Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

The arts and entertainment industry has been smashed by COVID. After last year, people had this sense of hope that 2020 was going to be the bad year and there would now be a pathway forward. Since 1 July, we've now had in the order of 23,000 gigs cancelled—just since 1 July. We have a situation where major festivals are now wondering whether they can take the risk to put themselves forward again.

The policy answers to all of this are actually pretty simple. It's about insurance and it's about a wage subsidy that will work. The government has gone down a path—with the Guy Sebastian announcement that they made, where they used one of our great celebrities in a horrible way—where they made the big announcement and then we found out a couple of weeks ago that, of the $200 million they promised, only $100 million had gone out the door. A grants program was never the ideal way to spend this money anyway, because a grants program always meant picking in advance where you would get to make an announcement, next to somebody famous, for an event, but an event that ultimately might not have actually needed the grant, because, in different ways, this sector is commercial.

But this sector now has one form of risk against which it cannot insure and which it cannot predict, and that's a COVID shutdown that can happen right up until the moment of the event itself. Bluesfest, two years in a row now, has been cancelled—last time, right when the event was about to start. Think what that means. All the food trucks have turned up; they've bought all their food. All the workers have turned up; they have assembled the marquees. The roads have been put down. The entire complex has been built. The artists have flown up. The audience have paid for their tickets. Bluesfest, when it was cancelled last year, had pandemic insurance. You can still get pandemic insurance, but you can only get it for COVID-20 or COVID-21. You can't insure against an event that is already here. So how can commercial enterprises around the country, whether they're major expos, events or festivals or big shows and productions, or even a smaller operation where someone wants to be able to organise a tour, have the confidence to take that risk—if they can find the capital; a lot of people have run down the capital—if there is an event that you know you cannot insure against and that could terminate all your plans at a moment's notice?

The smartest way to spend the money is to do what the government has done, to its credit, with the film industry: set up a business interruption fund. The businesses that don't get shut down never draw on the fund. But it gives every business the confidence to know that the form of risk that is the most dangerous at the moment is covered. They pay a fee to be part of the scheme, but it means that people have the confidence to know that.

Think of the big shows that people here might know of, like Harry Potter or Hamilton, where cast members have found that this is their big opportunity and people from within this chamber have taken their free tickets to go to opening nights. These workers have found themselves suddenly stood down, with a promoter who needs to refund the tickets, still has the liabilities and has to ask the question: 'How can I know to take the risk again another time?'

An insurance scheme, as exists for the film industry, if made available to major events and to touring, would allow commercial events to take a commercial risk again, instead of expecting them to take a risk which is then to be determined by state government decisions over which they have no control and which, we know, particularly now with Delta, they cannot predict. With a wage subsidy system, we then are able to deal with those events after lockdowns where the social distancing rules still prevent something from otherwise being commercial. A whole lot of events I went to last year with smaller crowds were not commercial, were it not for the fact that there was a wage subsidy allowing them to happen. But it meant that people got to work, it meant the venues still survived and it meant that people got to see shows within the social-distancing rules.

The solutions here are not complex but they mean going down a pathway where you don't get to make the big announcement with the celebrity but you do get to deliver jobs.

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