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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

Making a living in Australia as a writer, musician, or artist, has become an increasingly tenuous proposition.

In recent years the arts sector has been transformed - lockdowns and streaming services have radically changed the market, with work becoming more insecure, and worse paid.

Now, the federal government has unveiled the first major injection of arts funding in a decade, and a new national cultural policy, its calling “revive”.

So, what will it mean for artists? Will arts work finally be treated like real work? And will this policy help Australia create more good art?

Today, Editor of The Monthly, Michael Williams, on whether the Albanese government's arts policy can revive the sector.

It’s Wednesday, February 8.

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RUBY:

Michael, you've worked in the art sector for a long time. You’ve worked in publishing, at festivals, and you're now the editor of The Monthly. So you've spent your career working with artists, mostly writers. Over that time, what opinion have formed about how the art sector would best function in partnership with the government? What should that relationship ideally look like?

MICHAEL:

We are incredibly lucky in this country in the way the arts is regarded by government. In the US, for the most part, private enterprise is expected to prop up the art. It's supposed to either be commercially viable in its own right or supported by philanthropy. Happily, however, in Australia there's a kind of different approach, and a different approach that you can track back directly to that period In the 70s, when Gough Whitlam and his government turned their attention to the arts.

Archival tape – Gough Whitlam:

“Our program has three great aims, to promote equality, to involve the people of Australia in the decision making processes of our lands, and to liberate the talents and uplift the horizons of the Australian people.”

MICHAEL:

Under Gough Whitlam there was at least a recognition that what we needed in Australia was a system for supporting the arts and artists that didn't come from the politicians. That actually it was time to build an institution that would keep these things at arm's length from government, but would let artists and art makers, and experts in the field, kind of make the calls about where the money should be applied.

So after the initial founding by Whitlam of the Australia Council — that’s kinda often talked about as the golden era for the arts in Australia — you saw a proliferation of small and independent galleries, art makers.

Small independent publishers breaking free of the previous hegemony of UK publishing.

Archival tape – Double J:

“It’s 1 minute past 2 this is double j…”

MICHAEL:

You had the, you know, the rise of Double J, you had the rise of a kind of youth culture. You had on our screens films that kind of iconically defined what an Australian image might look like.

Archival tape – Picnic at Hanging Rock:

“We’d better be careful, I promised Mrs. Appleyard I’d have you back at the College by 8!”

MICHAEL:

Not just for the world, but also for ourselves, in a way that before them had really struggled to take hold.

From the outset, the idea there was that we needed to be bold. We had to create an environment where risk could be taken. There was a kind of recognition that the best art comes out of environments where risk can be taken, but risk is a product of privilege. If we have an art scene where only the people who can afford to be artists are artists, then it's going to be pretty middle of the road.

RUBY:

So with that in mind, knowing how things have worked, what has enabled artists to make work, can we talk a bit about what we've actually seen in the past decade, under Coalition governments? If we go back to Tony Abbott and his arts minister, George Brandis, and through to Turnbull, and Morrison? What did we see happen?

MICHAEL:

Look it would be a mistake to attribute the culture war entirely to the Abbott government, but if you think back to those early days of Abbott in power, it was waging war against what they saw as their ‘ideological enemies’. We talk a lot about the cuts to ABC for example. But the arts bore the brunt of it. ABC, universities, and the arts, all were big institutions that fomented dissent against the Abbott government’s agenda. And so, what it effectively meant was Brandis’ first order of business was to turn his attention to the Australia Council. And to think about the ways in which gutting it, and devolving power from the council would allow them to strengthen their arm.

Governments are very fond, in the arts, of using kind of, little catch phrases and market tested branding for things. So this was called the Catalyst Fund. This was how great art was going to happen. But what Catalyst was code for was the death of arms length funding of the arts. What Brandis was doing was saying “I know that I've got this whole bureaucracy that's there designed to work out what the arts needs and how to support it. I'm going to redirect that money back into my office.” Ministerial discretion. Brandis was a big fan of the opera. He was a big fan of particular art forms. He was a big fan of particular companies. He was a big fan of supporting a particular sector of society. And so funding the arts suddenly no longer became about recognising a complex and fragile ecosystem. It became about, as with so much else, ways to support one's mates. And as a consequence, the entire kind of structure of arts funding was put in danger.

