Thursday, June 5, 2014

After the Budget: Things could be worse

Prime Minister Abbott claimed that the cuts to arts and culture funding would have been greater if not for Arts Minister Brandis. I'm sure that's true. Would the cuts to Indigenous programs have been greater without the interest of the Prime Minister in this area? In this budget we have the ‘Prime Minister for Indigenous Australia’ presiding over large cuts to such a productive and valuable area as support for Indigenous languages. This is an area of activity which has been crucial to building resilience and a life-changing sense of purpose and identity in communities across Australia.

The problem is not just the level of the cuts, which may well be lower than in many other areas. It’s the nature of the cuts. Arts and culture have been cut because the Government doesn’t see a significant and broad role for national government, possibly government at all, in this area. This is particularly the case with support for small scale arts and cultural activity.

The exhibition of Cecil Beaton royal photographs at Ballarat Art Gallery, March 2012 - all the disparate elements the Budget struggles with: regional cultural life, the role of cultural institutions, the link between tradition and innovation.

After the Budget: The future landscape for Australian arts and culture

There will be immediate impacts from the decisions in the Budget affecting Australia’s arts and culture. Unfortunately the real damage will become apparent several years down the track when the cumulative impact of these various measures is recognised.

Autumn - not only in Canberra. 

Compounding effect
There are a suite of cuts, far wider than the arts and culture area, which when combined and also continued over several years will have a compounding affect far more damaging than appears at first glance. There are measures listed under the heading of ‘Cross Portfolio’, which are not specific to arts and culture support but will inevitably affect it. These include an ‘Administered Programme Indexation Pause’ which across Government will save $15.1 million in the first year, $34.1 in the second, $54.9 in the third and $60.9 in the fourth. On top of this one measure ‘Efficiency Dividend – a further temporary increase of 0.25 per cent’ will compound the already deadening effect of the existing Efficiency Dividend, which was itself increased, ‘temporarily’ as well, by the last Labor Government.

The whole notion of an ‘efficiency dividend’ is itself government doublespeak. Organisations, such as cultural institutions inevitably find their responsibilities, their collections, their programs, growing as they expand their outreach and consolidate their roles. They rely on finding their efficiency savings to fund these expanded roles, not to siphon back to consolidated revenue.

Indirect effect
Beyond these measures there are changes in other individual portfolios which are likely to have impacts on the arts and culture sector but which are difficult to assess at this early stage. This includes current support for creative industries through the Creative Industries Innovation Centre under the Enterprise Connect Program and support by the ABC and SBS for content production in the creative industries.

It also includes indirect support for aspects of Indigenous arts and culture through the restructured Indigenous programs which are now part of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. It’s also worth noting that $3.3 million will go to the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies to digitise its collection. This is a survivor from the National Cultural Policy, though $12.8 million was promised there. This seems to be the only other extra cultural funding in the Indigenous area and it’s interesting that it’s not part of Brandis’ portfolio.

It’s also noteworthy to see programs continuing that were almost abandoned by the previous Government, like the Australian Music Radio Airplay Project.

Reading between the lines the interesting feature of the Budget is which recommendations of the National Commission of Audit, such as ending support for community broadcasting, were not implemented. Whether that will change in the future will be the next question.

Major and unexpected
It’s easy to become focused on only the issue of funding. This was one of the major weaknesses of the discussion around the National Cultural Policy. Government, particularly national government, plays a highly varied role in support for arts and culture, of which funding is just a part. In many ways a comprehensive and coherent Government strategy to support Australian arts and culture by better coordinating all the support across Government would be more important than the absolute level of funding involved. However that’s definitely not evident here.

The long term impact of these changes will be major and unexpected, magnifying over time as each small change reinforces the other. In three years, six years, nine years, Australians will ask where valued and important programs have gone and how critical institutions have managed to diminish to the point where return will not be possible. The likelihood is that this will lead to irreversible damage to the contemporary culture and cultural heritage of the nation.

See the other articles about the impact of the Budget on arts and culture

Smoking gun – the invisible cuts to national arts and culture funding 
‘The transfer of substantial program funds from the Australian Government’s main arts funding agency, the Australia Council, to the Ministry for the Arts has had the effect of masking serious cuts to crucial programs run by the Ministry, including its Indigenous cultural programs. There have been cuts to overall Ministry program funds stretching long into the future almost every year since the 2014-15 budget, with the long-term trend clearly heading downwards’, Smoking gun – the invisible cuts to national arts and culture funding.

Support for small scale arts and culture
'Budget cuts only to uncommitted funding sound benign but will end programs by letting them peter out over several years.' After the Budget: Government support for small scale arts and culture – here today, gone tomorrow

Selective drive-by shooting
‘The Budget was a selective drive-by shooting with easy targets including small arts. Entitlement continues for others.’ After the Budget: a selective drive-by shooting

Things could be worse
‘The problem is not just the level of arts cuts, which may well be lower than in many other areas. It’s the nature of the cuts.’ After the Budget: things could be worse

See also

Indigenous jobs
'Subsidised Indigenous arts and cultural jobs are real jobs with career paths that deliver genuine skills and employment capability.' Real jobs in an unreal world

After the Budget: Government support for small scale arts and culture – here today, gone tomorrow

During the Senate Estimates Hearing on 29 May, Arts Minister Brandis repeatedly stressed that the Government was not cutting any funding that had already been committed. However, from what he said, it seems highly likely that any programs that currently exist that would have had funding rounds in future years will find that there are no longer funds to distribute. Organisations that have funds for the next 12 months, or next few years if they have triennial funding, may find that the programs they have relied on for support no longer exist by the time their current funding ceases.

