Facing up to a dominant QPAT by Gunduz Kalic

Brisbane is world class, isn’t it?  In particular, the performing art produced at the Queensland Performing Arts Complex is world class, isn’t it?

Late last year, the outgoing director of the Adelaide Festival, Barry Kosky, created a furore by lampooning the myopic obsession of the Australian cultural elite with having its arts production appear, at all costs, to be of a world standard.

The Queensland Performing Arts Trust, headed by Tony Gould, is in a position of overpowering dominance in the Brisbane arts market.  Under Joan Sheldon’s arts ministry, QPAT’s ascendancy has grown to near-monopoly, something indicated last week by the sacking of Arts Queensland head Greg Andrews.

With QPAT staffer Phillip Pike as senior arts adviser to Sheldon, and Gould’s deputy Kevin Radbourne astride, temporarily at least, the new Arts Office, the key positions in the state’s arts bureaucracy are held by QPAT stalwarts.

Gould is obviously a performing arts producer and manager of extraordinary talent.  So what’s the problem?  In a nutshell, the State Government’s every-expanding QPAT empire has grown too mighty, and is crowding out the state’s home-grown arts production.

Why is our State Government the dominant producer in Queensland of commercial showbusiness?  In the past, this was justifiable on the grounds that infrastructure and marketing were at the establishment stage.

But now, according to Gould, QPAT is doing very well financially.  Perhaps the Coalition should look at privatising all or part of the QPAT operation?

Last year Gould took Sheldon on a tour of world showbiz capitals such as London and New York, where they took in the best shows on offer.  In short, Sheldon was given a crash course in top-of-the-market artistic product - the better to understand the mechanics of producing the same in Brisbane.  For the price of this trip our company - and many others - could have created several new artistic works.

Undoubtedly, the QPAT approach is a cost-effective way of gaining political kudos from the arts:  Queenslanders, look at all the wonderful entertainment your government has brought you in its time in office!

However, the success of QPAT means a largely unacknowledged conflict of interest has arisen between the State Government’s massive financial and political investment in commercial show business and the real needs of the Queensland public in performing arts.

Yes, of course it is wonderful that touring productions of the best showbusiness and entertainment in the world sometimes, even often, come to Brisbane.

Yet this very real benefit of the global marketplace should not cause the diminishment of local artistic creativity.

Art is not a banana or any other global commodity, but rather, as on former Queensland arts minister put it, an expression of the social soul.

Do we really wish our Queensland soul-in-the-making to be scripted and produced elsewhere to this degree?

Small independent arts companies at the bottom of the market in Brisbane find survival very difficult in the face of the marketing muscle of QPAT, a body which only can be described as the State Government arts quango.

Making matters worse, the current shift of Australia Council funding of performing arts companies from an annual to a triennial basis will see the number of non-state theatre companies in receipt of federal art dollars shrink even further.

As John Bayliss of the Australia Council put it recently: "There will be fewer theatre companies around in the next few years!".

Only in Victoria, under Arts Minister Jeff Kennett, is it expected that a state government will pick up the slack.  Indeed, with Sheldon, Kennett is presiding over a corporate brand-name approach to the arts.  But at least in Victoria, serious, even world-class foresight is being shown by vitalising and promoting local, grassroots arts production - on its own terms.

This article appeared in the Brisbane Courier Mail, March 18, 1997.