The new Australian federal budget, revealed last Tuesday in Canberra, included the shock decision to cut a significant portion of funding for the Australia Council, the national body for funding the arts. The independent and emerging artists are expected to bear the brunt of the cuts: by Friday, Australia Council had suspended or cancelled some of its key grants for small to medium arts organisations. The budget decisions did not involve any prior consultation with the arts sector. The controversial budget has been announced just a week after the federal Arts Minister George Brandis and members of the Australia Council were seen together in Venice, celebrating the opening of the new Australia Pavilion at the Biennale. The Australian arts community has responded in shock, staging dance protests in all capital cities last Friday, and addressing an open letter to the Minister, signed by over 8,000 artists. The total of $104.7 million will be diverted from the Australia Council budget over a period of four years. Controversially, the funds will be used for the establishment of an alternative funding body called National Programme for Excellence in the Arts (NPEA), under the direct control of the federal arts department. Australia Council is further instructed to find $7.2 million in efficiency savings over four years, to 2018-19. The combined cuts represent a reduction of about 13 per cent of Australia Council's annual budget of $230 million. Mainly affected will be performing arts, which take up the bulk of Australia Council's funding, particularly theatre, dance and music. Another loser will be film: Screen Australia, the federal body that supports new Australian films, will also suffer the funding cuts of $3.6 million over four years. This year's re-direction of funds follows on the heels of large cuts to arts funding in 2014. While the Arts Minister Brandis and the conservative press have defended the decision by claiming that the total amount available for the arts has remained largely stable, the arts industry is expecting a large shift from the independent to the classical arts, and from independent to political processes, all in the climate of the overall slow reduction of arts funding. In NPEA, Brandis is aiming to effectively create a competing government body that will double the functions of Australia Council. However, while Australia Council was established in 1975 to distribute arts funding at arms' length from political processes, and relies on peer assessment for deciding grants, the NPEA will be directly controlled by the arts department, with the Arts Minister having the final say on the decisions. Not much more is known about NPEA at this point, but it is expected to favour classical over contemporary arts with little or no structured process. Australian politicians, particularly in recent years, have been known to try to, more and less successfully, to bypass or override the regular procedures for funding the arts, often in order to divert significant chunks of money to heritage arts. In 2014, Brandis approved a grant of $275,000 to the classical music label Melba Recordings, bypassing AusCo and any competitive grants process. That same year, an extra $1 million was awarded to the Australian Ballet School, for helping purchase a $4.7 million mansion, in the same budget that stripped Screen Australia off $25.1 million, and AusCo off $28.2 million. After the 2014 Sydney Biennale boycott, Brandis asked Australia Council, in a strongly worded letter, to de-fund artists and organisations that refuse corporate sponsorship. And in 2013, Brandis unsuccessfully tried to change the legislation to allow the minister to change AusCo's funding decisions at his discretion. There is a widespread belief that the conservative government is hostile to the independent artists and small arts organisations, mainly funded through Australia Council's peer-reviewed grants.In fact, the bulk of Australia Council's funds already go directly to a group of major performing arts companies (orchestras, major theatres, Opera Australia and the Australian Ballet), and are not subject to a competitive process. However, it is precisely these funds that the budget has quarantined from the cuts, leaving Australia Council to find savings in its competitive grants budget. On Friday, Australia Council announced that its budget for grants has been reduced by $23 million, or about a quarter. It announced cancelling a set of grants for artists at the beginning of their career, residence programs and community partnerships, and, most significantly, the entire round of grant applications that were due in June. It also entirely suspended the six-year funding for organisations, which was supposed to replace the previous three-year funding programs and create more funding stability for small and medium arts organisations. The abrupt decision has created a great instability in the funding cycle for the arts, and has been received with dismay. National arts funding tends to be among the first casualties of austerity measures. Similar dramatic cuts have recently happened in the Netherlands (25% reduction in national culture budget in 2012), Belgium (where steep reduction in arts funding was announced in 2014), the UK (where the catastrophic reduction of funding of about 30% for Arts Council England in 2010 will be followed by further cuts in 2015), and even France (where cuts to the culture budget shocked the nation in 2013). However, the cuts usually spare major organisations like operas, orchestras and museums, and target the individual grants programs, which dispense relatively small amounts of amounts of money to independent artists and small to medium organisations. This is due, in part, to the greater political clout of major organisations, but also to the perception that these institutions are at the heart of a national culture, whereas independent and avantgarde arts are a fringe, elite activity interesting only to few people. (Brandis himself has said for The Australian: “Frankly I’m more interested in funding arts companies that cater to the great audiences that want to see quality drama, or music or dance, than I am in subsidising individual artists responsible only to themselves.”) As in Australia, national cultural funding in most European countries tends to overwhelmingly support the performing arts: orchestras, theatres, dance and ballet, opera, and film (although film is often funded through its own funding body). There are structural reasons for this: performing arts are labour-intensive and collaborative, while requiring long training to acquire and maintain skills. In simple language, they cost more and take longer to start paying off. For non-commercial, expensive art forms such as opera and classical music, government funding is of exceptional importance. However, even commercial music, theatre, visual arts and film depend on subsidy in education, while small to medium arts organisations give young performers the opportunity to gain skills as they rise through the ranks. For countries too small to support a viable commercial sector in film or music (such as many smaller European countries, or, indeed, Australia), public funding creates incubator-like conditions for artists to mature. The pitting of 'mainstream' versus 'experimental' artists and organisations, shows a deep lack of understanding of how arts industries function. In thriving arts ecosystems, artists progress from smaller to bigger performance spaces, galleries, music halls: by the time they arrive onto the stages of important cultural institutions, they have the experience and maturity required for excellence. Unbalanced cuts to cultural budgets have a destabilising effect on these ecosystems, because small and medium organisations do more with less: analysing the distribution of Australia Council funds in 2010, Marcus Westbury calculated that the equivalent of the subsidy to a single major organisation, Opera Australia, supported no less than 781 separate projects, organisations and individuals across theatre, dance, music, literature and visual arts. At the lower end of the hierarchy, small amounts of money matter more. De-funding the independent performing arts and expecting the commercial sector to remain unaffected is wishful thinking: it is cutting the bottom off the ladder, and expecting the top not to fall.
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