Let the arts perform with a GST by Gunduz Kalic

Not a tragedy, but rather a farce - and the plot is thickening! Australia's major performing arts companies are presently playing the impoverished artist role to the hilt, as the GST looms nearer. Claiming that up to a third of the twenty five major companies would likely go bankrupt under the proposed GST regime, the performing arts is asking for special treatment. In recent testimony before the Senate GST inquiry's environment and arts committee, Australia Council general manager Jennifer Bott urged the Government to financially compensate the arts for the impact of the GST, as "it was doing for small business".

Interestingly, the Howard Government that Bott and performing arts executives from around the country have been simultaneously supplicating and chastising won re-election with a campaign that included television spots advising voters that "a vote for Labor is a vote for the elite arts". Further, this same Government is currently conducting an inquiry - headed by Dr. Helen Nugent and accepting submissions until the end of this month - into the chronically parlous financial state of Australia's government subsidized major performing arts companies.

The straightforward fact of the matter, as the Government is no doubt painfully well aware, is that "bankruptcy", that is, ballooning losses and/or intermittent, on-the-quiet financial bailouts by state (and federal) governments has in recent years become the normal state of affairs for many performing arts companies. Certain companies would appear to be only barely hanging on. However, the GST should not, in this gloomy Dickensian scenario, be melodramatically cast as a cruel and dark spectre about to sever the life-thread of arts companies, thereby closing them down and putting poor artists out on the street. Rather, the imminence of significant tax reform could be used as a trigger for a long overdue program of structural reform of the arts sector.

There should be no compensation packages, no exemption for the arts from the GST. As well as being ill conceived on economic grounds, a set of social priorities which saw the arts at or near the head of the queue for favored treatment would likely be felt to be bizarre and alienating by most Australians. The distance between "the people" and the arts capitalized upon by the Coalition at the last election would only be exacerbated. Instead, it would be well to lift heads from sand and reckon squarely with the malaise besetting the major performing arts companies. The bottom line is that it is only a tiny percentage of the population that actually attends the theatre, dance and opera put on by flagship arts companies; in the order of one to three percent. This embarrassing reality, which is obscured by statements in annual reports such as '266,000 people attended the productions of the Sydney Theatre Company in 1997', is readily discovered by making mathematical allowance for season ticket-holders who have been counted multiple times in the generation of such figures. Thus a generous guesstimate of actual audience in the Australian capital city which claims the largest audience figures for its standard season - Melbourne - is 100,000. Whether or not these playgoers comprise an 'elite', certainly they are (perhaps without knowing) a well looked after minority; being three percent of their metropolis subsidized by Government an average of $34 per person per play.

That performing arts companies play - and market - to the tastes of the few (whose enjoyment is heavily supported by the taxes of the many) whilst earnestly claiming on their mission statements to play for all is at the heart of their difficulty. This practice derives from the nineteenth century separation of high culture from the marketplace for popular entertainment and is now - in this era of burgeoning cultural industries - "bankrupt" itself.

It is little known that, as well as being in the circus business, PT Barnum produced credible and commercially successful Shakespeare. Repugnant as it may seem to some, circuses of his time often numbered in their ranks 'Shakespearean clowns'; performers who entertained popular audiences with scenes from the Bard amongst the hurly burly of all the other acts. In order to survive, the arts do not need to be protected behind a wall of government subsidy and styles of artistry dictated by minority taste. On the contrary, the quarantining of flagship performing arts companies from the market has, over time, drained them of artistic and commercial adaptability, and ensured their ongoing - and in some cases, worsening - dependency upon government largesse.

To exempt peak performing arts organizations from a GST, besides being inequitable, is only to encourage them to keep playing that most tiresome of roles, supplicant to the public purse. There are solutions to the arts malaise - and they lie in the direction of the popular entertainment marketplace.

This article appeared in the Australian Financial Review, March 31, 1999.