Big Blue Sky

by Peter Garrett

  27

  ART FOR EVERYONE’S SAKE

  WHEN IT CAME to the arts portfolio, I was among friends, on the surface at least. I was an artist and had a bit in common with ‘cultural creatives’, estimated to comprise around a quarter of the population.

  Disenchanted with consumerism, caring about social justice, operating in the middle of a web of coalescing social movements, this was my milieu. I still had blisters on my hands from climbing the rocky slope and knew how difficult it could be for practising artists to get started. I also knew they frequently felt their contribution in what often seemed like a country besotted with sport was underappreciated. I recognised that the creative act happens across all art forms—from the heritage offerings of opera and ballet (‘heritage’ being a term the practitioners hate) to digital installations and street performance. What was needed was an injection of government resources to rev up the sector.

  We’d consulted with the arts community before the election, and the central policy—realigning the funding system to give more support to young and emerging artists—was launched at Parramatta to signal the new direction. Plenty of artists made the journey west, but very few journos. We wanted to better assist Indigenous artists, including by legislating for a resale royalty scheme for painters, and also work more closely with the local film industry. Despite an abundance of world-class actors and technicians, it took a fair slab of public money. But audiences, with the exception of the odd breakthrough movie, were paltry.

  There is immeasurable value in the insights and lift the artists of Australia could offer our national life, but I believe the role of government is to lay the groundwork for the arts to flourish, not to pick winners or support favourites. I also don’t believe that simply calling yourself an artist means you can automatically expect taxpayer support. And I don’t think that popular music, prior to the age of the digital download, needed much in the way of direct government assistance. As a band we never had our hand out, nor should we have.

  Governments have a role to play in supporting non-mainstream arts, new work and the national institutions that display the best of Australian creativity and provide performance opportunities and training. If they are concerned about the vitality of the nation’s cultural life, governments need to get the ‘settings’ right—tax arrangements, subsidies, loans and grants—to give artists a decent crack.

  Contrary to the impression that artists working the popular avenue sometimes give, I respect output that has stood the test of time and spoken across centuries. This is the heavy weight of the canon; it had lasted the distance, and left much of the confused output of the postmodern era, overly influenced by academic theory, for dead.

  At the same time, the existing arts budget was heavily skewed towards perpetuating these classics, through opera, classical music and dance. If we were going to produce more Australian work that spoke to current generations, and for the best of that work to, in time, become part of our canon, the budget needed to support new work, not simply recycle the old. Consequently more money, both public and private, would have to be found to reach this goal.

  It wasn’t the minister’s prerogative to determine the specifics of who received funding, even though it was frustrating at times to see what qualified for a dollar. I’d come from a very different world, where bums on seats ruled and competition was tough. It had to be as good as you could make it from the get-go or you quickly ended up as a footnote in a fanzine.

  There was plenty that was good, and some—like Cate Blanchett doing A Streetcar Named Desire, or the Canning Stock Route exhibition curated by Aboriginal artists, or the Australian Youth Orchestra ripping up a symphony with the impudent energy of the young—was great. When I saw work that fell short, or simply copied someone else’s success, I usually made a note not to recommend it to friends and left it at that.

  One night I attended a post-concert supper at the Sydney Opera House after the Sydney Symphony Orchestra had performed with their visiting conductor, the world-acclaimed Vladimir Ashkenazy. With a twinkle in his eye, the conductor asked me directly, ‘as a musician’, what I had thought of the performance.

  I replied, ‘As a musician? Well, not too bad, but it would sound better if they got themselves in tune and everyone played in time.’

  More eye-twinkling from the super-energetic maestro as he responded, ‘Exactly.’

  There are a lot of moving parts in an orchestra, and even though the players, skilled musicians all, simply have to alight in unison on the black notes, I knew it wasn’t that easy. But before we could discuss how Ashkenazy would lift the performance bar (which he subsequently did), a crowd descended, showering the diminutive conductor with praise and proclaiming the concert one of the best ever.

  Much of the contemporary visual art I saw was freighted up with cultural commentary and insider allusions and often struck me as cold, yet it was crucial that people kept at it—even Bill Henson.

  Henson found himself at the centre of a storm when the police seized his photos of barely clothed underage children to investigate accusations that they were child pornography, forcing the closure of his exhibition. The next day, on morning television, Kevin Rudd fanned the controversy when he said he found the photos ‘revolting’.

  The arts community demanded Henson be defended and Rudd’s comments criticised. My response—to defend the artist’s right to create work, but not to breach existing laws, thus avoiding criticising the prime minister at the same time—was way too legalistic for some. Journalists hyperventilated, with David Marr claiming in The Monthly that I had ‘nothing to say’ about ‘the biggest art controversy in half a century’. In hindsight, despite plenty of discussion with the arts community, I should have said more, namely that while I found some of Henson’s work with teenagers creepy, and his habit of soliciting young children to model for him questionable, I would continue to defend his right to make photographs . . . as long as he didn’t break the law.

