
$40m. Meanwhile, strengthening is needed for the Opera House, which could also cost up to $40m.
These enormous blowout numbers are difficult to keep track of. I think we need a logarithmic scale, not unlike the Richter scale, to measure council budget blowouts. The units of measure could be named after former mayors. That way engineers could say things like, ‘‘We thought the Town Hall would only go up by two Lesters, but now we’re looking at three WadeBrowns and a Prendergast,’’ and we would understand exactly how much money they are talking about.
It’s not just earthquake strengthening that’s the problem. The report says the technology in our venues has not kept up, due to a lack of investment. Sound familiar? Yep, council-owned venues are the water pipes of the Wellington arts scene.
The report says venues are under-utilised, though this is a moot point. Using the normal methods, the utilisation rate of Wellington’s venues is at about 70 per cent. But given we love to hype our city as the cultural capital, why are our venues not reaching up towards 100 per cent, as some private venues are?
I believe the reason is cost. Council-controlled organisations are under enormous pressure to turn a profit. That’s why venue-hire costs, not to mention some salaries of those involved in the greater bureaucracy, are high. Non-profit groups must pay venues market rates and apply to the council for subsidies. It’s inefficient, disheartening and a time waster – and hardly in the civic spirit.
I’ve even been in the ridiculous situation of witnessing council-funded organisations having to hire outside private venues because they couldn’t afford to hire the empty, council-owned one.
So even if you believe it takes way more genius, talent and training to manage a venue rather than perform a piano concerto in one, why are the high salaries of our venues bureaucrats not linked to usage? I remember when public meetings were held at the Opera House, and school prizegivings in the Town Hall.
Why? Not only were they great places to meet; they were affordable. I suspect the only pressure group who could afford to hire a council venue today would be the Property Investors Federation.
The venues report also recommends selling or redeveloping the Opera House. No thanks. Luckily, there seems little appetite for this among councillors, and I’m pretty sure any sale would ensure its demolition. Surely we should invest in our existing venues and consolidate them, rather than selling them off or building new ones.
And what of the new indoor stadium some are calling for? No thanks. As council arts spokesperson Nicola Young says, ‘‘Let’s make sure we look after what we’ve got before buying new toys.’’
Sadly, we already have an expensive new toy called the Convention Centre, which I fear will end up costing at least three Wade-Browns, two Lesters, not to mention half a Foster a year to maintain.
Let’s hope any performance venue in the new Convention Centre will not have the historic charm of Shed 6, the intimacy of the MFC, the acoustics of the Events Centre, the toilet facilities of the State Opera House, and cost an arm and a Transmission Gully for locals to hire.
Surely we should invest in our existing venues and consolidate them, rather than selling them off or building new ones.