Speeches by Tony Burke and George Brandis at Blacktown Arts Centre on Monday may be the closest thing we get to an arts debate this election.
Arts Minister Tony Burke and Opposition Arts spokesman George Brandis were in western Sydney on Monday to speak at a function at Blacktown Arts Centre. It was the closest thing we may get to an election debate on the Arts portfolio.
What did we learn? Quite a lot actually. While some have been reporting that neither party have put forward any arts policies, the reality is rather different. Labor has a comprehensive arts policy on the table in the form of Creative Australia. The Coalition has a sophisticated philosophical vision for the arts, but also wants to cut funding.
Labor is campaigning on the benefits set the flow from Creative Australia in a third-term Labor government. After a four-year gestation period, Labor’s $235 million Creative Australia policy is only months old, and the new money is just starting to flow to bodies like the Australia Council and Screen Australia.
The government has also made an impressive series of commitments since the release of Creative Australia, including new funding for the National Live Music Office, the full funding of digital transmission for community radio, the delivery of the national arts curriculum, funding for Renew Australia, and 898 Creative Young Stars grants to local artists in the community.
In contrast, the Coalition has nothing on the table in dollar terms. Indeed, the Opposition has foreshadowed cuts to cultural funding, with Senator Brandis telling The Australian newspaper that there would be ‘economies’ in a ‘budget-constrained environment.’ Creative Young Stars will go, but beyond that, extracting further details about such economies from Senator Brandis’ office – or any response at all – has proved rather difficult.
Monday’s debate at Blacktown Arts Centre therefore represents the best opportunity to compare the two major parties’ visions for the sector.
For Arts Minister Tony Burke, the debate was an occasion to warn of the dangers of Coalition arts funding cuts, as well as to highlight Labor’s ‘deep understanding’ of the importance of culture to the nation. He honed in on Labor’s policy achievements and argued they would be at risk under the Coalition.
While both sides support the arts, Burke argued that what’s different about Labor is that it has a unified approach to cultural policy embodied in the national cultural policy. ‘There is a sustenance and a creativity that the arts deliver that actually doesn’t just change or affect the fabric of the nation, but in many ways is the fabric of the nation,’ the Arts Minister said.
‘If you believe peer review matters and if you believe arm’s length funding matters … If you believe the growth in the artistic sector that we have seen over the last couple of generations has enriched us, then you will understand why I have given the speech the focus that I have.’
Brandis gave an expansive speech setting out his priorities as an Abbott government arts minister. ‘It is a simple truth, uncontroverted by all but the most one-eyed partisan, that arts policy has been neglected in the period of this government,’ he argued, presumably referring to the fact that it took Labor until late in its second term to deliver Creative Australia.
As outlined by Senator Brandis, Coalition arts policy will be based on six principles: excellence, integrity, artistic freedom, self-confidence sustainability and accessibility. In keeping with Brandis’ legal training, the six points were argued closely and with considerable flair. But with no policy details available, it’s difficult to know how they will translate in government.
Point one, for instance, is excellence, which in arts policy is generally taken to mean a commitment to the elite performing arts organisations in the Major Performing Arts Board of the Australia Council. ‘Arts policy – and public money invested in the arts – have too often rewarded inwardness, mediocrity and political correctness, in the name of avoiding the elitist tag,’ Brandis said. ‘The identification of the celebration of excellence with the defence of elitism is both self-limiting and ignorant.’ Brandis seems to be calling for a return to a celebration of the ‘high arts’, which in another part of the speech he celebrates as ‘the great classical works and artistic movements which have shaped and defined Western civilization.’
Under the heading of integrity, Brandis calls for the support of the arts for their own sake. ‘A thriving and healthy arts sector is an intrinsically good thing, which needs no justification other than the good which it itself brings to a decent, sophisticated and liberal society,’ he claimed.
Under the rubric of ‘freedom’ and ‘self-confidence’, Brandis sketched a vision of the arts as outward-looking, vibrant and international, which he contrasts to what he sees as the narrow tastes of the inner-city elites. ‘As a first step,’ he promised that ‘a Coalition Government would re-establish the Australian International Cultural Council – abolished by Labor – to revive the international dimension of our cultural policies.’
When it comes to ‘accessibility’, Brandis seemed to be advocating for more regional funding. ‘The Coalition knows that, throughout Australia, in the regions no less than the big cities, the suburbs no ​less than the inner cities, there is a devoted arts public and devoted arts practitioners, who are entitled to reasonable access to the arts funding dollar,’ he said.
Despite the lofty rhetoric, there are plenty of inconsistencies in Brandis’ vision. It’s hard to square the criticism of inner-city arts elites with his support for excellence and great classical works: the two are essentially the same thing. It is the major performing arts companies and the big state galleries that present the classical repertoire, largely in venues in the middle of capital cities, and it is high-income, highly educated urban audiences that attend them.
Similarly, Brandis’ support for artistic freedom doesn’t seem to line up with his criticism of trendy postmodernism and his attempt to amend the Australia Council Act to allow ministerial interference in funding decisions. If artists are to have freedom of expression, surely that includes unpopular and, yes, ‘politically correct’ work.
As Burke pointed out on Monday, ‘if you believe in arm’s length funding then you can’t support political interference, but political interference is exactly how the Liberal and National parties tried to change the law.’
In his rejoinder to Burke, Brandis denied he had made the amendment, calling that a ‘a spectacularly brazen lie.’
Unfortunately for Brandis, the Hansard supports Tony Burke. Brandis did indeed move an amendment to allow the minister to interfere with Australia Council decisions. The clause read ‘a direction by the Minister will in all cases prevail over a direction by the Board.’
Brandis argues it wouldn’t have affected funding decisions, but Burke says that amounted to a line-item veto that would have been ‘the most fundamental change to the structure of federal funding and federal support for the arts we have ever seen.’
(Pictured: The closest thing we get to an arts debate)
