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KARA:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Kara Jensen-Mackinnon - This is 7am.

Arts policy in Australia has been virtually non-existent for ten years, and in those ten years the arts have suffered enormously. The challenges are huge. From music and live gigs, to literature and publishing, to film and television – every part of the sector has been damaged by years of funding uncertainty.

Today, we bring you an exclusive one-on-one interview between the editor of The Monthly, Michael Williams, and Arts Minister Tony Burke.

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KARA:

Michael, it’s no secret the arts in Australia have been particularly devastated and a lot of arts workers are in a precarious position. But can you tell me, when these problems actually started?

MICHAEL:

Yeah, Kara, the problems are kind of embedded in the question of how we fund the arts. You can go all the way back to Whitlam and the creation of The Australia Council, if you like. But, the truth of it is this current kind of malaise and precarity for artists, probably is best to go back to about 2013 when the then Gillard Government put forward its Creative Australia Policy.

Periodically, these policies are put up - they are always talked about as National Cultural Policies, so they are not just about arts funding they are about how we define ourselves and who we are. And somewhere between those kind of broad, bold ambitions, and the exact execution for artists, things get lost - and that’s what happened. The Gillard Government was voted out late in 2013 and Creative Australia never really saw the light of day. And so, funding cuts year on year have meant that the institutions that support artists and the direct revenue streams for artists themselves are both kind of more and more fragile as time goes on but you know, another change of government, a new Arts Minister, and one who is professing to kind of care about righting that chip - we have, standing there in the wings, waiting to prove himself - the inestimable Tony Bourke.

KARA:

And policy isn’t the only problem facing Tony Burke is it? I mean, the COVID lockdowns were particularly crushing for people who work in the arts? And those people are still recovering, right?

MICHAEL:

Absolutely, I mean, if you think about it - your favourite gig venues, you know, live music performance, theatre, galleries, shopping and bookshops - all of these things suddenly took this massive hit. And so what was already an incredibly fragile infrastructure, the kind of month-to-month proposition for so many artists, suddenly became untenable.

And when the Morrison government’s JobKeeper and JobSeeker programs completely overlooked artists and the people who made their money out of producing creative work, what was already a dire situation became kind of doubly so. So, it's a funny thing - a new government has many priorities, they have many demands on their time, and many demands on their budget. But, as you say, it's not only been a decade of policy inertia, it's not only been a decade of funding cuts, it's not only been a decade of a global pandemic - all these things together have conspired to make it very hard to live and work as an artist in this country.

The new government when it's working out its priorities - we are very keen to see what they’ve got for the people who make the art that we so love. So that’s why it felt essential to sit down with Tony Bourke at this point, ahead of a budget, ahead of the new national cultural policy and find out how he’s going to make things better.

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MICHAEL:

So, I guess from the conversation we're just having, you know, to be arts minister once can be seen as a mistake, but to be arts minister twice seems like carelessness.

TONY:

Not many people get a second go at government at all, and certainly not many people get a second go at a portfolio. So for me, for most of the past decade, I've either been minister or shadow minister, but only six months of that at the beginning was as minister. It was a very brief stint and I'd always aspired to the portfolio, I'd always wanted it.

And like if you gave it to the kid who joined the Labour Party, I was sort of to be an environment in the arts were my passions. And then I arrived in Parliament at the same election as Peter Garrett and you just shrug your shoulders. That's unlikely to happen.

MICHAEL:

Don’t get within cooee. But it must have been interesting, because you didn't directly follow Garrett as Arts Minister, Simon Crean-...

TONY:

Yeah, I followed Pete as Environment Minister and I had presumed arts would come with it, but Simon had put in the bid and he was more senior so, so he got it. And then once Simon was no longer a minister, I became the arts minister, which Simon was really generous, like while he would have liked to have stayed on. He did say publicly a few times if it had to go to someone else, he was okay that it was me.

