Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to note my concern in this debate on the appropriations bills at the plans of the coalition government and the Minister for Arts, Senator Brandis, to strip the Australian Council of half of its funding, moving it to a new program, the National Program for Excellence in the Arts, NEPA. This is to run within the Ministry of the Arts, with the ultimate authority for funding decisions resting with Senator Brandis. As Barry Humphries, now Director of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, said through his alter ego Sir Les Patterson: 'Sir Les has got a good idea. He said, "Why can't we say that the Australia Council is a sporting body?" If we pretended that it was there for the promotion of football and cricket, the government would give it even more money.'

Since its inception, the Australia Council has supported Australian arts and arts organisations with two guiding principles: the pursuit of artistic excellence based on peer assessment and that funding decisions be made at arm's length from the government. All previous governments have long been committed to these principles, and we will continue to be in the next government. Senator Brandis is a cultured man, but neither Sir Les Patterson nor Lorenzo Medici are appropriate models for arts funding in Australia in the current era.

In 2013 the then Labor government legislated to deliver key recommendations of a 2012 review of the Australia Council. Importantly—and I would wish my colleagues across the aisle to hear this—the reforms that Labor enacted took place after extensive dialogue and in conjunction with the arts sector. In contrast, at Senate estimates last week Senator Brandis admitted he had not consulted anyone in the arts community before making the announcement. The Chair of the Australia Council, Rupert Myer, was only told of the impending cuts—that half of his funds would be cut—late in the afternoon of budget day. For a budget that was supposed to be about no surprises, perhaps Mr Myer and Chief Executive Officer of the Australia Council, Tony Grybowski, found this something of a surprise.

Labor has long had a dedication to the arts. One of the greatest achievements of former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was on Australia Day 1973, in founding the interim Arts Council, which later became the Australia Council and incorporated and streamlined the roles of many other arts bodies. Within the council, there were seven specialist boards representing literature, music, theatre, crafts, Aboriginal arts, film and television, and visual arts. During the Gillard government I had the honour of being Parliamentary Secretary for the Arts. Indeed, I moved the second reading for a major piece of legislation remodelling the Australia Council so that its organisation would not be siloed and so that interaction would occur more easily.

As a result, I fear, of the minister's consolidation of power, the Australia Council suspended the grants process for the six-year funding program for many arts organisations before any money was awarded. There is a real sting in this cut to the Australia Council. Funding arrangements between the Australia Council and state and federal government bodies mean that funds to the 29 major art companies are quarantined. This means that the cuts to the Australia Council budget will disproportionately affect hundreds of small to medium arts companies. It is these companies that will be most dramatically affected by the stripping away of the $100 million of arts council funds. They are, in particular, the grassroots of the arts community which grow all of the future creativity of arts activity around Australia.

Amid all of the ambiguities over the council's functions, Senator Brandis has revealed he will award projects that have already received or been promised private funding. While the bigger companies will find it easy to attract philanthropic investment, the smaller ones will struggle to do so. They will be more likely to go to the wall because of these changes. Ironically, it is the helping hand that the Australia Council provides that enables some of these small companies to be noticed and to obtain private funding. Therefore, whether it is intended or unintended, Senator Brandis is cutting this process off at the knees.

The ministry for the arts will now be scrambling to set up a bureaucratic infrastructure to handle the applications for funding that will be pouring in. Beyond establishing the NPEA, the ongoing maintenance and assessment of applications will add a considerable burden to a Public Service already cut to the bone. For a government so obsessed with the efficiency of the Public Service, it is ironic that the Minister for the Arts will be pushing what is effectively a doubling up of work, because the Australia Council already does that work.

The true danger of this move is that there will be ministerial discretion over what arts in Australia is funded. As I said before, this may have been appropriate in centuries past with Lorenzo de Medici or in the imagination of Barry Humphries with Sir Les Patterson—but the whole idea of noninterference in the arts was to have arms-length funding and assessment by one's peers. Some in the media have questioned Senator Brandis's role as an arbiter of excellence in the arts. They have a good point, but I think the problem is deeper. To ensure that political interference does not affect the arts in Australia, the Australia Council supports art based on peer assessment, as I said, at arm's length from government. The council determines a pool of peers who measure an application for funds against eligibility criteria before coming together to discuss proposals. It is confidential, it shuts out political interference and, to date, including during the 11 long years of the Howard government, it has worked. What is to stop Senator Brandis deciding that arts projects to be funded just happen to be in marginal seats or just happen to be connected to people connected with the Liberal Party? It is the old song—'I dance with the man who danced with the Prince of Wales.' Who will keep the senator accountable?

