Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to take note of the answer from Senator Wong pertaining to the decision by the Rudd government to close the Australian National Academy of Music. I want to say at the start that this is a shameful decision. It is an unjustified decision. Ever since the minister made it, he has been hiding in his office and failing to justify to anybody why he made the decision. What is even more disgraceful is that he implied for a long time that it was because the internal reviews of the academy had in some way suggested or recommended that it should be closed, when in fact both internal reviews said the academy should be better funded than it is now and should be expanded, not be closed.

Since the minister announced this, nothing satisfactory has been done. There has been no real consultation with the academy—nor was there any before the decision to close. Minister Garrett did not ever set foot in the place, he did not visit it once, before he made his decision to close it, and now it is to be closed down in favour of what will be an inferior institution. The University of Melbourne will supposedly be taking this over if it is allowed to close. As I said, we heard the minister say today that there will be a revitalised program. Well, nobody has said that the existing program is not excellent. In fact, they have had expressions of support from symphony orchestras from one end of the planet to the other and, here in Australia, from the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and so on.

I was privileged to be at a concert there last Friday night, where those students played for their lives. They played for their teachers, they played for the love of music and they played for the future of the academy. You had to be sitting there in that audience to know that all that talk about problems in the academy that required it to be closed down was simply false. You would not get students playing in the way that they did, for the love of it, if those allegations were true.

I have to say it had all the hallmarks of Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt. People will remember they had been there that night and will feel incredibly privileged to have been part of a concert where Richard Tognetti, one of Australia’s most incisive and impassioned violinists and conductors, conducted Beethoven’s fifth. For me, it will be the definitive Beethoven’s fifth because I will always see the faces of those young people, knowing full well that Minister Garrett and Prime Minister Rudd shut down their institution and took away the careers and opportunities they had planned for next year, with no replacement. There is no transitional arrangement in place that is appropriate for the level of skills. How can you close down an institution, not provide the transitional arrangements in the time frame and then try to pretend that you are encouraging some sort of excellence?

Let me deal with some of the things the minister said. Firstly, she said they wanted better geographical representation at the school. Number 1: this school is a school of excellence. You audition to get into it. Excellence is not determined by where you live; it is how well you perform. If 53 per cent of the students there come from Victoria, so be it. It is not where they come from; it is how well they play. It worries me that, if this is how their new institution is going to operate, based on geographical quotas, it will not have musical excellence. Secondly, when I pointed out that not one single person on the new board is an internationally acclaimed musician, the minister cited people from various conservatoriums around the world. She actually talked about one institution that does not exist—she cited someone from a school in London that does not exist. They are administrators; they are not musicians. We need the care and teaching of these students to be by internationally acclaimed musicians.

What we want in this parliament is to see this academy stay open for the next 12 months. It is disgraceful to leave these students with nowhere to go in the new academic year, with no appropriate transitional arrangements in place. It must stay open for 12 months. We must be able to negotiate its future and the excellence that it offers Australia’s young musicians. If Minister Garrett and the Prime Minister close this down then the education revolution is bereft because it is one of cultural philistinism. That is all you could say about it, because this is an utter and absolute disgrace. I look forward to seeing what the Prime Minister does.