Arts funding changes – rearranging the deckchairs while we ditch the lifeboats

The impact of the changes to national arts funding flowing from the Budget are likely to be deep and severe. The main issue for me is what will now not be funded – by the Australia Council or by anyone else. There are hundreds of small to medium arts and cultural organisations that play a pivotal role in supporting Australia’s cultural life. They need to be seen as every bit as important a part of Australia’s cultural infrastructure as the major performing arts companies or the major arts galleries and museums. They are essential infrastructure for our arts and culture’‘The impact of the changes to national arts funding flowing from the Budget are likely to be deep and severe. The main issue for me is what will now not be funded – by the Australia Council or by anyone else. There are hundreds of small to medium arts and cultural organisations that play a pivotal role in supporting Australia’s cultural life. They need to be seen as every bit as important a part of Australia’s cultural infrastructure as the major performing arts companies or the major arts galleries and museums. They are essential infrastructure for our arts and culture.

The impact of the changes to national arts funding flowing from the Budget are likely to be deep and severe. It is highly likely that a whole layer of small to medium arts and cultural organisations – nationally around 150 likely to have been funded from a pool of over 400 applicants – is at grave risk. It happened in Queensland before and it could happen again, but this time across the whole country. This is not simply decimation – it's a massacre.

Unlike many commentators I have been less concerned about some of the issues raised by the stripping of a large chunk of funding from the Australia Council and its transfer to the Ministry for the Arts. The issue of arms length funding and independence from government of the main arts funding body raises important long-established principles that need to be discussed but it isn’t my main concern, my most pressing worry.

I’m not even mainly concerned that funds have been transferred. The reality is that there is a very large amount of arts and cultural funding that is not distributed through the Australia Council – funding for screen culture, support for the national cultural institutions, operational funding for the national arts training institutions and Indigenous cultural program support, to name a few.

What will now not be funded
The main issue for me is what will now not be funded – by the Australia Council or by anyone else. This is the hard, cold reality of these changes and I'm not convinced that many of those talking about them realise just how very, very serious it is.

There are many hundreds of small to medium arts and cultural organisations that play a pivotal role in supporting Australia’s cultural life. They need to be seen as every bit as important a part of Australia’s cultural infrastructure as the major performing arts companies or the major art galleries and museums. They are essential infrastructure for our arts and culture and they are the level of arts and cultural infrastructure closest to the very grassroots of our country - the Australians who vote, who get unhappy and who change governments. They rarely do it because of matters related to arts and culture but sometimes matters related to arts and culture, added to other concerns, can help tip things over the edge.

Arts funding - rearranging the deckchairs while we ditch the lifeboats

Sign of things to come
In a sign of things to come the Australia Council has suspended its six year funding program for Key Organisations and will not proceed from the expression of interest stage which is part-way through, to the full application at this point. Existing funding until the end of 2016 will be continued but, after this, small to medium size arts and cultural organisations will struggle to continue.

‘Having a go’ at Australia's arts and culture – the Budget Mark 2

What we are seeing is the steady skewing of Australia’s arts and culture sector as the most dynamic component, the one most connected to both artistic innovation and to community engagement, atrophies and withers. This is the absolute opposite of innovation and excellence. It is cultural vandalism of the worst kind.

There’s been a great deal of coverage of the impact of the most recent national Government budget on ‘the arts’. The first thing to say is that while we need to focus on what is happening with support for ‘the arts’, and on the Australia Council, it’s critical to remember that ‘the arts’ are only a part of the broader cultural sector and we have to be careful we don’t lose sight of that.

Still, I am concerned about the $13 million in ’savings’ mentioned in the comment in Minister Brandis’ media release, ‘The Government will find savings of $13 million through “efficiencies” to arts and cultural programs run by Screen Australia, the Australia Council and the Attorney-General's department.’ Over four years this comprises $7.3 million from the Australia Council, $3.6 million from Screen Australia and $2.2 million from the arts programs of the Attorney General’s Department itself. The savings for the Australia Council will be met through reduced funding to the ArtStart, Capacity Building and Artists in Residence programs. Other than this, what that means in practice is difficult to say, though it’s worth noting that amongst the arts programs of the Attorney General’s Department are what remains of the Indigenous cultural programs.

Craft ACT during DESIGN Canberra - an event which brings together artists, creative industries, education bodies and the general public to explore the central role of design in an innovative regional and national culture

Australia Council and Ministry for the Arts
Is anyone surprised that the Government has transferred so much from the Australia Council to the Attorney-General’s Department? The Coalition has never loved the Australia Council – alarmingly located at arms length from government. Even though it was established by Holt and Gorton, it has always been seen as the baby of Whitlam, who gave it statutory authority. Philosophically the Coalition don’t like agencies that are removed from government in any way, preferring to focus all their support through Government departments. It gives more control and is also cleaner and clearer in their less than enthusiastic embrace of any role for government in just about anything.

Valuing the intangible

We are surrounded by intangible cultural heritage – Indigenous and non-Indigenous – and often it’s incredibly important to us but we can’t seem to understand why or put a name to its importance.So many issues of paramount importance to Australia and its future are linked to the broad cultural agenda of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). In particular they are central to one of UNESCO’s key treaties, the International Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

As usual the most recent discussion about ending services to Aboriginal homelands has been expressed completely in terms of physical infrastructure – roads, rubbish, water, housing. When the Intervention, or the National Emergency Response as it is more formally called, rolled into the NT in 2007 all the focus was on this – how many water tanks, how many houses with how many people in them, no consideration of whose country all the families were crowded onto, what languages people spoke – like seeing a coloured photo in black and white. No wonder they missed the point.

'It’s a gap in Australian culture that we don’t seem to appreciate our own culture – or our own language. We might complain that people don’t speak English but for us it’s just a way of saying things – we don’t appreciate that we are held tightly in its world view.' 

I’m not surprised – when I worked in Local Government decades ago the challenge was to get councillors to think beyond the garbage bins.

Fashion parade of Indigenous designs from Far North Queensland, the Torres Strait and NT, Cairns 2013.

It’s a gap in Australian culture that we don’t seem to appreciate our own culture – or our own language. We might complain that people don’t speak English but for us it’s just a way of saying things – we don’t appreciate that we are held tightly in its world view. All of this powerful phenomenon which surrounds us and shapes our view of the world so completely is intangible cultural heritage.

The Magna Carta – still a work in progress

Australian culture is inconceivable without the crucial role of Indigenous culture. In the arts and culture sector Indigenous culture has always been seen as a strength to be celebrated, whereas in the mainstream of ‘Indigenous affairs’, there has always been a faint ambivalence and a lingering concern that Indigenous culture might be holding back economic development and "full" participation in  mainstream society.

Chou En Lai, the much respected former Premier of China, once famously (and perhaps actually) said when asked what he saw as the long term effects of the French Revolution, that it was too soon to tell. The same could be said of the Magna Carta, the birth certificate of Western democracy. I keep being reminded that it remains a work in progress and that the hard won gains we enjoy are fragile and need to be constantly protected and extended. The Magna Carta and all that followed it is very much an ongoing project.

This blog is about Australian culture – not human rights, democracy or Indigenous communities. The problem is that culture is about all those things – that’s what makes it so important.

Stop the closure of Aboriginal communities marchers reach a Parliament House long since empty, in all senses of the word.

Threatened closure of Indigenous communities
A few days ago I stood up in my small way in my home town, Canberra, as part of the campaign to stop the forced closure of remote – and not so remote – Aboriginal communities. At the same time thousands marched in their own home towns, villages or tiny ‘remote’ communities across Australia – and Australians and others across the globe also marched in places as far apart as Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin, Tauranga Aotearoa and Hamilton in New Zealand, Chicago, Denver, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington DC, the United Nations Headquarters and Honolulu in the US, Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa in Canada, and Hong Kong, London and Berlin.