Guns, Brushes,
and the Balance
Sheet of Power

Let's start with the numbers, because the numbers are damning. Budget 2026 — the Willis government's grand vision for "fiscal repair" — slashed Vote Arts, Culture and Heritage by $27 million over four years. In the same breath, it delivered $1.6 billion in fresh Defence funding. That ratio — roughly sixty dollars of bombs for every dollar cut from culture — tells you everything about whose values are being legislated into existence.

Meanwhile, the same ministers lecturing beneficiaries about belt-tightening were quietly signing off 63–80% pay rises for Crown board members. Social Development Minister Louise Upston — who defended raising the income threshold for accommodation supplements as "better targeting" — was simultaneously claiming a $1,000-a-week housing allowance to live in her own mortgage-free Wellington apartment. As The Spinoff put it: "Austerity is for poor people, not politicians."

The government is scrapping fees-free tertiary education. It's raising the minimum rent contribution for state house tenants from 25% to 30% of income — squeezing roughly 84,000 households by an average of $31 a week. Public service jobs are being cut from 63,600 to 55,000 by 2029, a 14% reduction. The ideological logic is consistent: make the state smaller, make life harder for workers, and hand the savings to those who already have plenty.

Creative New Zealand, the country's principal arts funding body, is proposing to gut a third of its workforce — 23 jobs — in a restructure it insists is about "regional devolution." The plan would shift funding decisions to 16 regional partners by 2027, with CNZ retreating to a "national leadership and oversight" role. Budget 2026 cut CNZ's baseline government funding by $1.3 million over four years. With no new money coming in, staff were told the organisation needs to "reduce operating costs significantly for the future."

The Public Service Association has called it clearly: "cultural vandalism." The roles being cut aren't back-office paper-pushers. They're specialists in Māori arts, Pacific arts, literature, music, theatre, dance, visual arts — people with deep sectoral relationships built over years. When Dame Lynda Topp, just days after the death of her twin sister Dame Jools, stood at the Aotearoa Music Awards and told Arts Minister Paul Goldsmith that New Zealand needed "a government that says the arts is more important than a defence budget," she was saying what thousands of workers already knew.

The "devolution" framing is worth scrutinising. CNZ doesn't even know yet whether there are enough capable regional partners to take over distributing some $40 million in funding. A swift transition timeline — regional partners signed up by January 2027, delivery from July 2027 — and a hollowed-out central body is not a recipe for a stronger arts ecosystem. It's a recipe for an under-resourced one that can be blamed for its own failure. The creative sector contributes around 4.2% of GDP. What's being gutted here isn't a luxury. It's infrastructure.

The same Budget that attacked arts funding also cut RNZ and the NZ Film Commission, sliced the NZ Symphony Orchestra's baseline. These are not separate decisions — they're a coherent programme of dismantling the public institutions through which working-class New Zealanders access culture they didn't have to buy from a streaming platform.

Budget 2026 touts a $2.1 billion education package — and the government is proud of it. Look closer. The headline investment in secondary education is explicitly framed around producing workers whose "skills match real-world labour market demands, especially in the trades." Alongside scrapping fees-free tertiary education, the government has overhauled vocational education, replacing the centralised Te Pūkenga with Industry Skills Boards — industry-led bodies that set training standards. The logic is unambiguous: education should serve capital's immediate workforce needs, not develop people as thinking, creative, political subjects.

The government's "Teaching the Basics Brilliantly" programme — $131 million for reading, writing and maths — isn't wrong to prioritise literacy and numeracy. But when it sits alongside gutted arts funding, scrapped fees-free study, and a wholesale restructuring of vocational ed toward market demands, a picture emerges of what kind of education is being valued. Not the kind that produces critical thinkers, artists, organisers, or citizens. The kind that produces compliant, skilled-enough workers.

This connects directly to the cuts at Creative NZ. The hollowing out of specialist arts workers doesn't just affect professional artists — it affects the ecosystem of arts education, mentorship and community practice that feeds into schools, community halls and marae across the country. In Ōtepoti, where the Dunedin Fringe Festival and organisations like Artsenta do real work connecting communities to creative practice, the ripple effects of national cuts are anything but abstract.

Dunedin is not insulated from any of this. Our city punches well above its weight culturally — the University, the Fringe, Artsenta, the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, a thriving music scene, a film community. Much of that infrastructure is stitched together by the very kind of specialist knowledge and public funding now being stripped away at the national level. The CNZ restructure's new "Southland" delivery location presumably includes Otago. Whether a regional body will have the capacity, funding and expertise to replace what's being lost from Wellington is — to put it diplomatically — deeply uncertain.

The cuts to RNZ affect Dunedin directly, too. Provincial cities depend on public broadcasting in ways Wellington and Auckland often don't notice. When RNZ shrinks, Dunedin's stories get told less. The public record gets thinner. And the gap gets filled — or doesn't — by commercial media with different priorities and shorter memories.

There is also something to be said about what austerity does to a city that is already navigating post-industrial transition. The creative economy isn't a nice-to-have in Ōtepoti — it's a genuine part of what makes the city liveable, of what keeps young people here, of what builds the kinds of social bonds that make working-class communities resilient. Cutting it in the name of fiscal discipline is cutting the ligaments of civic life.

Antonio Gramsci argued that hegemony — the dominance of ruling-class ideas — is maintained not only through coercion but through cultural leadership. The ruling class doesn't just rule by force; it rules by making its values feel like common sense, by occupying the institutions where meanings are made. Schools. Broadcasting. The arts. When this government defunds those institutions, it isn't just saving money — it's withdrawing the state from a contested cultural terrain and allowing market logic to fill the void.

Raymond Williams, one of the founding figures of cultural materialism, insisted that culture is ordinary — it is the whole way of life of a people, not a preserve of the elite. When socialists fight for arts funding, we're not fighting for abstract refinement or bohemian privilege. We're fighting for the conditions under which working-class people can make meaning, tell their own stories, and develop the imaginative capacity to see a different world. You can't build a movement from people who have never been told their creativity matters.

The Defence budget isn't separate from the arts cuts — they're two sides of the same coin. A government that spends $1.6 billion making war more available and $27 million less on culture is telling you what kind of society it's building: one where working people fight wars and consume product, but don't make art, don't broadcast their stories, and don't fund the institutions that help them think collectively.

The PSA is submitting against the Creative NZ cuts. That's worth supporting. The Dunedin City Council is one of the few remaining points of pressure available — attend, write, make noise at the decisions about cultural funding that still run through local government. The CNZ regional partner process is open: if you're involved in an arts organisation in Otago, understand what's at stake in that process and engage with it, critically.

More broadly: this government is telling a story about what New Zealand is for. Our job — as artists, educators, workers, unionists, community members — is to tell a different one. That means creating things. It means defending institutions. It means refusing the logic that culture is a luxury item to be cut when times are tight, while board members pocket 80% pay rises and defence contractors cash their cheques.

The Kiwi Dialectic exists because we believe working-class people in Aotearoa deserve serious political analysis grounded in the materiality of their lives. If you agree, share this, subscribe, and — if you can — contribute. We're readers and writers and workers, not institutions, and we're not going anywhere.