The river or the boat? - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 23: Essentially Creative
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Julian Meyrick
ALL ROADS LEAD TO THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL, an institution used and abused, punished both for having had the temerity to stand up for artists and for not doing enough. Time and politics have long worn away the effectiveness of its advocacy. It must be found again. The elaborate arm's length and peer review structures touted as the Council's most precious asset are less important than the fact the agency is an expression of the country's deepest understanding of creative practice. It deserves not derision, but militant support that puts its values once again at the heart of cultural policy. It has its problems and dysfunctions, but these need addressing not excoriating.
The money involved in all this is, if not insubstantial, less than generally believed. Because the funding debate is so often framed in redistributive terms, the absolute amounts and what they represent get lost. Yet the economic impact of the cultural sector shows a tsunami of contribution against a trickle of direct subsidy. In 2005-06, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that the recreational and cultural sector produced goods and services worth just under $26 billion, or 1.5 per cent of gross domestic product, with a value-added component of $10 billion. Expenses represented 1.6 per cent of government expenditure, or $12 billion out of $335 billion (a small outlay for a big result).
But ‘culture' is widely defined by the ABS, and includes everything from dog-racing to opera. The Cultural Ministers Council exclude the dogs and put cultural funding at $5.5 billion. This seems a lot until you realise that 61 per cent of federal money goes to film and broadcasting and 39 per cent of state support to parks and gardens. There is also a hefty heritage component dedicated to the upkeep of museums, libraries, galleries, archives, aquaria, zoos and the like.
When heritage and broadcasting are taken out, $264 million is left for the arts proper - about 5 per cent of all government cultural expenditure. In 2005-06, the Australia Council dispensed most of this ($157 million). The lion's share - more than a hundred million dollars - went to the performing arts organisations. But most of this money goes to music and the upkeep of orchestras, an area with a low rate of capital substitution (you can't replace a horn section with a moog synthesiser). The remaining organisations get what's left. My old employer, the Melbourne Theatre Company - one of the largest repertory theatres in the country - received total government subsidy of just over $1.5 million that financial year, about 11 per cent of revenue, extremely modest by international standards. For individual artists, the situation is even more dire. Professor David Throsby has tracked the earnings of artists since the early 1980s. His report, Don't give up your day job (2003), shows the reality for most practitioners - average annual earnings of less than $20,000.
Compare this with funding for sport. Although it represents a smaller proportion of recreational and cultural expenses (about $2 billion), money spent on elite sport through the Australian Sports Commission and the Australian Institute of Sport is justified in terms remarkably similar to cultural subsidy. By contrast with the arts, there is no coyness about the word ‘elite'. The AIS uses it three times in the first paragraph of its self-description. The investment during the run-up to the Beijing Olympics brought well publicised results: thirteen gold medals - estimated to cost Australian taxpayers $16.7 million each in direct support. When infrastructure and non-AIS elite sports programs are added the figure is much higher (perhaps $100 million each). After the ‘humiliation' of Beijing, the ASC demanded more money in preparation for 2012 Olympics, arguing Australian sport ‘was on the verge of a crisis'.
I like sport. I enjoy watching and playing it. I do not begrudge the money elite athletes earn as they strike me as being under similar pressures to elite artists. But the differences in their social reception are profound. Australians understand sport. They have good, if inflated, ideas about its benefits. No matter how esoteric or occasional, there is a place in public life for any sporting activity worthy of the name. Knowledgeable commentators flock around it and professionals, enthusiastic amateurs and spectators combine to define its identity. Not so the arts which, despite their presence in our everyday lives, are regarded as at best a personal preference, at worst an expensive foreign or historical imposition.
To transform this situation requires time and leadership. The work of artists gathers and gathers, an immense, furious investigation into who we are, what we are. This is the job of art: to strike at the insensibility of quotidian life and open us to new thoughts, feelings, sensations. The outcome can not be mandated, but the process can be supported. That's where leadership comes in. The academy, the government and practitioners themselves have a duty to work together to define a way forward. Together: the word cannot be stressed enough. ‘Australia is a lucky country,' goes Donald Horne's famous quote. ‘Run by second-rate men who share its luck' it continues. We are a lucky country still - lucky in life, lucky in art. It is our second-rate ideas about them that need to change. ♦