Artistic Intelligence: New Zealand’s film and television industry has produced nothing remotely like the Australians’ highly political series Secret City and Pine Gap. Under examination in both of these series is the vexing problem of how Australia should manage its relationship with the United States of America, on the one hand, and the Peoples Republic of China, on the other.
THE BEST MEASURE of a nation’s maturity is its willingness
to submit its biggest challenges to the audit of art. For all their political
boorishness, the Aussies can boast a much more favourable auditor’s report than
we can. I can’t remember the last time this country committed significant
resources to a dramatic examination of its domestic and international political
relationships. Certainly, New Zealand’s film and television industry has
produced nothing remotely like the Australians’ highly political series Secret City and Pine Gap.
Under examination in both of these series is the vexing
problem of how Australia should manage its relationship with the United States
of America, on the one hand, and the Peoples Republic of China, on the other.
How deeply have the Chinese penetrated Australia’s governing institutions? Is
honouring Australia’s security relationship with the USA worth the fundamental
destabilisation of the Australian economy which an acrimonious break with China
would entail? The first question inspires the plotlines of Secret City; the second, of Pine
Gap.
Now, if these questions sound at all familiar, then well
done You for keeping abreast of current events! New Zealand’s relationships
with China and the United States are similarly fraught with ambiguity and risk.
All the more so today, following the emphatically pro-American speech delivered
yesterday (16/12/18) by Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, to a high-powered
American audience assembled at Georgetown University’s Centre of Australian–New
Zealand studies in Washington.
Except we Kiwis have one more player to consider than our
Aussie cousins: which is Australia itself. Our countries have been so close,
historically, that it is very difficult for ordinary New Zealanders to
conceptualise a situation where the Australians might look upon us as something
less than a mate. Sure, we spar with one another on the sports field and tell
obscene jokes at one another’s expense, but the idea that the Australian
political class might already have fallen out of love with their irritating
Kiwi cousins would strike most New Zealanders as ridiculous.
But what if the Australian “Deep State” already regards New
Zealand as an enemy? It’s a thought more likely to seize the imagination of a
novelist, playwright or screen-writer than the average Kiwi citizen. Which is
why a mature NZ-on-Air would be badgering this country’s writers for scripts
dealing with New Zealand’s growing economic and diplomatic vulnerability in the
face of the US-Australia vs China
stand-off. Anywhere else but here, Professor Anne-Marie Brady’s run-ins with
the Chinese would have commissioning editors salivating. The screen-play is
practically writing itself in real time!
But, no, NZ-on-Air doesn’t do political thrillers dealing
with the moral duty of the news media to expose the dark deeds of the state
security apparatus. Nor will it commission a TV series exploring the
consequences of discovering Chinese and/or American “assets” embedded at the
heart of our major political parties. As for a series examining the contradictions
inherent in having our indispensable security partner asking us to spy on our
indispensable economic partner: Good God! What would MFAT say?
The Australians are more fortunate, because the challenges
outlined above are precisely the challenges confronted and explored in Secret City and Pine Gap. (Both currently available on Netflix.) Aussie viewers can
watch these dramas and argue with friends and family about the issues driving
their plots and characters forward. How much room for manoeuvre do our
political leaders have between China and America? How far should Australia go
in honouring One Hundred Years Of Mateship? If the US fires shots in anger at
the Chinese, should Australia do the same? Are we really willing to have the
Chinese crash our economy in retaliation?
It’s what grown-up countries do. Think not only of the
American and British film and television industries, but of the Danes, the
Swedes, the Norwegians and the Irish. Think of Borgen and its international success. Think of Scandi-Noir. These are countries not much bigger than ourselves,
but unlike us they have the wit to resource their film and television
industries to a level where making series like Borgen becomes something more than the wistful pipe-dream of
writers condemned to turning out endless variations of Outrageous Fortune.
Thirty-five years ago the Aussies commissioned a series
dealing with one of the most traumatic events in their country’s history – the
dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s Labor Government by the then Governor General, Sir
John Kerr. The screening of the six hour-long episodes of The Dismissal began on 6 March 1983, the day after Bob Hawke’s
Government was elected – the first Labor Government to take office since the
bloodless coup d’état that toppled
Whitlam’s eight years earlier.
New Zealand television was given the opportunity to perform
a similar artistic service in relation to the national trauma of Rogernomics.
The renowned novelist and playwright, Dean Parker, pitched a series to the
networks exploring the reactions of a typical group of Labour Party members to
the devastating “reforms” of the Lange-led Government. Parker’s working title
was “The Branch”. The chance was there for a New Zealand audience to confront
in Art’s mirror not only the moral and political choices forced upon Labour
Party members, but the whole nation.
The networks weren’t interested.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Tuesday, 18 December 2018.
