Tue 23 Jun 2015 In: Our Communities View at Wayback View at NDHA
Part two of a multi-part feature series. You can read part one, "Auckland Pride: In the beginning..." here. The first clear and public sign that something was going awry within Auckland Pride Festival Incorporated was on November 10, 2014, when GayNZ.com picked up on a disturbing rumour. It was whispered that, well into preparation time for the February 2015 Festival and with the Christmas-New Year dead period looming, Julian Cook, the event organiser heading into his third Pride festival of events, had suddenly resigned. GayNZ.com immediately went to the two parties to get to the root of the matter. Within hours Cook was on the phone. He was tight-lipped but clearly emotionally drained and frustrated. All he would say was basically that he had felt there was no alternative to his departure and that he was unable to comment further. The Pride Board responded later in the day with its now notoriously glib message saying that Cook wished to leave to “pursue other interests”. The implication was that he was walking away from the project because something else had caught his interest. To anyone with even a passing knowledge of Cook's character, long-standing community commitment and professionalism this was quite unbelievable. The Pride statement raised way more questions than it answered. And questions were emerging about the largely unheralded appointment of a Pride staff member. GayNZ.com Daily News compiled those questions into an email which we sent through that new staff member who said she would pass them to the Board. Day after day we waited for an answer. And waited. And waited. Cook had leaned on friends and associates for support and as the days of silence from Pride ground on some of those people began to leak a few details of his dealings with the board. Stunned by the Board's lack of public, or even private, communication even some of those close to the Board itself began to whisper off the record to GayNZ.com. On November 17, with some - in retrospect - real information and lots of wild speculation now swirling through the wider glbti communities and day after day the Board maintaining absolute silence, GayNZ.com published an editorial reminding the Pride Board of its responsibilities to the glbti communities to whose mandate the organisation owed its existence. Based on what we managed to find out at the time and on tidbits gleaned since, it seems what had gone down was something like this... Earlier in the year Cook had signed a contract with the board to create his third Auckland Pride Festival events calendar, a massive undertaking. Under that contract or agreement he reported directly to the board, thus giving him immediate access to the final decision-makers and the ability to confer with them directly. Board member and events and performance lecturer Lexie Matheson had been detailed by the board to be Cook's primary point of contact with the board and that relationship had initially at least worked quite well. But Matheson was sometimes overseas lecturing and it may have been during one of those absences that the board, without consulting or advising Cook, decided to employ a staffer to handle operational management matters. And Cook would now report to her. It was a like or lump it, fait accompli arrangement which a friend of Cook's believes he only became aware of when he asked the staffer to arrange a meeting with the board, or a board member, only to be told something like “Oh, you report to me now.” It was an arrangement we now believe Cook had been concerned might be put in place and had some months previously warned the board he would find untenable. It has even been suggested to GayNZ.com that the board or one of its members had reassured him it would not happen. Negotiations continued over several weeks until it became clear that the Board would not honour the reporting terms under which Cook had signed on. It was committed to keeping the new staffer's role as intermediary even if it meant losing its Festival organiser that close to the event. Cook seems to have broken the impasse by resigning but had agreed to keep on the job a few weeks until a successor could be phased in. It was around this time that GayNZ.com Daily News realised the Auckland Pride Charitable Trust had been killed off and the Auckland Pride Incorporated society had appeared. Then it became apparent that the new staffer, styled an executive officer, was an ex-board member who had, unknown to the wider community at the time, resigned to take up the paid role. A role which the board had not advertised, instead choosing to quietly give the job to one of their own. On November 19th, in the face of a mounting tide of community indignation, the Pride Board co-chairs finally took part a face-to-face interview with GayNZ.com Daily News journalists. Co-chair Megan Cunningham-Adams said she had not engaged with GayNZ.com and the wider glbti communities on the matter because “I actually didn’t think it was a story. Julian handed his notice in, we’re very upset, we tried to retain him and he opted to leave.” The loss of the pivotal expert coordinating the festival of events for the country's biggest celebration of glbti life and lifestyles, a person well known for his ability and professionalism, leaving at a critical time in the lead-up to the festival, was in her estimation not something the glbti communities would want to know about or should be told about. It was to many an illustration of the isolationism which increasingly seemed to characterise the Pride Festival Board's ethos. During the interview the other co-chair, Dan Mussett, pleaded: “I think sometimes people forget that ... we’re volunteers, so please don’t judge us too harshly. It’s actually really quite hard when you’re a volunteer to be told that you suck, when actually you’re giving up a hell of a lot of your spare time. We really are doing the best we can, with very limited resources.” The appointment of one of their own to Pride's only paid staff position was explained as an expedient and, in retrospect, bad call. Cunningham-Adams and Mussett apologised on behalf of the board, saying it was overworked. The interview ended modestly satisfactorily, with Cunningham-Adams assuring GayNZ.com and the community that Pride would from now on be more open and communicative and that we could approach her directly any time for comment or information and it would be forthcoming. But in the background of the farrago there were other reputations at stake. Although she had refused to break ranks with the board by commenting personally, it soon became apparent that Lexie Matheson, whose academic reputation rests on her credibility and expertise in event, project and arts management – she's a lecturer in the subject at Auckland University of Technology - was uncomfortable to say the least. By Christmas-time Matheson had had enough and resigned from the board. Her reasons, explained just a few days later in an interview with GayNZ.com, were wide-ranging. She characterised the board as dysfunctional, said that she had lived with the situation as long as she could, she was increasingly uneasy at the Board's lack of transparency and she believed Cunningham-Adams and Mussett had been misleading in their public explanation of the circumstances of Cook's resignation. After initially saying it would respond through GayNZ.com Daily News to Matheson's resignation and scathing indictment, the Board members then changed their minds and refused to do so, imperiously and somewhat irrelevantly stating they would prefer the results of the looming Festival to speak for themselves. On Thursday we'll take a look at how the Auckland Pride Festival 2015 was kept more or less on track and how it panned out. But in the background of all this were the consultant members. Were they happy, we have been wondering, with the way their Board was operating? Where was their expertise and experience in all this? The first two consultant members GayNZ.com has approached agreed up front to comment publicly. Ashley Barratt works internationally in the area of management and governance consultancy and is currently the chair of Body Positive. Simon Randall is one of the country's longest-serving gay politicians with a long track record in Auckland local body politics and is the immediate past-chair of the NZ AIDS Foundation. And now, as this article further fleshing out the background to the controversy surrounding the Auckland Pride Festival Board has gone rather longer than we anticipated a couple of days ago, we'll give our readers a small breather by pausing here and publish Barratt and Randall's take on the situation tomorrow. Jay Bennie - 23rd June 2015