So we have just had our first presentation of Australian Honours under the new Labor government. (more…)
Richard Letts
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RICHARD LETTS. National Opera Review: propping up the 19th Century
The National Opera Review has reported. Instigator George Brandis is probably well enough satisfied.
The Terms of Reference are pure Brandis. The name is National Opera Review, the game is a review of the four larger companies funded by the Commonwealth. Excluded are the Victorian Opera and the numerous small companies that are the growing edge of opera in Australia. (more…)
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Richard Letts. Mitch Fifield should dump it while he can.
In a Senate Estimates hearing this week, the new Arts Minister Mitch Fifield was gently questioned for ten minutes by Senator Scott Ludlam about his intentions with regard to the future of arts support: in particular, did he intend to implement the plan of his displaced predecessor, Senator George Brandis, to use funds taken from the budget of the Australia Council to set up a new fund under direct Ministerial control. This scheme created open warfare between Brandis and his arts constituency and doubtless was the reason for his removal from the post in PM Turnbull’s ministry reshuffle.
Fifield dodged and weaved. To be fair, he is still warming his seat as Minister for Communications and the Arts. But he has been left a mess, and no government action in living memory has put the arts in such a precarious position. If Fifield perseveres with Brandis’s plan, there will be enormous damage. He should at the least postpone that decision until he knows what he is doing.
The funding to the Australia Council was divided by Brandis into two categories: support to major performing arts organisations – the large theatre, dance and circus organisations, the orchestras and opera companies – and everything else. Support to the major performing arts organisations has been quarantined over the last two budgets. Support to everything else has been halved, firstly by a cut to the arts budget in 2014 and then, in 2015, by Brandis’s raid on that part of the Australia Council budget that does not go to the major companies.
Brandis never gave a coherent explanation of his policy intentions. He pointed out that the overall funding to the arts had not been cut. However, in a one-sentence improvisation in a Senate Estimates hearing, he said that his main intention was to give more funding to the major performing arts companies. So the major companies retain all of their ongoing funding, and will receive more from the funds removed from the Australia Council.
Of the $26m a year taken from the Australia Council, Brandis announced that $19m will be distributed via his National Program for Excellence in the Arts (NPEA). That will be divided into support for international touring (intended recipients: the major companies), matching grants for funds secured from the private sector (de facto recipients, the major companies, which have staff members devoted to fund raising), and the rest to “strategic projects” for which small organisations can apply. That leaves $7m. Could it be that the intention for this money was to fund the recommendations of Brandis’s National Opera Review?
Excluded from applying for NPEA support are individual artists (Brandis was dismissive of them as interested only in creating art – bye bye Beethoven; a recent statement from Malcolm Turnbull was even more scathing – indeed was the sort of abuse that many people direct at politicians.) Also excluded were applications for “operational” funding – the core funding that enables an arts organisation to have a continuing existence.
The NPEA would fund projects – one-off exercises that certainly are important but only in a scatter-gun sort of way support the existence of the art world. Private donors like the in-and-out thrill of project funding. It is governments that give ongoing core funding, the funding that allows an organisation to build skills, audiences, supporters, mount projects, raise money.
So the Australia Council is left with sole responsibility for funding operational budgets and it mainly does this through support to 145 “key organisations”. These are the small to medium sized organisations that make up a sort of informal infrastructure for the arts in Australia. The Australia Council has suggested that in the new circumstances, it may have to delete support to about half of them.
Here from the list are the “A’s”. (This being Australia, there is a bias towards national support organisations cf production/presentation organisations.) If the Australia Council has to close half of these organisations, which will they be?
- Arena Theatre Company Ltd – 50 year-old theatre for young people, Melbourne
- Art Gallery of SA (Adelaide Biennial)
- Art Monthly Australia – major periodical for visual arts
- Art on the Move WA. Organises state, interstate and international tours of visual arts exhibitions
- Artback NT – visual and performing arts touring agency
- Artlink Australia. Quarterly magazine covering contemporary art and ideas from the Asia-Pacific
- Arts Access Australia – arts participation for the disabled. The national body.
- Arts Access Society Inc. The Victorian body.
- Arts Law Centre of Australia – legal advice to artists and arts organisations, policy formulations in advice to governments
- Artspace Visual Arts Centre Ltd – gallery in Sydney
- Asialink University of Melbourne – support to artist residencies, collaborations with Asian countries
- Asian Australian Artists Association Inc
- Assoc of Northern Kimberley & Arnhem Aboriginal Artists
- Ausdance National – national organisation that speaks for the dance world, provides services to dancers and dance companies
- Australian Art Orchestra Ltd – Australia’s only improvising orchestra
- Australian Book Review Inc – monthly literary review, also gives annual awards
- Australian Centre for Contemporary Art – major public contemporary arts space, in Melbourne
- Australian Children’s Performing Arts Co t/a Windmill – children’s theatre company in Adelaide
- Australian Copyright Council Ltd – the main copyright organisation in Australia
- Australian Dance Theatre – one of the main contemporary dance companies. Based in Adelaide.
