How does the Australia Council set its funding priorities?
“Dumping” is a trade term, denoting the practice whereby one country unloads its surplus production on another at a price the locals can’t match. Dumping has undermined Australia’s agriculture and manufacturing industries, all in the name of free trade. And there is a cultural equivalent of dumping – we buy up the surplus created by Europe and America and in the process undermine our own cultural creators and institutions.
Have a look in a bookshop and see how many English language books are by Australian authors published in Australia. At the cinema when did you last see an Australian film? In your record collection how many discs are Australian?
Call it The Cringe, or call it the consequence of dumping, Australian companies and artists have not fared well in competition with European and American imports, almost always produced with government subsidy. It is hard for our musicians, writers, painters and film makers to make a living, which is why government patronage has been essential to, in a sense, “protect” them from unfair competition. All civilised governments provide public support for unprofitable artistic creation, and in our case the public support comes in large one line grants to ABC, SBS, orchestras, opera and ballet and theatre, libraries and museums, and smaller grants to individuals, usually through the Australia Council.
In 1908 the Alfred Deakin government set up the Commonwealth Literary Fund to allocate pensions to sick authors and their families, and for writers who had produced important works but were ‘unable on account of poverty to persist in that work’. It was not money given to new practitioners who might or might not ever produce anything worthwhile. You had to have made a significant contribution to the national culture to qualify, a different model from the present Australia Council method of doling out small amounts of money to people of whom we have never heard and of whom we probably never will.
The OzCo model is seriously flawed. Millions are wasted every year in the process called “peer review”, where applications are received from the thousands of self-described artists, some of whom will get a few thousand to pursue their delusions for a year or so. Most of them will never make a notable contribution to the Australian culture, while many individuals and organisations who are conspicuous by their accomplishments will be starved of funds.
One former member of the Australia Council board agonised over this issue, using the metaphor of space travel. Is it the Council’s job to launch the rocket or to keep it in orbit by supplying the fuel? Given the aversion of governments of all stripes to picking winners you would think that the answer is obvious. Governments should be supporting winners, not trying to pick them on the basis of applications from unknowns. An element of Darwinian sorting is appropriate for the arts funding process.
We labour under a number of handicaps in the arts business. We speak English, which is a blessing and a curse. The metropolitan centres of English language culture are London, New York and Los Angeles. It is easier and cheaper to take our culture, dumped and second hand, from the centre than to create our own. Our best artists move away to the centre. We have the sneaking suspicion that what happens here is inevitably a second rate, colonial imitation of the real thing.
Lots of small handouts allocated on the basis of gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, parental language and so on will not set us up as a confident, if remote, centre of European culture, known for more than didgeridoos and weird animals – only substantial support for a few outstanding performers and companies will do that. It is past time to rethink the Australia Council model.
Terry Lane is a broadcaster, writer, former member of the Australia Council and board member of Melba Foundation, which is a recipient of government patronage administered by OzCo.