MICHAEL:

I think there can be a perception that arts is a bit undervalued as a portfolio, that it can either be a kind of political football or it can be a secondary portfolio you do when the main game is somewhere else. And so it's refreshing to hear the ways in which you're excited by it. I'm interested though, you know, that history of your first time in the portfolio was just after Creative Australia was launched. And you've been very clear that the new arts policy, the new national cultural policy, is taking Creative Australia as its starting point. Kind of it's jumping off point.

TONY:

Yep, which is for two reasons. One, because Creative Australia never got a chance. But secondly, I want to do this quickly. So if you go to the two major times that cultural policy has been done in those terms, so Gough effectively had it, but it was never called cultural policy. With Hawke-Keating, it was in the final term of the Keating government that it happened and it was a fair way into that term and the final term of our last time in government, in fact the final few months of our last time in government when we did it, which meant that it never really had a chance to be embedded.

So, my view was you'll get better policy if we waited four years. If we started with a blank canvas, we would land with a better cultural policy. But I don't want to wait. And so the best way to get something done quickly is to start with the old document and the five pillars of it. As the foundation. Get moving. That means will the policy be as elegant as it was otherwise? No, it won't be. But we will be able to change the trajectory straight away. And that really matters because cultural policy is different to arts policy.

Arts policy lives within it, but cultural policy is about the place of culture within government. So if you get it right, you affect your health policy, you affect your education and training policy, you affect how you conduct foreign affairs. The impact of this ricochets across government. And I want that to happen very early in the time of the new government rather than waiting for the most elegant consultation process.

MICHAEL:

I really love that idea. But isn't there a danger then that cultural policy is big on motherhood statements and low on kind of actionable detail, low on kind of what it looks like, how it's made real.

TONY:

The first thing, the sort of high level principled statements I think matter. And if I give a simple example as to how they mattered. Because when we lost office, it's not like the previous government, or governments replaced Creative Australia with something more conservative or more aligned with a coalition government. They just ditched it and replaced it with nothing.

If you had a cultural policy in place, I don't believe they ever would have designed wage subsidies in a way that effectively cut out as many arts workers as possible, because you've got a formal framework that the public service needs to relate to. So, while if you're reading the document, a lot of people will be, ‘what's this high level stuff? Get me to the dollars.’ In terms of how government works, that matters.

And a lot of the decisions that were taken during the pandemic where, you know, arts workers weren't regarded as real workers. I had to make speeches in the parliament that I found weird saying these are real jobs, these are real businesses, these people are workers, as though that was somehow a revelatory statement. So that stuff matters. But secondly, you know, If you were to wait for the best time in the budget cycle where there'll be as much money as possible. You'd never do it right now. Like the availability of cash now is much worse than it would have been say if we'd won three years ago. But that said, you could make a decision now to start changing the trajectory and then those policy decisions feed into future budgets as well. So there is a financial advantage in making the decisions earlier.

MICHAEL:

Is being an effective arts minister as much about persuading Treasury and your parliamentary colleagues about the quantum of funding for the arts as it is about anything external?

TONY:

Everything in government is about persuasion. Everything in my job, and a lot of that is within government, persuading your colleagues. But also a lot of it is using the megaphone of government in being willing in how you relate to culture within the country.

So it must have been the day I was sworn in, I had an email ready to go, effectively saying the culture war is now over. The work on cultural policy now begins. The culture war against the arts was often run by arts ministers, and so the megaphone of how you use persuasion and argue the place of culture within Australia that matters. Something where my views in holding the portfolio has actually changed because of the pandemic.

So, back when I was Arts Minister, last time I remember opening the Turner exhibition at the National Gallery, and I was given the notes and the notes went through how many people were going to attend, the complications of establishing insurance with the British Gallery, what it would mean for the Canberra economy. And I said, ‘Well, isn't anyone going to talk about the arts?’

And they said, ‘Oh, that's normally what ministers want.’ And they were right. But my view became, Well, I shouldn't be talking about that. The Arts Minister needs to be the person making the cultural case. But then of course the pandemic hit and I realised we also needed to make the economic case because there were big parts of government, big parts of Australia, and you know we ended up with a Prime Minister in the previous government who, even when they were finally making an announcement of funding for arts workers, had to justify it on the basis that tradies work here too.