This is a way of cutting programs without stopping them outright. Instead it allows them to peter out slowly over a number of years, by which time it will be too late to complain.

Ngarukuruwala - Strong Womens' Choir, the sort of local cultural activity that contributes so much to Australia's cultural life

In the arts area this is particularly likely to hit hard because many organisations rely on small amounts of funding from year to year merely to continue their base level of operation and many have been supported this way for many years if not decades. This is particularly true with small local Indigenous cultural organisations. They are then able to use the government funding to attract a broader range of support.

After the Budget: A selective drive-by shooting

Discussion about the impact of the Budget has become bogged down in arguments about degrees of entitlement and ‘sectional’ interests. If you take a simplistic and static view of the Budget in terms of an aggregated series of cuts which affect many different individuals to see what the total savings are then this is inevitable. If you look at the economy in a more dynamic way and consider the interaction of the different components and the likely effects over time it looks very different.

March in May protest against the Budget, Adelaide May 2014

Cuts to education could be seen simply as expecting certain groups to pay more for their use as individuals of social resources that benefit them. That’s true – in part. Individuals want an education because it benefits them but society may also want an educated population. From a macro, whole of society perspective the changes to education in the budget will have the overall social effect of reducing access to and application of education. This in turn reduces the breadth and level of skills and capabilities in the workforce and hence the ability of the economy to function as a high level one, rather than as a crude mine or factory producing basic raw materials or goods.

The big picture
The arts and culture sector is in the same situation. It’s easy to see criticism of cuts to arts and culture support by government as a knee jerk reaction by the sector to loss of funding. However, decades of discussion, including the extensive public consultation during the development of the National Cultural Policy, has made it clear that involvement in arts and culture and the role of artists, arts and cultural organisations and the creative industries has a broad positive impact across society generally for a relatively small outlay by government. These are some of the most important industries of the future as well as playing an important role in representing Australia to the world and to itself.

Innovation
A clear sign of the crude approach to arts and culture in the Budget is the way important areas of innovation have disappeared entirely from the Government landscape. In the screen area, the Australian Interactive Games Fund, an initiative of the National Cultural Policy, has lost $10 million. This is an area which successive governments, both Labor and Coalition, have struggled to understand. It took decades to win Government support and a year to remove it. It is one of the rapidly expanding industries of the future, with great potential for Australia, but requiring a role for government in lifting it to the next level. Now that won’t happen.

Selective drive-by shooting
Like so many things this government does, many elements in the Budget might well be introduced by any government so long as they were part of a comprehensive balanced strategy. This would need to include the whole range of measures, both in the area of spending and of income, required to future-proof the national budget and the economy.

I’m sure this won’t stop the Opposition acting in an opportunist way, even at the price of principle, if there are votes at stake.

Large-scale infrastructure spending might be welcome if it extended beyond the narrow cliché of more roads, looking backwards rather than forwards. Digitisation of our national collections so they become more widely available to individual Australians and our creative industries is a major infrastructure project that has been overlooked, yet would have a profound impact.

Unfortunately what we’ve seen is a selective drive-by shooting aimed only at easy targets – the old, the young, Indigenous communities, overseas aid recipients, Australia’s arts and culture and its creative industries. The age of entitlement still continues if you’re eligible for the diesel fuel rebate or superannuation tax concessions, are grasping opportunities for wealth accumulation provided by the capital gains tax or negative gearing regimes or can extract Australia’s mineral resources while paying tax under an archaic and unrealistically generous scheme.

Even if you are caught up in the tax surcharge for high earners, the one measure included so the budget didn’t look to be completely aimed at the small end of town, that’s only temporary, whereas the cuts to the less well-off are forever.

Make no mistake, there is no ‘budget emergency’ that requires an urgent fix. There are long term structural issues that need addressing in a strategic and thoughtful way. However, this Government has decided to use the excuse of a budget emergency to make the changes they have long wanted to make, including in the arts and culture area.

See the other articles about the impact of the Budget on arts and culture.

Smoking gun – the invisible cuts to national arts and culture funding
‘The transfer of substantial program funds from the Australian Government’s main arts funding agency, the Australia Council, to the Ministry for the Arts has had the effect of masking serious cuts to crucial programs run by the Ministry, including its Indigenous cultural programs. There have been cuts to overall Ministry program funds stretching long into the future almost every year since the 2014-15 budget, with the long-term trend clearly heading downwards’, Smoking gun – the invisible cuts to national arts and culture funding.

Support for small scale arts and culture
'Budget cuts only to uncommitted funding sound benign but will end programs by letting them peter out over several years.' After the Budget: Government support for small scale arts and culture – here today, gone tomorrow

Long term effect of broader Budget cuts far more damaging
'Wider budget cuts combined over years will have a compounding effect on arts and culture far more damaging than anything immediate.' After the Budget: the future landscape for Australian arts and culture

Things could be worse
‘The problem is not just the level of arts cuts, which may well be lower than in many other areas. It’s the nature of the cuts.’ After the Budget: things could be worse

See also

Indigenous jobs
'Subsidised Indigenous arts and cultural jobs are real jobs with career paths that deliver genuine skills and employment capability.' Real jobs in an unreal world