TRANSCRIPT: RADIO INTERVIEW - 3RRR SMARTARTS - THURSDAY, JULY 9

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
3RRR SMARTARTS
THURSDAY, 9 JULY 2020

SUBJECTS: Government’s arts package.
 
RICHARD WATTS, HOST: My next guest has just joined us on the line. Tony Burke MP is the Shadow Minister for the Arts in the Labor Opposition here in Australia and joins us to talk about Labor’s concerns about the federal government’s arts stimulus package. Tony, to begin with, the sector were asking for a significantly larger amount than the government has given us. They’ve given us $250 million, to re-use the phrase I used this morning speaking to Esther Anatolitis from NAVA, is this $250 million too little too late?
 
TONY BURKE, SHADOW MINISTER FOR THE ARTS: The reality is it’s not even $250 million, because $90 million of it are loans that have to be paid back and you’ve got to question how many people take up the loans in the first place. So it’s $160 million. Before I analyse where the problems are, I want to say that the fact that we’ve got anything is a big step from where we were. For a long time the government was arguing there wasn’t even a problem for the music industry, and they were talking about workers in the industry effectively as though they were engaging in a hobby. So, to have got to the point where they’re acknowledging the problem, for all the flaws of what they’ve put forward, I do want to acknowledge we are better off than before they were doing that, and now they’ve acknowledged it, then I think there’s an opportunity to get right into the detail of, OK, how can this be done  better? Because effectively there’s three different stages for the industry. There’s the help people need right now, during lockdown. The second stage is how do you emerge, and the third stage is how do we make sure in the future the platform for music and performance is stronger than it was in the past. Effectively of those three stages, this program is entirely engaged at the second stage. And we need to make sure that artists make it through the crisis, particularly now that lockdowns in Victoria are going to last much longer than what had been anticipated when this package was announced – not a dollar will flow in an area where lockdown continues because it’s all about ‘how do you come out’. And the first thing that I think we need to look at is OK, where are the big gaps and the biggest gap is while the lockdowns are happening, effectively the industry is shut out in many ways.
 
WATTS: Now in terms of gaps – yes this package does seem very much targeted on the live performance sector, including commercial theatre, the major performing arts organisations and touring whether of international artists or the staging of music festivals for example. It does seem to largely overlook and ignore individual artists, small to medium companies and organisations as well, and as we heard from NAVA earlier in the program, people from the visual arts sector as well. What’s also concerning from my perspective I guess, and putting on for a moment my chair’s hat at La Mama theatre, comparing the funding that the federal government has announced in Australia which as you say is billed as $250 million but is effectively $160 million, plus a loans package – the UK government has recently announced a 1.57 billion-pound package which even once you do the maths from pounds to dollars is approximately nine times the amount of the money that the Australian federal government has given the sector. Why do you think the federal government seems unable to grasp the needs of the arts industry across the country and indeed seems unable to grasp the very makeup of the sector and some of the unique challenges that face the arts sector here in Australia?  
 
BURKE: Yeah one of the – and here’s where I shift between ‘is it deliberate or do they just not understand’ and I’ll be honest with you, I shift between the two. I was stunned when Scott Morrison claimed, when he was announcing it, that it was only a week earlier in a zoom call that he had discovered that businesses in this industry weren’t having a 30 per cent downturn, they were having a 90 to 100 per cent downturn. That was obvious from the moment the restrictions on gatherings were put in place. So...that’s what he said, if we take him at his word then the extent to which they’ve failed to engage is phenomenal, so I guess I move between two different views to be honest. The first is I am always suspicious of the extent to which with the arts they’re just engaging in a culture war. I don’t think it’s an accident that the three sectors that keep saying they’re being left behind in different ways have been universities, the ABC and the arts and entertainment. I just don’t think that’s an accident. Whereas industries that employ fewer people have managed to get targeted support. But the other thing is the way they’ve designed JobKeeper effectively puts a fence around many of the groups that you’ve described. So small to medium companies that have effectively been under attack ever since the Brandis cuts back in 2014, and that’s been a long-term attack from the government – but when they introduced JobKeeper, the moment they said that if you were a casual you would have to have had 12 months employment, they effectively knocked out massive parts of the sector. Because so many people, not just performers themselves but various artists – work as either short term casuals or freelancers. They are the two principal forms of employment. And if you’re working gig to gig, event to event, festival to festival, it is almost impossible to get inside JobKeeper. Now the government has a response to that and I think it’s worth unpicking. Because if they then say ‘oh but if you can’t make JobKeeper you can make JobSeeker’, and you know it’s a similar amount of money.. it’s less but depending on what add-ons you get it might come out to a similar amount. Now some people won’t be eligible at all because of partners’ income but there is a bigger issue with JobSeeker. Because of mutual obligation, the purpose of JobSeeker if you’re in an industry that is having a downturn, is to push you into a different industry. That’s what JobSeeker does. The purpose of JobKeeper is to keep you there so that you’re still available to the industry when the reboot happens. When things open up. And so when they give their offhand, ‘oh well JobSeeker is still available so tick, we’ve looked after the sector’ - no. That is in fact an active decision to shrink the number of people in the sector. Because by definition, with mutual obligation that is what JobSeeker does. And I think that point has been largely overlooked in the debate.
 