MICHAEL:

Yeah, yeah. Because they are real Australians, not arts workers. Although having met a few arts workers they might not be real people, so I accept that idea.

One of the things that characterised the successive Coalition government's approach to the arts was a diminishment of the Australia Council and ministerial discretion suddenly played a much bigger part in arts funding than it had in the past.
How important is restoring those structures to you? And aren't you a little bit tempted to apply some ministerial discretion? Isn't there, you know, just the one gig that you want to bankroll before you go back to best practice?

TONY:

Yeah, I think, is it Oscar Wilde who said that democracy is the worst system in the world except for all the others? And the Australia Council, I think fits the same category, it's the worst of all systems except for every other alternative.

Last time I was Arts Minister, there was a point where I said to the department, what am I actually in charge of here? Because you do naturally have views and want to impose them. But look, the big thing for me is decisions about artistic merit. I think it is a disaster if decisions about artistic merit are being made by a minister. And so the whole way the Rise programme was designed, where some of the questions did actually go to the value of the work. I simply don't believe that ever should have been handed to a minister. I think that, look, I have really strong views on things that I absolutely love, and I don't believe I have any right to make financial decisions to advance them.

I think that once you go down that path, the role of the Arts Minister becomes that of an art critic. And I haven't been elected to do that. There are better people than me at it, even though you know, after a couple of glasses, after a show, I'll have some strong opinions.

MICHAEL:

Well, and so you should, strong opinions are the backbone of good decision making. But you know what we say. And in portfolios beyond your own, the degradation of various institutions means that having a sympathetic minister again isn't enough. Those institutions, to varying degrees, are less functional than perhaps their original intention.

You're deep in the consultation process at the moment, and looking at some of the submissions to that process, there is a recurring refrain about scepticism about the effectiveness of the Australia Council now, or Richard Flanagan, for example, suggested that literature is poorly served by the Australian Council and that might be better to break away and act like film does. How do you unpick those kind of structural breakdowns other than tip a great deal of money back into the system that's had it ripped out?

TONY:

So first thing, I think the scepticism of the Australia Council was inevitable once the Brandis cuts happened. So, we gave, and I put the legislation through back in 2013, a significant increase in the remit of the Australia Council and with funding to allow it to do things it hadn’t previously done. The Brandis cuts, which were so that George Brandis could have ministerial decision making rather than peers making decisions on artistic merit, that the impact of that was effectively that the Australia Council could no longer do what it had been charged with doing.

And that had two impacts. One, it caused a lack of confidence from a lot of people in the Australia Council because, ‘You're meant to be doing this stuff!’ And they just simply didn't have the funds to do it. The second thing that happened was something that never used to happen, which was the small to medium sector and the major companies started to argue against each other on the belief that the pie was never going to get any bigger.

Yeah, there was a moment here in Melbourne nearly ten years ago, where I had a dinner with the popular music sector, and there was one moment where someone started to bag how much money went to the opera, and around the table everyone said, you can't say that. Now, post Brandis cuts, those conversations just started to happen because the view was unless we haemorrhage each other, there's no other way forward. So while financial decisions haven't been made, I certainly am sympathetic to the arguments about the Australia Council needing the funding to be able to do its job.

But I'm also conscious of, even if you just provided money, I do think there might be some structural issues we need to look at. I am conscious that the Australia Council has not engaged closely enough with the philanthropic sector. That's the reason why I want to return creative partnerships functions to the Australia Council. It's not a criticism of Australia of creative partnerships, I actually established creative partnerships, appointed the original board and put the ledger through. But creative partnerships, because it's in a separate body, has simply meant the philanthropists go there and the Oz Co has lost that relationship. I want them to have it back.

