Arts soft target for cuts by Gunduz Kalic

The Australian arts community must prepare for tough government funding cuts if overseas experience is anything to go on.  How much of the Coalitions $8 billion in cuts will be carved out of government subsidies to the arts?  So far, the question of arts budget cuts has not yet been seriously raised.  Yet if Australia follows overseas trends, our arts can expect considerably less in the way of government largesse in the years ahead.

Budgetary pressures are laying waste to arts subsidies internationally.  In the UK for example, after years of cuts, operating subsidies were chopped back again for 1996 - another 5 million pounds was removed from the Arts Council budget.  Actors Equity protested that, "54 theatres have closed in the past two years.  No more cuts are sustainable". The British Government has since announced an additional 4 million pound cut to commence in 1997.  How much further can it go?

Tony Blair and the British Labour Party have been warmly sympathetic to the financial withdrawal pangs suffered by the arts yet also most careful not to promise any reversal of the cuts.

In the United States, popular opinion has identified much arts funding as a prominent example of governmental financial waste and mismanagement.  Funding to the National Endowment for the Arts has been slashed.  The NEA is limping towards extinction or a greatly diminished role in the American arts, writes prominent American theatre director Richard Schechner.

Are the arts in Australia making any contingency plans in case of austere times ahead?  There is little indication that they are.

A reasonable estimate of total expenditure on the arts in Australia by all levels of government is $1 billion a year.  What does government get for its art dollars?  In America and elsewhere established arts institutions are matter of factly called the official culture.  Common sense would suggest that in the arts, as in most spheres of life, he who pays the piper calls the tune.

Richard Schechner warns innovative or socially critical artmakers that "feeding off the system means to become part of it.  If I were the government, and if I in any way feared the avante garde, or despised it, I would want to continue a system that guarantees the transformation of rebellious or resistant artists into pliant applicant".

Remember the 1995 restructuring of Australia Council arts funding policies to ensure that artists produce, in Council Member Hugh Mackay’s words, according to community interests rather than themselves?  These changes are so far proceeding unaltered under the coalition Government.

Interestingly, the production of Australian content is currently being heavily promoted by State-subsidised theatre companies around the country.  The South Australian Theatre Company will apparently perform nothing but Australian works until the year 2000.  The Melbourne Theatre Company has set a quote of 40 per cent Australian work.

Yet the world class Australian cultural product of the past, in film and rock and roll, for example, was not born out of government guidelines and funding priorities for the arts.  Nor was this work self-consciously Australian - or boring.

Canada seems only now to be recovering from its 'We are good, too aren’t we?' phase.  How long will Australia be burdened with this sort of adolescent syndrome?

When economic realities hit home - when the use of the arts to promote national identity becomes old hat - the odds are better than even that the arts will be left high and dry.  Inevitably, the arts will be downgraded from their current prestige position.  Theatres will close, even more artists will be out of work.

Doubtless, the universities will continue to pump out more acting graduates for guaranteed 95 per cent unemployment.  The arts world will feel let down and miserable.  But instead of whinging, the arts ought to get back to the real world.

This article appeared in the Australian Financial Review, June 17, 1996.