David Smith (Bean, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In March 2018 the Joint Standing Committee on the National Capital and External Territories announced an inquiry into Canberra's national institutions. The inquiry not only held hearings and received submissions but also provided an opportunity for committee members to participate in site visits to see firsthand the challenges facing the institutions in managing their collections, providing access to them and ensuring they had appropriate staff with skills required in largely expert roles. I was a latecomer to the inquiry, joining the committee halfway through the year, but had the opportunity to talk to archivists, curators, librarians, sound engineers and others doing their best in their work within, and in some cases across, institutions. It was obvious how thin the resourcing was and, as a result of ongoing funding cuts, the risk it created to these institutions if the issues weren't addressed.

The National Gallery of Australia told the committee it was at a crossroads after years of efficiency dividends had a marked effect. Their submission noted:

Funding reductions have put the core purposes of the NGA at risk, with questions around financial sustainability, caring for the collection and the planning of our loans programs under constant review.

The NGA can no longer find more efficiencies. The National Library of Australia's submission said the caps on staff levels created 'significant challenges', the Australian War Memorial noted the unsustainable impact of the efficiency dividend and the National Archives noted the impact of these measures were cumulative.

The committee finalised its report early in 2019, and it was tabled before the election in April 2019. The report had support across the political spectrum for its conclusions and recommendations. As the chair, Ben Moreton MP, noted:

A strong and vibrant collection of national institutions is critically important for the continued success of our democracy and nation.

…   …   …

These institutions tell our Australian story. It is essential that we understand that story, learn from it and use it to build confidence and pride for the present and future.

The report made 20 recommendations, including recommendations around the resourcing of the institutions that required urgent attention. These included a reassessment of the average staffing level caps to reduce the skills retention impacts the caps are having and the perverse cost impact of having to rely on inefficient and expensive labour hire arrangements, the adoption of measures to offset the disproportionate impact of the efficiency dividend, understanding the challenge of digitisation of analogue audiovisual items across the collections by 2025, and the need for a clear and coherent whole-of-government strategy across institutions to get this done.

The report has just sat there since April 2019, gathering dust without a government response to any of the recommendations. The inaction, particularly around the resourcing of critical skills across the institutions, has already had significant consequences. In June this year the National Gallery of Australia announced that they could make up to 12 per cent of their staff redundant. In July this year the National Archives warned that they were preparing to lose large sections of more than 100,000 hours of audiovisual magnetic tape archives as they did not have the resources to digitise the archive by 2025. And in May this year the National Library announced that they had removed key Asian countries from their list of collection priorities, closed their Asian collections rooms and cancelled their subscriptions to hundreds of Asian periodicals.

As James Spigelman, the former chief justice of New South Wales and former NLA chair, put it:

This is not a propitious time to proclaim to the world that Australians are not interested in India, Japan, Korea and all the nations of mainland Southeast Asia. That, however, is what the National Library of Australia has done by announcing it will stop its systematic collecting of materials about all these nations, because … financial restraints force the library to prioritise … The blame should be correctly attributed … No-one said that the library's funding was being cut. Rather, year after year, it was subject to what was called the "efficiency dividend". That this could be imposed year after year for decades, without effect on the delivery of services, as implied in the language used, was and is delusional.

At such a point in our nation's story it is critical that we support those institutions entrusted to tell our story and give us a better understanding of our place in the world. The government needs to urgently respond to the report's recommendations before more of our institutions' work is lost or left to wither on the vine.

See this speech in context