WATTS: Now, one of the other concerns that I know you’ve raised particularly is, following the Senate hearings into the federal government’s response to COVID-19 and its impact on the country, one of the revelations at the Senate hearing was evidence from Dr Stephen Arnott from the Office of the Arts who stated quite clearly that the new funding that is available for the federal government support package will not be available until at least September, the end of the first quarter of the financial year. Given that people who were affected by bushfires and were still living in caravans because money has not flown to them yet, months and months later, are you equally concerned that the arts sector will not just be waiting until September to receive money from the federal government’s arts support package, but many months later?
 
BURKE: Oh it will be a long time later. And sadly, in Victoria and in particular in Melbourne, I’m worried about how they do the bidding for this because what it could very easily mean is with lockdown, who knows what will happen in the rest of the country but if where we’re at at the moment continues, you could end up with a situation where outside of Victoria, small companies and big companies, whoever, are in a position to bid for events and to try to get access to the money in September – but because the lockdowns are at a different stage in Victoria, the companies there aren’t in a position to put in applications so you could very easily come to a circumstance where Victoria, which has been such a strength for the artistic community around the country, is in fact largely locked out of eligibility or the capacity to be able to apply because of where the lockdowns are at, come September. So there’s problems all over this but essentially I think the simplest way to look at it is this way. It took 100 days from when the industry shut down until they announced a package, it will probably take 100 days and then an extra 100 days, so you get to 200 days, from the time of the original lockdown before many dollars flow at all. And in Victoria, it could even be another 100 beyond that. Now when you’re looking at that length of time, you have a very real situation where bills are mounting up on small companies, bills are mounting up on venues, and bills are mounting up on individuals and freelancers. If people aren’t given an extra, direct line of assistance to be able to remain in the industry during lockdown, we will have a sector that will look fundamentally different on the other side of this, and the principal characteristic of the difference will be it will be smaller. You know, think about it if even for small to medium companies, many of which don’t own their own premises. If venues start to disappear during this time, where does that leave them? Because they’re then bidding with bigger commercial operators for fewer and fewer spaces to be able to use to exhibit or to perform. So there’s some real risks here, and this is why I think the biggest principle that can help us through all of this is if we can make sure that we are helping people now – helping people to stay in the industries now, because downtime in the arts community, where there’s downtime in the sense of not exhibiting or not performing, doesn’t need to in fact be downtime. It can be a time of research, it can be a time of really  hard work in writing, in creating, which means on the other side of this we have a huge body of work ready to go. But if we go down the JobSeeker path and we force everybody simply to spend this time applying for jobs that are not there in other industries, then at the end of this not many more people will have found themselves employment. Some will, and we will have lost some people from the industry altogether. And no-one will have been given the support during this time to use it for writing and creating, so that we’ve got this whole body of Australian stories ready to go on the other side.
 
WATTS: If you’ve just tuned in, I’m speaking with Tony Burke MP who is the Shadow Arts Minister. Tony, to wrap up the conversation – we’ve obviously heard that there are significant flaws in the government’s approach to supporting the arts sector including their recent and underwhelming support package for the arts. You’ve just used the phrase that we need to make sure we’re helping people now – how is the Labor Party helping Australian artists now? What actions are you taking to make sure that there will be an arts sector on the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic?
 
BURKE: The most important part of our calls has been, and we’ve moved motions in the Parliament on it, we’ve called for it every time Parliament has returned, and that is to open up JobKeeper to people in the arts and entertainment sector who are currently shut out. Some people have been eligible, that’s true. But principally, the people who’ve – the more creative your work is, the less likely you are to have found your way in. And opening up JobKeeper is the biggest issue. And this is where – and I’ve spent a lifetime arguing about the arts being important for our stories, for our soul, for oxygen for our community to define who we are, how we see each other, how the world sees us. But if that argument’s not going to resonate with the government, can they at least understand that the individuals concerned here are workers – they are part of an economy that functions as an ecology. And if you cut out any section of it, you harm the whole thing.
 
WATTS: Tony Burke thank you for your time – it’s been a pleasure speaking to you this morning and we will just have to wait to see whether the government listens to you, and to everyone else in the sector who is talking about the need to do more. Thanks again.
 
BURKE: Thanks for the opportunity Richard.
 
ENDS