Last weekend I was lucky enough to sit on a panel with some amazing GLAM sector colleagues at LitCrawl Wellington. We were hosted by Bartley & Company art gallery (which I had never visited despite living in Wellington for 7 years) and had a pretty engaging and urgent yet relaxed conversation about the state of art/cultural sector critical writing in NZ. I will always be so grateful for having friends who talk and think with, so much so that I even didn't mind doing it in front of a (bigger than expected) audience. One thing that kept coming up for me during that panel was 'generosity' so with that in mind...

There's change afoot. Jacinda chugged up to the front steps of Parliament in the mode of transport of the people and promised the crowd in front of her an empathetic government. On the bus ride over, when asked by John Campbell "if there was a central tenet to her approach to the new role" she said it was empathy: "Empathy is the one thing that I think that's your foundation, that's your grounding, and we'll keep ourselves in constant check." She talked about bringing parties together to work for people who need it most. She hasn't said that everything's fine, that we have a rockstar economy...

I've been wondering recently about the root cause of change. Not like restructures and such but good change. One of the most frustrating things about us humans is our capacity to know the damaging effects of our behavior yet doing nothing to change it. Let's take the environment vs my own lazy behavior. I know I shouldn't use single-use plastics.I know I shouldn't use throwaway takeaway coffee cups....

I am very, very nervous. About a week ago a small but not insignificant flutter of butterflies began to congregate in the pit of my stomach. In the intervening days the butterflies have not only multiplied exponentially but taken up permanent residency. I am very nervous about tomorrow's election. Pretty neat feelings of hopefulness have been replaced with dread and an unshakable feeling that come Sunday, the majority of people in Aotearoa will not have chosen to step into a fairer, more equitable, empathetic, progressive future...

I have just spent two days at Nga Kete Wānanga Marae at the Manukau Institute of Technology. Part of a wider Auckland Museum leadership initiative, the noho was intended to provide a space and time for honest discussion and reflection on bi-culturalism at the Museum. Throughout the stay I had a passage written by Maualaivao Albert Wendt in his response to Dr Selina Tusitala Marsh's new publication, Tightrope  , going round and round in my head: