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April 7th, 2008

Peter Garrett’s arts policy

By Ben Eltham

Over at the Australia Council’s arts marketing website Fuel4Arts, I’ve written an article about the emerging shape of the ALP’s arts policy under Peter Garrett. You have to sign in to Fuel4Arts to access their content, but it is free.

As the rather patchy list of attendees for the 2020 summit shows, so far our Arts Minister is showing far less reforming zeal for the sector than many had hoped for. For those of you who don’t wish to sign up for Fuel4Arts, I’ve posted my article below the fold.

FIVE THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW … FEDERAL ARTS POLICY

After eleven years in deep freeze, Australia’s cultural policy debate appears to be slowly thawing out. Ben Eltham examines the new agenda.

Peter Garrett is an extremely rare thing in Australian political history: an Arts Minister who has actually been a working artist. So it’s not surprising that many in Australia’s perennially hopeful cultural sector were excited about what the former lead singer for Midnight Oil could bring to the Federal Arts portfolio.

So far, it’s been steady-as-she-goes. With most of the big-ticket policy items continued from the previous administration, Labor’s arts and cultural policies have essentially kept to the status quo. But in the far-off distance, the first outlines of a new cultural agenda for Australia are gradually beginning to appear.

Here’s what you should know in a nutshell:

1. Labor promised a surprisingly small set of new cultural policies

2. The new policy agenda is moving towards creative and cultural industries, community access and participation, young and emerging artists and indigenous arts

3. Peter Garrett has ignored certain parts of the sector (new media arts, publishing, festivals), and faces significant challenges in other parts (the future of the major performing arts sector, the need for an over-arching Australian cultural policy)

4. What this means for artists and arts organisations is “steady-as-she-goes”

5. There is one very important symbolic development: we now have a Government which says it values the arts

1. What Labor promised

As Erik Jensen noted in his December 3^rd Sydney Morning Herald interview with newly-elected Arts Minister Peter Garrett, Labor’s “language is positive but short on detail.”

After releasing a wide-ranging and thoughtful discussion paper in 2006, Garrett went to the Australian voters with a surprisingly small policy platform. There were some notable policy directions, but few new dollars promised. Where money was promised, it was in small initiatives - $2.4 million for community broadcasters, $10 million for a community arts strategy, and extra funding for Indigenous art centres.

Broadly, Labor’s arts policy promises can be grouped as follows:

Australia Council reform

Labor is committed to the “independence and transparency” of the Australia Council. Board appointments will include “practising artists, young people and creative entrepreneurs,” peer review will be strengthened, while arts funding programs that sat under the previous DCITA department will be moved into OzCo. Dance and the small-to-medium theatre sectors will each get a Sector Plan with Myer/Nugent-like funding recommendations.

Cultural industry policies: digital media, contemporary music, screen

Labor has keenly embraced the rhetoric of the “creative industries” and a focus on arts entrepreneurship looks set to be a major policy driver for Garrett’s term. A Strategic Digital Industry Plan will be developed to examine Australia’s $2.8 billion dollar trade deficit in cultural goods – mainly due to the games, CDs and DVDs we import – and which will develop a “framework” to “increase and target innovation investment.” A $17 million Creative Industries Innovation Centre will be set up along the lines of QUT’s Centre for Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (and possibly even located at QUT).

As well as the digital media strategy, there will be a contemporary music strategy which will look at “micro-finance” models for small music labels and includes $2.4 million to continue the Australian Music Radio Airplay Project (AMRAP), a local content initiative for the community radio sector.

The screen sector will also get an industry policy, the Strategic Film and Television Industry Plan, and Labor will implement the previous Government’s Australian Screen Media Support Package. (This is the package currently causing George Miller heartache over whether it will include substantially foreign-financed but locally-made films like Happy Feet 2.)

The main screen policies are:

• merging the old AFC and FFC into a new body called Screen Australia

• establishing the National Film and Sound Archive as a separate statutory authority.

• enacting the Australian Screen Production Incentive – a set of tax offsets for domestic film and TV production (but not financing or marketing costs)

Diversity and Participation

An Australia Council arts and disabilities strategy will be belatedly developed, and the recent work of Regional Arts Australia in pushing for more regional arts support looks likely to be rewarded. National cultural institutions will be pressed to develop charters of operations that include regional touring and the need to “share resources” with the independent sector – a reform which the big institutions may not welcome. There will also be $10 million of new funding for a Creative Communities funding stream, presumably delivered through the Australia Council’s current Community Partnerships program.

Arts education

Arts education will be supported mainly through a series of reviews. Labor will look at the recommendations of the two current reviews into national music and visual arts education and look to work with the states to implement them.

Indigenous arts

Labor is making much of its indigenous arts proposals, pointing out that visual art is the main industry for many outback Aboriginal communities. Apart from the extra money for Indigenous arts centres, the new Government will also introduce a visual art resale royalty bill, levied largely on galleries and auction houses and collected by Viscopy, which will probably be based on Bob McMullan’s private members’ bill from the previous term.

