Open letter to mayor and council: leave our library alone
Last week a majority of Wellington city councillors passed a proposal, presented by mayor Andy Foster, for the partial privatisation of the building housing the central library and a 40 per cent cut to the resources budget – books.
We write jointly to express our strong opposition to this move and to ask Wellingtonians to roundly reject this private-public partnership model and severe budget reduction.
We remind councillors that in July 2020 they ruled out a possible privatisation of the closed library: just seven months ago they chose to maintain this cultural asset as a service owned by the people of Wellington for the benefit of the people of Wellington. Public ownership of the city’s central library is fundamental to our understanding of civic society, democracy, and infrastructure.
The central library building, its resources and, not least, its librarians are at the heart of Wellington’s civic and cultural life. The library is greatly loved and heavily patronised. Its long-term closure for earthquake strengthening has certainly left a hole in the city; nevertheless, book borrowing (enabled by the three temporary CBD library hubs) has risen over the months since the library closed its doors. And the shuttered library itself stays alive in the hearts and minds of Wellington citizens.
We understand the central library as a space and essential resource for everyone – children, wha¯ nau, students, our homeless people, the self-employed, the lonely, business people, the mentally fragile, and the elderly. It is the city’s repository of information, of learning, of cultural and intellectual nourishment; it is the city’s flagship house of reading.
We remind Mayor Foster and the councillors who supported his proposal that their decision, both to partially privatise and cut resources, is starkly counter to a considerable body of research telling us that the value of public libraries has never been more important to the success and wellbeing of individuals and communities.
This research makes plain that reading for pleasure is foundational to full literacy (including digital literacy) and, therefore, to educational, social, and economic success.
Reading for pleasure improves health and wellbeing; it can increase empathy and social skills; it is a source of pleasure and imaginative flight. It builds critical-thinking citizens.
But Aotearoa New Zealand faces a growing challenge with falling literacy and reading competency, particularly in our young people; this is the result of a complex confluence of social developments, including the rise of digital platforms and a sharp increase in economic and educational inequities. This has serious implications for the social and economic health of our entire country, and addressing the problem requires a multi-pronged effort.
Public libraries are a critical part of that effort. They play a vital role in minimising the inequities in access to reading material across New Zealand. They are public spaces for all citizens, offering a vast range of books and information, selected and made accessible by librarians attentive to the diverse needs of their communities, and freely available to all.
Mayor Foster’s 40 per cent budget cut threatens both the breadth and depth of the library’s collection and its ability to service the entire community; it undermines the library’s ability to play its part building a fully empowered community of readers.
Let’s call the budget cut and the privatisation proposals what they are: austerity measures.
And these austerity measures are proposed at a moment in history when both the New Zealand government and governments around the world have recognised that a neo-liberal fiscal approach is utterly insufficient to the economic and cultural crises posed by the global pandemic. Both at home and overseas, governments are borrowing in order to invest in and grow the cultural, social, and economic capital of their communities and nations.
It’s worth remembering, too, what a decade of austerity measures did to the UK public library system. It was disembowelled: a well-documented act of cultural vandalism that has had profoundly negative effects on communities throughout the United Kingdom. The writer Philip Pullman, who spoke soberly and often about the unfolding library disaster, knew well what was at work: ‘‘the greedy ghost of market fundamentalism,’’ he wrote.
Or, to put it another way, a government (and civic politicians) who closed their eyes to 150 years of a flourishing public library system – to its role in the democratising of educational and cultural resources in print; its role, in other words, in the empowerment and decisionmaking capacity of the people – and attended only to balancing the account books.
We know well, too, what happens to a public space and service when purely commercial imperatives become the measure of ‘‘success’’. Currently, the public good is the principle by which the library’s worth and work are measured. We shouldn’t allow any diminishment of that measure; privatisation, however partial, inevitably threatens the library’s existence as a cultural institution dedicated to burnishing the people’s cultural growth and wellbeing.
Mayor Foster and his councillors hold office at the discretion of the Wellington people. They must understand that the privilege of office brings with it a duty to respect and protect the city’s public library system and its place in the citizens’ – and electors’ – lives.
Signed by: Anna Jackson, Bill Manhire, Bridget Williams, Catherine Robertson, Chris Tse, Claire Mabey, Dame Fiona Kidman, Damien Wilkins, Elizabeth Knox, Emily Writes, Gregory O’Brien, Ingrid Horrocks, Jane Arthur, Jenny Bornholdt, Julia Marshall (president, Publishers Association of New Zealand/Te Rau o Ta¯ kupu), Juliet Blyth (chief executive, ReadNZ), Kate De Goldi, Mandy Hager, Mary McCallum, Melanie Laville-Moore (chair, Coalition for Books), NZ Society of Authors, Philippa Werry, Rene´e, Tom Rennie.