Similarly, Oz Co has become increasingly seen as a funding body, and even though they get great data, they haven't been effectively charged in the public mind or in anyone's mind really of being advocates for what we might so-call the commercial sector in the way that screen Australia will argue for the commercial sector. So, I'm really interested in the structural changes that will increase that ambit.

If you go through the submissions, there's a really interesting joint one that a whole lot of the music bodies have put forward about establishing something called Music Australia. Now they've done it on the Screen Australia model. I'm interested if there's a way somehow within the structures of the Oz Co establishing something like that, which gives a really clear commercial remit as well. Similarly, I'm interested in what we can do to guarantee a stronger dedication to writers, than we've had. And in that I'd be including authors, poets, playwrights, scriptwriters. For the people where their art form is the written word.

I think Richard Flanagan's argument, which he's not the first author to make this argument, and even back in 2019 when Thomas Keneally spoke at the launch of our campaign, where we thought we were about to get there but we didn't. He was very conscious of the fact that while supporting peer reviews, supported the independence of the Oz Co, we needed to find a way of doing something about the lack of funding for authors.

MICHAEL:

Your dual portfolio's kind of exciting for the point that you made earlier about particularly in a post-pandemic or an ongoing pandemic period, what it means to think about individual artists as workers. It did feel perhaps I missed it, correct me if I did, but that artists were particularly prominent at the job summit in terms of the conversations around how those kind of fragile workers might be protected in this.

TONY:

Yeah, look, the new CEO of MEAA was one of the delegates there. And I had some long conversations, there were specific references, in particular in Amanda Rishworth sessions, about what had come from some of the arts roundtables. And there was an arts roundtable as part of the job summit process that I held in advance of the jobs summit.

The specific issues though because, so the issues as workers, a series of them happened and the second day of the job summit was the day that the music industry report into safety at work in particular for women was dropped. So there were some very specific conversations with that, including with Kate Jenkins that I had at the job summit. So there was a lot of it around.

I think realistically, because the cultural policy consultation was already underway, I made a deliberate decision that I do not want to sort of litigate everything twice, and I kept a lot of the issues to the cultural pulse.

MICHAEL:

That makes sense, but you do see them as connected in your own mind.

TONY:

Oh completely, but also bear in mind, every portfolio I've had has a neat match to arts. The only one where I didn't manage to keep the portfolio, Mark Dreyfus got it from me for three years, was when I had finance, which is probably one where everyone would have thought, ‘I wish he kept it!’

MICHAEL:

The finance and the arts together, alumni.

TONY:

But it's been like when I had immigration I kept it and it was relevant particularly to the multicultural affairs part of the portfolio. When I had environment, it was relevant and certainly as employment and workplace relations. There are some issues that have been around for a very long time where it puts me in the box seat to be able to do a few things around that.

But ultimately, cultural policy by definition needs to reach every portfolio, whether I hold it or not.

MICHAEL:

So two of the five pillars are around the centrality of the artist on the one hand, and the importance of institutions on the other. And you talk about the ways in which in the arts, particularly in recent years, there's been a sense of people competing for the same pie, often at each other's expense.

Is this something that your working group is specifically charged with navigating? The relationship between the individual versus the institution?

TONY:

Well, the thing that I've done that is quite different from Creative Australia with those two pillars goes to what we were talking about earlier. So, if you go to Creative Australia and you talk about the centrality of the artist, which there was the first pillar, but this time we've got First Nations first, but on the centrality of the artist, last time it was entirely about the artist as creator. And this time I've said to the panel and I've said to people, when we had the town hall meetings, I want it to be about the artist as a creator and the artist as worker. Whether it goes to their safety at work, their conditions at work, the remuneration, and also the concept of being able to have a lifelong career in the sector. I want it as worker as well. That wasn't there last time.

Similarly, with strong institutions, you go through Creative Australia, the institutions we were talking about were effectively the ones that were government owned or directly government funded. This time I'm also talking about the privately run businesses. I'm talking about the venues, I'm talking about the various technical businesses that are out there running that underpin the events industry. There's a whole lot of institutions that are not run by government without which the sector is in a diabolical state.