- Australian Experimental Art Foundation Incorporated – important Adelaide organisation combining a gallery, bookshop and residency studio
- Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) – innovations at the interface between arts and technology
- Australian Poetry Limited publishes Australian Poetry Journal inter alia
- Australian Script Centre collects, catalogues, promotes and distributes unpublished Australian plays and now holds hundreds of scripts.
- Australian Society of Authors – the professional association for literary authors
- Australian String Quartet Inc – one of Australia’s main string quartets; there are only 11 with a continuing existence
- Australian Theatre for Young People – major Sydney company for young actors
- Australian Writers Guild Ltd – the professional association for Australian performance writers including film, television, theatre, radio and digital media.
One year ago, then-Minister Brandis announced that he would take half of the funds provided by the Australia Council to literature and with them create a national book council, which would distribute the funds on new criteria decided, presumably, by the Minister and the commercial industry. There is still no book council and arrangements are in limbo.
The Minister announced the redirection of the Australia Council funds at budget time in May. There are still no guidelines for application to the National Program for Excellence in the Arts.
Beyond the ineptitude in instigating and following through on his scheme, the problem with this whole initiative is that it seems simply to be an indulgence of the Minister’s personal artistic taste. There is no sense of an understanding of the ecology of the whole of the cultural sector, the interdependence of its parts. The arm’s-length status of funding under the Australia Council is bypassed in favour of direct ministerial control, leaving the arts open to political favouritism or censorship – only a good idea when your own side is in power. Pork-barrelling was seen, in the May Estimates hearing, as an exercise in democratic government. There is no sense of the importance of artistic creation. Malcolm Turnbull has said that we will be an innovative nation but the government’s arts policies withdraw support from the artists and organisations most responsible for artistic innovation. Mitch Fifield should dump the Brandis scheme while he has the chance. There is nothing in it for him.
Michael Naphthali was Minister Brandis’s chief arts advisor and Naphthali and Brandis made very similar statements about these initiatives in the middle of the year. Naphthali was on the Board of the Australian World Orchestra – which to date is by far the principal beneficiary of the new arrangements. (The lack of guidelines and applications did not deter Minister Brandis from deciding upon a number of handsome grants.) There is some speculation that Michael Naphthali was an originator of the Brandis scheme. At the least, they appear to have sung from the same hymn book.
Malcolm Turnbull has just appointed Michael Naphthali as his arts advisor.
Dr Richard Letts is Director of the Music Trust. In the 1980s he was Director of the Music Board of the Australia Council. He was founder and CEO of the Music Council of Australia (now Music Australia) and is a past President of the International Music Council.
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Richard Letts. George Brandis’ hobby.
George Brandis’s day job is as Commonwealth Attorney-General. He is also Arts Minister, which on the evidence he treats as a sort of hobby. He has been responsible now for two annual arts budgets. In the 2014 budget, there was a cut to arts funding but he quarantined from the cut the 28 major performing arts organisations funded through the Australia Council; these are the main orchestras, opera companies, theatre companies, dance/ballet companies, Musica Viva and Circus Oz. They were quarantined again in 2015, not from an overall funding cut to the arts, but from a raid by Brandis himself on the funds of the Australia Council.
Brandis took about $26 million a year for the next four years and transferred it to his own Ministry. The result over the two years is that about half of the funds available to all other grantees – the small to medium sized organisations and the individual artists – has been taken from the Australia Council. It could set Australian arts back decades.
Under the Australia Council legislation, the Arts Minister can instruct the Council in matters of policy, just as he can his own Ministry. The Council must now prepare an annual Corporate Plan which must be approved by the Minister and has been so approved by Brandis. Given this high level of control, why would the Minister feel the need to transfer funds out of the Australia Council to his Ministry? The most obvious answer is that at the Ministry, he can decide, grant by grant, who will or will not be funded. He is prevented by legislation from instructing the Australia Council on individual grants – the “arm’s-length principle”. Perhaps a secondary advantage is that he can dictate policy at the Ministry without having to contend with informed argument as he might at the Australia Council.
In the course of a Senate Estimates hearing on May 27, the Minister was asked whether he found the decisions coming from the Australia Council to be problematical. He implied that he did, that its interests were rather narrow, but was unable to give examples. In fact, he has made no considered, defensible policy statement about the purpose of the transfer of funds. Even if he had identified matters with which he is dissatisfied, the Australia Council, as he should know, is right now after years of planning introducing a new regime which is intended to widen its scope. A rational response would be to wait to see the outcomes and then seek to improve them further.