RUBY:

Okay. And the lowest point for the arts sector under the Coalition government, I think, came towards the very end, during the pandemic. Lockdowns exacerbated every other kind of long standing issue, long standing challenge that that the sector was already facing. Was there a particular moment during that time — during 2020 or 2021 — when it really hit you just how difficult things had become for the sector?

MICHAEL:

Yeah, one of the most acute examples of it was when JobKeeper came in and large sectors of the arts were kind of excluded from that, weren't given packages to support them. Their work wasn't recognised as work essentially.

This was a grand indulgence and they weren't the people that the government wanted to help. Even on the few occasions when Scott Morrison tried to address this, or tried to talk about this, he would very quickly pivot in the way he talked about the arts, to talking about the tradies who made sets in theatre companies, and talk about there was a kind of job that he understood as a job, and then there were a whole lot of people in skivvies waving their hands around that were alienating in some way, and so were able to be a kind of massive blindspot.

In the book industry, it was an interesting period because, actually, sales of books did pretty well. But something like being a writer, something like the arts, is about belonging to a community. It's about connections. While book sales were good, there's something a bit deceptive in that figure because they were the sales of books by established and known authors. Which meant that if you're a new or emerging writer who was bringing out their first work in that period, you were sinking without a trace. Without people being able to browse in bookshops, without book launches, without writers festivals. All of a sudden you're publishing, kind of, effectively into a vacuum. And the tragedy of it is an entire generation of writers might not be able to build a sustainable career because of what happened to them then. And that’s heartbreaking.

RUBY:

So this is the situation then, that the Labor government walked into when it took power last year. An arts industry, I think, in despair. How big is the challenge for them to turn this around?

MICHAEL:

Look, as you say, the expectations were acute. They went into the election and their policy was that they would build a policy after they were elected. A bold gambit, but one that means that when it was finally time to announce, all eyes were on the minister, Tony Burke.

RUBY:

We’ll be back in a moment.

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Archival tape – Josh Burns:

“It's my absolute privilege to welcome the artist formerly known as DJ Albo. But now the Prime Minister of Australia. Please put your hands together for my friend Anthony Albanese.”

RUBY:

You were there, Michael, at the Espy, the live music venue in St Kilda in Melbourne, when Anthony Albanese and his Arts Minister launched the Government's new arts policy. Can you take me there and tell me about it?

Archival tape – Anthony Albanese:

“Well, thanks very much, Josh. Let's just hope I'm a better PM than I was a DJ”

MICHAEL:

Yeah so it made a certain amount of sense to be standing, launching the policy in the Espy.

Archival tape – Anthony Albanese:

“Every year when I vote in triple J's Hottest 100, I'm struck by how much talent there is in Australia, how difficult it is to narrow it down to those ten songs that you're able to nominate.”

MICHAEL:

There were lots of jokes about the Prime Minister's former career as a DJ. There were lots of jokes about the fact that the floor was less sticky than people remembered it being.

Archival tape – Anthony Albanese:

“This is about our soul. This is about our identity. It is so important because it's about who we are and being able to express ourselves, and about our quality of life.”

MICHAEL:

But most of all, there was a kind of electric anticipation that was government bringing to the table what the arts industry was so desperately crying out for?

RUBY:

And so does this do that? Does this policy respond to what the industry needs? Talk me through the details.

MICHAEL:

There are three things you want from a new arts policy. The first is the rhetoric. The second is the kind of structural integrity of what's being proposed. And the third is the money. On the rhetoric, it was incredibly heartening. Both the Prime Minister and the arts Minister banged the drum about understanding the importance of the arts and its centrality to our society. They talked about putting First Nations voices and First Nations artists first, and that was incredibly well received in the room.

Archival tape — Unknown person:

“It gives me great pleasure to introduce the honourable Tony Burke, Minister for Arts and Employment Relations.”

MICHAEL:

They talked about artists as key workers, the ways in which we needed to understand both their creative and imaginative contribution, but also their financial contribution.

Archival tape – Tony Burke:

“Today the Albanese Labor government has a message for you, you touch our hearts and you are a $17 billion contributor to the economy.”

MICHAEL:

On the structure, is a kind of slightly more complicated question, and it remains to be seen how effective the prescription is.

Archival tape – Tony Burke:

“And at the centre of the reform is a reimagined Australia Council.”

