Note: As originally published in The Post, page 6 – Editorial and Opinion, on Saturday, 19 September 2026.
Circa Theatre’s Public Service Announcement – Election Meltdown lands sharply because its absurdity mirrors reality: just when Aotearoa New Zealand most needs reliable evidence, stronger literacy and trust in institutions, its national memory institutions face further cuts.
Te Papa, the National Library, Archives New Zealand and the wider GLAM sector are not decorative extras. They are democratic infrastructure. They preserve the evidence of government, the records of communities, the taonga of iwi and hapū, and the stories through which a country understands itself. If these institutions are essential to accountability, identity, literacy and research, why are they treated as discretionary whenever budgets tighten?
PHANZA warns that restructuring could restrict public access to history and weaken the knowledge infrastructure supporting research, innovation and informed citizenship. Archives New Zealand must preserve full and accurate public records so government can be held accountable; the National Library has legal-deposit and sector-wide legislated responsibilities, including to schools.
This matters in a country already concerned about institutional trust. New Zealand’s score in the 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index continues a decade-long decline. Memory institutions are not the only influence on public integrity, but strong recordkeeping, preservation and access allow citizens, journalists, researchers and Parliament to test what government has done. Repeated cuts weaken that machinery gradually, then suddenly.
Across the sector, the evidence is consistent. Historian Jonathan West describes a slow erosion of Archives New Zealand’s ability to keep the state’s record and enable accountability. LIANZA identifies risks to school-library support, literacy services, shared digital infrastructure, preservation, collection description and research. Museums Aotearoa chief executive Jaenine Parkinson’s argument about Te Papa applies equally to the National Library and Archives New Zealand: success cannot be measured by revenue [or cost-savings] alone. It’s about value to New Zealanders.
Australia offers both a warning and a precedent. After a decade of underfunding, its nine national collecting institutions faced deteriorating buildings, deficits, staff losses, reduced access and conservation backlogs. Trove, the free national discovery portal with 14 billion items from 1,000 collecting institutions, faced possible closure. In 2023 the Australian Government responded with $535.3 million over four years, followed by $117 million annually from July 2027, including ongoing support for Trove. Its five-year national cultural policy, Revive, added a strategic roadmap for rebuilding cultural infrastructure.
Aotearoa New Zealand should learn before reaching the same funding cliff. Collection care, insurance, energy, digital preservation and research are expanding obligations that cannot be suspended when circumstances become difficult. Reduced access and deferred preservation compound over time, undermining earlier investment.
The practical solution is a cross-party Charter for Cultural Heritage, backed by a minimum sustainable funding model for the institutions that hold the nation’s memory. Drawing on Australia’s Revive, the charter should recognise the responsibilities Parliament itself created: preserving records, protecting taonga, supporting literacy, enabling research, upholding accountability and ensuring future generations inherit knowledge rather than absence. These costs need to be indexed given physical and digital collections invariably grow.
Drawing on Sohail Inayatullah, UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies, funding should link collection care and infrastructure with digital capability, workforce transformation and community engagement. Libraries and memory institutions must evolve from keepers of information into innovators and trusted truth-tellers, adopting new skills and measures of success while cultivating a knowledge garden for all. Transparent reporting on preservation, access and statutory performance should underpin this investment. The immediate ask is to pause further reductions and commission a cross-party framework beyond the electoral cycle. “More with less” is not a strategy; at some point, less becomes loss.
The sector – LIANZA, PHANZA, Museums Aotearoa, ARANZ, institutional leaders, iwi partners, researchers and communities – must make the risk visible to candidates, Ministers, boards, journalists and the public. The Circa farce returns here: a country that trims its memory institutions and calls it prudence should not be surprised when it later struggles to remember what it promised, who it served and why it mattered. Fund the memory, or own the forgetting.
About the author:
Andy Fenton is a leader in information governance, records management, digitisation, standards development and community access to knowledge, with more than 30 years’ experience supporting cultural heritage organisations. He founded New Zealand’s first trust dedicated to preserving historical newspapers and has served in governance, standards and technology leadership roles across the archives, records and library sectors.