That also brings in a whole lot of training issues which have hit us now, where we had we lost people from the industry or industries, however you want to put it during the pandemic and some of them aren't coming back, certainly during the lockdown period of the pandemic. You talk to anyone organising a major event or festival now, or even someone running a standard venue, and they will talk about the technical skills that are learnt skills, where they don't have people anymore and that being a real potential limit on being able to bounce back.

So, this is where there are a whole lot of issues about the artists and people who work in the industry and about the institutions that were never part of cultural policy previously. And the experience during the lockdown period of the pandemic says we need them to be now, otherwise there is not a recovery.

MICHAEL:

I think that's exactly right. If we want to think about the state of crisis that the arts are in, you have not just a decade of inertia from a policy perspective, but cuts, degradation. What's happened in the university sector, in particular in the arts and humanities… And then you have the overlay of COVID as well.

Can we anticipate any kind of arts announcement in the budget that's coming up, or is this going to have to be a longer, slower process?

TONY:

Oh, look, I'd always say cultural policy was to be announced at the end of the year and so therefore, don't expect much in the October budget at all.

MICHAEL:

I assumed as much. But there must be a temptation to at least telegraph intent, to recognise that there is a large constituency who are kind of crying out for change, crying out for reform. I don't think anyone would dispute the value of a good process and cultural policy first, arts, policy next. But are there things that you're impatient to do that are going to happen regardless of how that cultural policy rolls out?

TONY:

The big thing I was impatient to do was to get an insurance system up and running for live performance because I was worried about investment over the summer festivals in particular, and more people go to cultural events in those summer months, and there was a potential barrier to investment where it's if someone has mandatory isolation periods because of a government decision, then that's where government has a responsibility.

I've been arguing it for two years now. We're now getting you know, they've now reduced it from seven days to five. And so, you know, there's different talk about how long it'll last. But my view was we just need to announce something immediately, and I wasn't willing to wait for the budget for that, to ensure that there was a clear - well to send that investment message.

So that one couldn't wait. And so there was the early announcement on that, but that's really, don’t anticipate much more than that when we get to the budget.

MICHAEL:

And look I guess there are already the things that have been flagged the restoration of money to the ABC. You know, there are things.

TONY:

That's right, the ones that were there as election commitments. Yeah, that's already happening. But beyond that, we’d always said end of the year for cultural policy and we're still working through the submissions that are in. So, even if I wanted to, it's not possible to make major decisions at this point.

MICHAEL:

Fair enough. And any shocks at those submissions, any that you’ve found that you had no idea or it took you in a different direction or an artist who unexpectedly argued to defend the arts?

TONY:

Nothing like that's come to me yet, there's one that has really affected me by the actor Sachin Joab. Where he just goes through the story of what happened to him in neighbours, and this is for the second pillar about a place for every story about the diversity of Australia, and when he was in neighbours he was there as a character or he's an actor of Indian, South Asian heritage. And his character always had a broad Australian accent, there was never any question as to how long he'd been around. The scriptwriters originally when they were writing him out of the show, were going to write him as going home to India. And he had to push back on that.

And, and they ended up writing it differently. But it's just a reminder of the arts sector is one where the creators and the storytellers tend to tell the stories of discrimination and are the, window to us of how people get treated badly, and the extent to which that's still happening in their lives. Whether it's on, sex, gender, race, faith based, whatever it is, you want it to be better than that.

And so there's some submissions with some personal stories. And certainly I'm treating that music industry report as though it were a submission that have come in, where I just think they're all telling stories that I have never experienced in my life, and I never will experience in my life. And we've got to do better. We just have to.

MICHAEL:

Minister, thank you for your time.

TONY:

Good to talk to you.

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KARA:

You can hear more from Michael Williams in his comment piece for the latest edition of the Monthly.

The October Issue is a dedicated Culture issue, from provocations around policy to celebrations of the best in Australian arts.

And it’s available now.

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