However, there was one statement from Senator Brandis in that Estimates hearing that gives the game away, in part at least. “We want to spend more on developing our arts companies, which is why we have created this new fund.” He means the 28 major companies. The statement is consistent with his actions. He has quarantined them from cuts. He has defined three directions for the use of the new Ministry funds, one of which is to support the major companies in additional touring, and the second is to support companies in seeking private support – and it is the large companies that have fund-raising staff that can best take advantage of that program. (The remaining funds, for “strategic projects”, can go to SMEs.) Of the $26 million available each year, only $20 million will be spent on the programs so far named. For the other $6 million, apart from funds needed for administration, we could conjecture that additional support will be provided to implement the recommendations of the Minister’s review of the major opera companies, to report later this year.
Also on May 27, Senator Brandis said: “But let us not forget that the major performing arts companies are the heart and soul of the performing arts sector in this country. They are the big employers of artists and arts workers. They are the people who undertake most of the touring, including the regional touring, as well as the international touring.
“They are the people who provide the performances that the great [?] audiences of Australia enjoy. As I have always said, one of my misgivings about the exclusive peer-to-peer funding model is: who represents the audience around the table? The minister, being the responsible officer in charge of taxpayers’ money, has to be the voice for audiences. What are the shows, what are the performances, what are the concerts that the audiences go to? Primarily, they go to the performances of the major performing arts companies, whether it be drama, music, opera, ballet, dance or whatever art form it may be. It is very important to remember that their interests, and therefore the interests of the great audiences and the arts public of Australia, have been protected…”
I certainly agree that the orchestras and opera companies are the economic engine of the classical music sector. They are the major source of organised employment that gives some rationality to a young person’s decision to invest years of their lives in training as classical musicians. They account for a large if unknown percentage of paid attendances for classical music. But Live Performance Australia’s data show that including Musica Viva, they account for 7.7% of ticket sales, as against 42.5% for contemporary music, even though the latter probably omits attendances at small venues.
But is not the Minister’s perception of himself as the hero-defender of the audience a little peculiar? It’s as though he has been musing one day on what possible useful role he might play in the arts portfolio and suddenly realised that among the Australia Council’s expert artist-peers there are no (inexpert) representative of the audience. Presto – Ministerial relevance! Does he think that the companies do not consider what is popular with audiences? Why then is there hardly an Opera Australia year without a long season of La Bohéme? The audience speaks softly but it carries a big stick – it buys tickets or it doesn’t.
Minister Brandis to The Australian on June 21, 2014, when he first announced his crusade for the audience: “Frankly I’m more interested in funding arts companies that cater to the great audiences that want to see quality drama, or music or dance, than I am in subsidising individual artists responsible only to themselves.” * (Now he has announced that his new fund will not give grants to individual artists.)
This is an astounding statement from an Arts Minister. Of course, the individual artist must give him- or herself to their own process. But does the Minister think that individual artists have no concern for the views of the organisations that may put their work before the public, or the public reception?
But this Minister seems to have no interest in the creation of art, no sense that we are in a time of great artistic flux and invention. He likes the safety of the heritage, culled over centuries. The transfer of funds seems to be about indulging the Minister’s personal artistic preferences and values.
What we need the Minister to do is understand the entire ecology. We need to build audiences not only for the performing arts canon, but the arts of our time and place. The individual artists and small companies are the incubators, the risk-takers, the innovators, a training ground. Even the major companies acknowledge this. An informed arts minister finds ways to support audience building, perhaps for crowd-pleasers but especially for the art that finds the way forward.
This is a summary of part of the following submission: http://musictrust.com.au/list-of-projects/senate-inquiry-into-the-impact-of-the-2014-and-2015-commonwealth-budget-decisions-on-the-arts/
*When a playwright sits amongst an audience and shifts their eyes sideways to take in an expression of submission, when a playwright hears the laughter or feels the transition of reality from auditorium to stage, a transition that happens in a mutual seduction of artists and audiences – that is the moment when a playwright succumbs to the love-affair of a writing life – a love affair with that amorphous, sometimes frustrating, occasionally disappointing and often inspiring lover: the audience.
We don’t talk about our lover very often. We think of ourselves as more interesting. The audience encourages this by fanning the flames of our self-importance. And in the full swing of our egocentric flourishes, we sometimes forget them – but we do so at our peril. Everything we are, everything we want, everything we need and everything we aspire to is in their hands.
– Playwright Joanna Murray-Smith, writing coincidentally in the Daily Review, July 24.
Dr Richard Letts is Director of the Music Trust. In the 1980s he was Director of the Music Board of the Australia Council. He was founder and CEO of the Music Council of Australia (now Music Australia) and is a past President of the International Music Council.