George Brandis’ raid on the Australia Council threatens many small arts companies with extinction, writes Ben Eltham.
Those most affected by the diversion of funds from the Australia Council to the new National Programme for Excellence in the Arts are the 141 so-called Key Organisations currently supported by the Australia Council. Collectively, they represent most of what the Australian cultural industries calls the ‘small-to-medium’ sector.
The small-to-medium sector is made up of not-for-profit cultural organisations, particularly in the performing arts, visual arts and literature. It is important. Minister for the Arts Senator George Brandis certainly used to think so.
Way back in 2007, when he was the final Arts Minister of the Howard government, Brandis announced a funding increase to the sector. ‘The entire industry will be greatly buoyed by this announcement,’ he told the Senate on June 13th that year, singling out for special mention ‘the decision to invest in the small-to-medium arts sector.’
The reason for giving the smaller companies more funding in 2007 was that they were the organisations creating the bulk of the new work: the innovative, experimental and original stuff that many artists have always considered to be the main reason to make art. ‘The Government recognises the importance of these companies as the engine room of creativity in the arts sector and as a breeding ground for emerging artistic talent,’ former Australia Council CEO Kathy Keele said at the time.
Fast forward to 2015, and Minister Brandis has just implemented one of the largest funding cuts to the small-to-medium sector in Commonwealth history.
The future of many smaller arts companies must now be at risk.
Why? It’s all in the arithmetic. If you do the maths on Minister Brandis’ excellence raid, serious pain for the small-to-medium sector is inevitable.
To see why, let’s examine what happened last Tuesday night.
The Abbott government did a number of things to the funding mix of the Australia Council in the 2015 budget. All of them will negatively impact the Key Organisations.
Firstly, the budget imposed efficiency dividends of $7.3 million over four years on the Australia Council. To this you can add a $6 million cut over three years, directed to the nascent Books Industry Council. Finally, of course, Brandis took a whopping $104.8 million over four years for his new National Programme for Excellence in the Arts.
With the Minister’s promise to quarantine the majors, it is obviously the small-to-mediums face a loss of a quarter of their Australia Council funding. The pain from the budget cuts will fall on the funding pools currently devoted to everything but the majors: individual grants, the key organisations, and the Australia Council’s staffing and on-costs.
The Attorney-General’s Department Portfolio Budget Statement and the Australia Council’s most recent annual reports allow us to quantify the austerity.
In 2013-14, the final year of the Rudd-Gillard government, the Australia Council received an appropriation of $218.7 million from the federal treasury. It distributed $199.2 million in cultural grants. $102.2 million went to the 28 major performing arts companies. That left $97 million for grants to the small-to-medium sector and independent artists.
In 2015-16, the Australia Council’s appropriation is just $184.5 million. Because the major performing arts sector has been quarantined from all the funding cuts of the Brandis era, funding for the majors is still governed by the 2011 National Framework agreement between the states and the Commonwealth. This means funding for the majors will actually increase, rising in line with inflation (currently running at 2.5 per cent). Funding for the major performing arts companies this year will probably be somewhere in the order of $107.3 million. At least $2 million must then be subtracted this year for the new Books Industry Council.
This leaves just $75.2 million for everything else. The Australia Council’s administration, staffing and on-costs must also be subtracted as well. Even if we assume some redundancies inside the headquarters at Surry Hills, it’s difficult to see how the Australia Council can distribute more than $60 million in grants to the small-to-medium and independent sector.
The upshot? A funding cut of 30 per cent (perhaps more) to the funding available to the 141 Key Organisations is locked in.
Arts Hub has requested funding projections from the Australia Council. We were told the agency is still crunching the numbers in an attempt to work through the implications of the budget. But the implacable arithmetic leaves the Australia Council with little room to move.
As many in the industry will be aware, the funding cuts come at an extremely delicate time for the small-to-medium sector. The Council was in the process of assessing six-year funding agreements for the key organisations, ironically with the intention of guaranteeing them more funding certainty.
The six-year funding round is now in limbo, with Australia Council CEO writing to the sector this week to effectively suspend the entire process. “Given the significance of this unexpected budget announcement I need to advise you that the timeline for notification regarding the outcomes of the EOI process has been impacted,” Grybowski wrote. ‘The Council is undertaking an immediate review of our activities in the context of the budget measures, so that we can identify what programs we are able to deliver in future,’ he added. In other words: all bets are off.
Grybowski and Australia Council chair Rupert Myer are in an invidious situation. There is almost no way the Council can offer the six-year agreements as they were originally envisaged. Either far fewer key organisations can be funded, or all can be funded at far lower levels.
Grant pools for individual projects and artists are also going to be affected. Again, the size of the surgery is unknown, but it will be an amputation rather than a trim. A one-third reduction in the size of the available pool must inevitably reduce the number of successful applicants. It will be savage austerity all round.
Is there any good news? Supposedly, some organisations and artists will be able to apply to the new excellence programme. However, with no funding criteria published, no funding rounds current, and no application dates announced, uncertainty abounds.
What would a savage cut to funding for the small-to-medium sector look like?
There is a recent precedent, in Queensland. In 2012, the newly-elected Newman government slashed funding for the state’s small-to-medium companies by 34 per cent. Twelve companies were defunded entirely, and the rest of the sector made do with deep cuts to their state-based funding. Arts Hub explored the political machinations behind the decision in a three-part investigation in 2013.
Predictably, the result was widespread devastation in the sector. A number of smaller companies folded, including Youth Arts Queensland and Contact Inc. Many that survived cut staff, closed venues and wound back projects. The Queensland Centre for Photography, for instance, shuttered its gallery in South Brisbane and its respected director, Maurice Ortega, stepped down from paid work. Job losses are
In November 2014, Arts Hub revisited Queensland in the wake of the funding cuts. We discovered a sector struggling to survive the consequences of the funding shock. Anecdotal evidence suggests younger artists are moving away from Brisbane; a number of independent art spaces and artist-run initiatives have closed.
When Queensland’s small-to-medium cuts were announced in 2013, arts leaders warned that the northern experience might be repeated under a Coalition federal government. ATYP’s Fraser Corfield cautioned that the Queensland cutbacks ‘nationally set a really dangerous precedent.’ Footscray Community Arts Centre’s Jade Lillie told us that ‘I am concerned that the Queensland context is a sign of what is to come at a national level.’
And so it has come to pass. Now the Australia Council and the Key Organisations are scrambling to work out just who will survive.