ArtStart

One controversial aspect of Labor’s election platform was ArtStart – a NAVA proposal which will look at the potential for artistic practice to be considered as part of the Mutual Obligation requirements of Centrelink. Labor will develop a ‘Social Security and the Arts’ policy that “harmonises current Australia Council, Centrelink and Australian Tax Office rules and determines the most equitable way to treat earnings and royalty payments for artists currently receiving

welfare.” New initiatives for young and emerging artists are also flagged.

2. Strategic Directions: towards a new cultural policy

For eleven and a half years, the Coalition Government didn’t even have a formally-stated arts policy – though this didn’t stop it from embarking on important policy initiatives from time-to-time, as Senator George Brandis observed when defending his Government’s record on arts policy at a National Press Club speech in September 2007.

Under Howard, arts policy was essentially made in response to crisis-driven public inquiries, from which flowed new funding - but not necessarily substantial reform. So, the Nugent report meant substantial new funds were tipped into the major performing arts sector, while the Myer report saw a similar, smaller package for visual arts and craft. Meanwhile, less favoured sectors like new media arts and community cultural development saw their support reduced or restructured. The result were largely ad hoc policy settings that ANU academic Jennifer Craik has described as having the effect of favouring the big cultural institutions (Craik called it “elite nurturing”).

The Rudd-Garrett agenda is different in several ways. Big institutions are not going to be automatically validated in the new agenda and will instead be asked to work harder on regional touring and emerging artist development. There is a strong commitment to the creative industries and entrepreneurship aspect of cultural policy. Early murmurs from the sector suggest Peter Garrett will be less patient with “art for art’s sake” arguments than many might think. There is also a swing back to support for policies like community engagement, access and participation – both through valuing and nurturing younger artists, and through at least a token amount of support for community arts projects.

3. What Peter Garrett hasn’t promised

Peter Garrett’s arts policies have also ignored some important issues. Here are some things New Directions for the Arts doesn’t promise:

• It doesn’t address the long-term challenges for the operas, orchestras and major performance companies, like ageing audiences, stale repertoire and narrow demographics

• It doesn’t fund an international development program (e.g. an Australian version of the British Council)

• It ignores important sectors of the arts industry – like publishing and festivals

• It doesn’t articulate a long-term strategy for growing local “creative industries” beyond their current boutique status

• It doesn’t resolve the current uncertainty over the final details of the film production tax offset

• It doesn’t restore board status and funding to the Australia Council’s New Media Arts and Community Cultural Development Boards, after the upheavals of recent years. In fact, Garrett has made little mention of the concept of new media arts in general – a strange omission given his policy’s focus on digital media

• It doesn’t provide an over-arching cultural policy for Australia which could draw together the various threads of arts, heritage, communications and media policy.

Finally, Garrett hasn’t promised any substantial new money.

4. What it means for the sector

What will this mean for arts administrators and working artists?

For organisations, it will be more of the same. No new money should be expected, and for the next two budgets at least, it seems likely the Australia Council and its client organisations will have to live off their current resources. New money is flowing to the small-to-medium Australia Council organisations from George Brandis’ previous budget; their challenge will be to improve their sustainability and generate more funds from their business operations. The national cultural institutions may even have to find 2% efficiency dividends this budget. Publishing has been curiously left out of the discussion of Australia’s creative industries, while game design is still apparently not “arty” enough to qualify for the film production package.

For those parts of the sector which did it tough under John Howard, it’s not time to celebrate just yet. Fields like CCD and new media arts will continue to struggle. Survival for independent artists and small collectives will require intimate knowledge of audiences, support across state and local levels of government, and the usual determination and luck.

For working artists, though, life will get a little easier. There won’t be too many extra Australia Council grants available, but Wayne Swan’s tax cuts will actually raise the tax-three threshold significantly at the lower end. This will make a difference for the average artist with an ABN. In the longer term, there is the hope that Centrelink will relax its Mutual Obligation requirements for working, but low-income, artists.

5. Welcome symbolism

Finally, on the symbolic level, the Australian Government now claims to actually like artists. This much, at least, marks a very big shift.

Resources on Australian arts policy

Australia Council Theatre Board, Make it new? some proposals for the future of theatre funding (Australia Council, 2006)

Australian Government. Indigenous Arts Centres Strategy and Action Plan. (Australian Government, 2006)

Australian Labor Party 2007 arts policy, New Directions in the Arts (ALP, 2007).

Jennifer Craik’s recent monograph on Australian arts policy, Re-Visioning Arts and Cultural Policy: Current Impasses and Future Directions (ANU E-press, 2006).

Keith Gallasch’s Art in a cold climate: rethinking the Australia Council. (Platform Papers No. 6: Currency House, 2005).

Kevin McCarthy and co-authors, Gifts of the Muse: reframing the debate about the benefits of the arts. (RAND Corporation Monograph MG-218, 2003).

Bob McMullan’s The Artist’s Resale Rights Bill 2006 (Commonwealth of Australia, House of Representatives, 2006)

Rupert Myer’s Report on the Contemporary Visual Arts and Craft Inquiry (Australian Government, 2002).

Helen Nugent’s Securing the Future: Inquiring into the Major Performing Arts (Australian Government, 1999)

James Strong’s A New Era: Report of the Orchestras Review 2005 (Australian Government, 2005)

Marcus Westbury’s TV show on Australian culture (available for download on the ABC website), Not Quite Art (ABC-TV, 2007)