Hide and seek

What is it that Creative NZ is trying to hide away in its announcements of funding round results? We’ve posted before about how it has removed comparative charts and the ability to easily access results in different categories like the Visual Arts. While these were both useful tools in supporting informed advocacy and any debate around Creative NZ’s performance, we’re another step along. Now the total amount funded has been taken off the introductory information for the latest Quick Response grants. While we all do have calculators and can do the sums, it’s not a helpful or user-friendly development. Even more problematically though, the total number of applicants has been removed something we flagged earlier this year. For tax payers near enough is good enough. It’s been replaced with the comment that ‘typically one in four or five applications gets funded.’

For the record then, and in the same near-enough spirit: around 360 to 450 applications were received and just over $470,000 was allocated to between 20 and 25 percent of them.

So how did the visual arts make out? They received just under $82,000 representing around 17.5 percent of the total. Of these, a whopping 77 percent went to projects outside New Zealand.

Image: OTN’s Statistics Unit working its way through Creative NZ figures