MICHAEL:

But part of the way they’re identifying what needs to happen is that the Australia Council needs to be made stronger.

Archival tape – Tony Burke:

“The new body will be known as Creative Australia, the Brandis cuts will be returned in full”

MICHAEL:

They’re rebranding it, restructuring it, adding different parts to the entity, but they're not just funding business as usual. And that I think for people in the arts is heartening.

On the third front, on the money, it's promising, but it's a start, rather than a final point. When Keating announced the Creative Nation policy back in 1994. He announced an additional $252 million for the arts. Burke announced an additional 280 million. In real terms, there is a point to the fact that Burke and Albanese both talked about the fact that the funding was restoring the Brandis cuts. You know, this was about revival rather than excellence and going forward. It's necessary, it's heartening, but it hardly represents bold new frontiers.

RUBY:

And the issue for the arts though, I mean it isn't all about the funding, it's not all about the money, although obviously it's a big part of it. And I think one of the challenges that the arts industry is facing of many is the changes that we've seen to distribution models particularly. That's changed the way that artists are valued, the way that they're paid. If you look at music streaming — to take one kind of example there — there are really big challenges for musicians to get paid fairly for the work that they make. Those sorts of problems, are they really something that government intervention can fix?

MICHAEL:

I think they're essential to a certain extent. One of the one of the changes to the Australia Council is the introduction of a new division within it devoted to thinking about artists as workers. Thinking about their rights, thinking about security. Recognising the ways in which both tenuous employment, casual employment, variable pay structures, sexual harassment in the workplace, all these things, artists are traditionally a bit adrift when it comes to how they're protected against these dangers and risks.

So from that perspective, there's something very heartening about the Government saying, “okay, we recognise the need to professionalise and support artists to professionalise.” That can only be a good thing.

Some of the structural changes are more in line with bringing up to date things that have been kind of shamefully lacking for years. You see that in things like, for writers, in traditional public lending rights and educational lending rights mean that a writer ,when their book gets borrowed in a library, gets a certain fee each time. Until this new policy, digital lending rights were not included in that order, lending rights were not included in that limit. That's a crazy gap. But that's what happens when you're relying on a policy that was written in the 1970s to be relevant in 2023. Similarly, Australian content quotas for streaming services, for example, we've had that battle with free to air television that's been more or less won in the past. It's almost like an administrative oversight that it hasn't applied to the new means of televised content. And yet it takes a kind of bold new policy just to play catch up.

RUBY:

And in terms of measuring the success of an arts policy, it's obviously an incredibly difficult thing to do. But one way to look at it is to ask the question of whether this particular policy is actually going to produce better art, so better music, better film, better TV. What are your thoughts on whether that's likely?

MICHAEL:

Well, that is a can of worms, the question of better art. I mean, every arts policy tries to claim that it's purely about the art, but the relationship between the art and the commerce, between the elite and the accessible, is a complicated one. Is it the job of the government to bail out stuff that will never be commercially successful and prop it up? Or is it its job to back winners that are going to find more and more audiences and more and more readers, and viewers, and listeners and whatever. You know, we look at something like the local content quotas for streaming services. There's every chance all that will mean if we get 15 new spin offs and iterations of The Bachelor Australia or Married at First Sight. Rather than the kind of new written content that we're all kind of moist eyed and saying is the great storytelling of our age. Success is measured in many different ways, and one person's art is another person's dross. This policy hopefully creates the room for much more of both.

RUBY:

Maybe an easier question is will it make Australia a better place to be an artist?

MICHAEL:

That's the crucial question. Will it be possible to live and work as an artist in Australia underneath the Revive policy?

MICHAEL:

Look, I certainly hope so. I'm not sure that it completely saves the arts from the world of only the privileged to be able to do it, but it's a step in the right direction.

RUBY:

Michael, thank you so much for your time.

MICHAEL:

Thank you, Ruby.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

Interest rates have risen again.

At the first meeting of the RBA board for the year, the reserve bank raised the cash rate by 25 basis points.

The board, in its statement, said further rises could be needed over the next few months to bring inflation back into the target range.

And…

The death toll from an earthquake affecting southern Turkey and Northern Syria is approaching 5,000 and the World Health Organisation says it fears there could be over 20,000 dead.

The earthquake struck communities still devastated by the impacts of the Syrian civil war and the ongoing displacement, poverty, and security risks.

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