I observed an interesting anecdote in The Guardian last week. Its columnist wrote:

One of my sources directed me to examine the Twitter feeds of the arts companies to determine reactions to the changes. "The most you'll get is a 'wow', or an expression of shock," the source said. "Amidst this kind of uncertainty, no company can afford the risk of making criticism public."

It is a sad fact that the Minister for the Arts, who is also this country's Attorney-General and a fierce defender of free speech, has caused the arts sector to be so afraid of their own voices that they are not saying anything for fear of losing more funding. That is quite a legacy! I commend the Australia Council for its courage in at least issuing a press release saying to arts organisations across this country that the six-year funding round will be abandoned and that it is totally affected by both this cut and the split and double bureaucracy that has been created.

I turn now from this unfair budget's effect on the arts community nationally to other disproportionate impacts in my state of Victoria. Over the next five years Victoria is slated to receive just eight per cent of the $19.8 billion the Abbott government will invest in road and rail infrastructure. Compare that to the 39 per cent share that New South Wales will receive. Indeed, in the coming years Victoria's share of the Commonwealth's National Partnership Payment scheme will drop to just 12 per cent, despite the fact that my state has a quarter of Australia's population. Is it because Victorian cabinet ministers, such as the members for Kooyong, Menzies and Goldstein, are not able to stand up to their Sydney based colleagues who seem to run this government? Or is Victoria being punished for being the only state to elect more Labor than coalition MPs? The Age newspaper—a newspaper I do not cite very often—did say that Victoria will get 19 per cent of the Commonwealth National Partnership payments and this will drop to 12 per cent over the next four years—less than half of Victoria's population share. I think the way Victoria is being treated is a very inequitable. The figures are indisputable, particularly in infrastructure. I realise we are in the middle of the political stoush that will eventually be resolved, but there is no other conclusion one can come to than that Victoria is being punished for electing a government that is unacceptable to the current federal government.

Let me turn to the last area I want to identify, and that is claims made by the foreign minister last week in response to the intense questioning from the shadow Attorney-General that somehow during the previous Labor government expenditure on national security was diminished and the opposition was somehow unsupportive of the safety of all Australians. Nothing could be further from the truth. As we all know, in the last three tranches of national security legislation—including with some intense debates on our own side—we have supported the government to protect Australian people on every occasion and that includes not only in legislation but also in expenditure on non-Defence national security. If you examine expenditure by the Howard government from, say, 2001 to 2014 expenditure on non-Defence national security it goes, in the billions of dollars, from about three in 2001 to seven when Labor finished office and it has remained at that high level under the current government, although I note that it is projected to decline in 2017-18 to six and a half. I am not going to quibble with members of the coalition about what might happen in the future, but all I would say is: over the years, between 2001 and 2007, when the Howard government was in office, there was a slow increase of expenditure in this area. It remained high when Prime Minister Rudd was elected and went to greater heights when Prime Minister Gillard was elected. So the claim that Labor is not interested in legislatively or financially supporting Australian national security is plainly false.

The review of Australia's counter-terrorism machinery produced a chart that is available from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in their January 2015 report, and it is clear that we were mindful of expenditure in this area because circumstances demanded the increase. I do not think it serves either political party to say that one is more patriotic than the other, if there is no evidence of it. So, both in legislation and in expenditure, Labor has been responsible and supported the government. It is regrettable for a glass-jawed Foreign Minister to be unable to answer questions about what the Attorney-General should have done with national security and to say that we were not spending sufficient money when we were in office or that we did not support them on legislation.

Since we have time in these debates to reflect on things, I might say that the foreign minister and the Attorney-General do not understand these things. That piece of paper from Monis could have been very important for a professional intelligence officer if he had evaluated it. Who knows what other information they had? This might have indicated that this person had become very active when he suggested that he wanted to be in contact with the head of Daesh.

Not everyone reacts like the Attorney-General's office did. I am not saying the Attorney-General himself. I am sure that if he had seen the correspondence he would have referred it on directly to the security services, not just to his department. I received a letter from a convicted terrorist some years ago. I was alarmed because I thought the person sounded very emboldened. I did not understand why he was writing to me. I not only sent it on to ASIO; I also rang the director-general. I came to the view that the security services found this piece of correspondence a particularly important part of the picture with this individual. That is why all of us, from the highest to the lowest, have a responsibility when these matters come before us to refer these matters directly on straightaway to the appropriate authorities.

It is not good enough to say that former Attorney-General McClelland received a piece of correspondence. The difference is the situation. The security alert was at the highest level it has ever been and it should have been referred. The foreign minister should not be so glass jawed about it.

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