Vessel’s Play for Australia, Arts Centre Melbourne. Playwrights Candy Bowers, Angus Cameron & Tania Cañas. Photo credit: James Penlidis.
Dear Regional Arts Australia (RAA) Board,
I write to you after my experience at ARTLANDS 2018 and ARTLANDS Dubbo, Kalgoorlie and Goolwa.
I am a regional artist based on Bunurong land in the Bass Coast of Victoria.
I make theatre.
I wish to thank you for the work you do.
I also wish to thank your chair, Simon Spain, for his moving and personal story at the closing ceremony at ARTLANDS Victoria.
It was both humbling and galvanising to listen to such a deeply personal story shared with such courage and honour.
I also feel inspired that RAA has moved to take control of ARTLANDS for the foreseeable future. While I do not know what this means in reality, I believe the shift is a very good thing.
I also wish to share my thoughts regarding the direction of RAA in regards to reinstating Regional Arts Fund (RAF) funding to former levels. At first blush of course this is a positive. Of course we want to see more funding and especially for artists. I have deep concerns about where the funding goes in terms of funding regional artists in terms of cost to deliver funding to an artist. I fear, without any evidence at hand to be honest, that the cost to deliver small amounts of funding to artists far outweighs the actual amounts delivered to artists. I am happy to be proved wrong but I would enjoy seeing how this stacks up in each state. I seek this as something that should be publicly shared.
However, my primary concern is that redressing the funding of the RAF to former levels simply does not go far enough.
The following data is from the Regional Universities Network website:
32.7% of Australians lived outside greater capital city areas and 28.2% lived outside major cities in mid-2017. (The total population of Australia was estimated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to be almost 24.6m.)
Despite common misconceptions, the population of regional Australia is rising. Between 2007 and 2017, the population outside of Australia’s major cities grew by 10.6%. The ABS projects that the population outside capital cities will grow by 26% between 2007 and 2026.
If indeed regional Australia makes up over 30% of the population currently, approximately eight million people, then we should seek funding that reflects that. A return to $22 million which is no longer worth $22 million is simply not good enough.
The figure should better reflect the regional population and at least $50 million should be sought. At least.
The time is now, not after the election in 2019, to lobby prospective governments to make a commitment to this figure. And it is the one point of the closing remarks at ARTLANDS with which I have an issue – that we should wait for a new government to be installed and then lobby for reinstatement. I urge you, do not wait until a new government is installed to achieve commitments. That is simply too late. And $50 million is paltry compared to some singular MPA organisations.
Put simply, more has to be achieved in real dollar terms and I put it to the RAA Board that you need to do more to seek a greater slice of the pie.
Regional artists, regional people, deserve better.
Regards,
Jim Lawson
Creative Director
Vessel