  Good luck to artists if they found an audience; many jewels could always be discovered among the dross. Apart from Australian literature, which I’d always enjoyed and managed to dig into from time to time, including trying to read all the finalists in the Prime Minister’s Literary awards, theatre was the stand-out form. While not averse to recycling the classics, it balanced this by delivering new work and featuring Australian playwrights like Maxine Mellor and Campion Decent, whose play Embers had a lasting effect on me. Theatre is so in your face it can’t easily escape or pretend to its audience.

  I did manage to find a few spare moments to run some master classes in vocal performance for the final-year students at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), which happened to be near my electorate office. I suspect I got more out of it than they did. The pent-up energy of these students sizzled through the rehearsal room like a high-tension wire in a swamp. They responded to the class with so much verve that I left the sessions alive and kicking.

  Supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts where possible was also an immediate priority. The painting, especially from remote areas, embodied a sense of the country unlike anything I’d seen, with stories that deserved a wider audience. One of the most remarkable outpourings of creativity in the twentieth century was taking place in every corner of the continent, pulsing out of the desert lands and the unconquered north—it was nothing short of remarkable. I knew the paintings could be appreciated internationally. As recently as 2006, attendance at an Emily Kngwarreye exhibition in Japan had matched that of an Andy Warhol exhibition held at the same time.

  Indigenous artists, living on the edge of poverty, often painting in the dirt, were producing art of great power and beauty, earning income for themselves and their communities—and they deserved help. This meant making sure there was a resale royalty scheme in place, consistent funding for arts centres and a workable code of conduct for Indigenous art (the fakes and mass-produced work flooding the market were a growing problem).

  Above all, a
cross the portfolio the funding mix had to be changed, and that included seeing where genuine savings from other areas of the budget could be found.

  And find them I did, though I was to discover that hell hath no fury like the spoiled having something taken away from them without warning; so it was with the decision to restructure the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM).

  The academy is headquartered in Melbourne with a brief to provide first-class tuition to young classical musicians from across Australia. The organisation was struggling and was after more money, despite already receiving large dollops from the Commonwealth, but I demurred. My department’s advice, accepted by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, was that the academy should be co-located within the University of Melbourne, and a new board be put in place to sort out the mess, with a brief to draw less on government funding and to cast a wider net for students.

  The outcry was immediate and the decision subject to a barrage of criticism, led by eminent composer Brett Dean, who was the ANAM artistic director, with the backing of Richard Tognetti, artistic director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and many of my colleagues in the music community.

  Looking back, it is clear the decision was poorly executed, without sufficient consultation and preparation. I felt the department and my chief of staff had let me down, but the ultimate responsibility was mine. We wore the catcalls as the Melbourne establishment took up the campaign, leading to Terry Moran, the secretary of the prime minister’s department and a Melbourne arts aficionado, edging backwards and weighing in at the same time—a dangerous sign.

  Still, I stubbornly pressed on, with some compromise around logistics and location, while trying to get people to understand the issue, including meeting with a delegation of students who came to Canberra to press their case. When I pointed out to the assembled group—middle class and plummy rude—that well over 90 per cent of ANAM’s funding came from the government (even Opera Australia wasn’t on that good a wicket), that there wasn’t a bottomless pit of money in my budget and, finally, that there were other deserving artists who could do with a bit of help, no one so much as blinked. The culture of entitlement had a firm hold over these young players. They were adamant that the government had ‘no choice’ but to fully subsidise their learning in this privileged location.

  When, on the eve of the 2010 election, an old bloke from out in the sticks replied to a reporter’s question about what he was looking for from government by saying, ‘I’ve got me hand out for more of those handouts,’ he neatly summed up the prevailing zeitgeist. These students had grown up with the special pleading that typifies modern politics. They’d seen industry, farmers and unions all engage, some with more success than others. Now it was their turn, and in their minds their cause was just. Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard managed to root out some subsidies that had no economic or enduring social purpose but instead imposed an unnecessary charge on the public. But Howard and his treasurer, Peter Costello, also took budget surpluses from selling off public assets and then provided more middle-class welfare to people who didn’t need it, and so a sense of entitlement spread across the electorate—it’s still there.

  We persevered with the changes to ANAM long after the fracas had died down, and when I met with representatives of the new board some time later, the transition was complete and the organisation is now in better shape, ‘thanks to the minister’—no worries, everyone.

  Always back the horse named self-interest, New South Wales premier Jack Lang famously said, and this episode, and the assault by the mining and resources sector on Labor’s plans for an emissions trading scheme, showed again, as if anyone needed reminding, that self-interest knows no bounds and has no shame. The extensive, and expensive, series of ads in which the industry attacked the government’s plans across all forms of media raised doubts in the public mind, and emboldened the Opposition to scream ever louder about the sins of pricing pollution; the rationale for the scheme didn’t get a look in.

  On a much smaller scale, self-interest was on ugly display in the opposition to our plan for a Resale Royalty Bill.

  The principle was simple. A resale royalty for artists was a longtime Labor promise, and had previously been recommended by Melbourne businessman Rupert Myer, who later went on to chair the National Gallery of Australia, in his Report of the Contemporary Visual Arts and Craft Inquiry (2002). This legislation would create a scheme under which visual artists—painters, printmakers and sculptors—would automatically receive a small percentage of the sale price (5 per cent of the total) every time one of their works was resold on the secondary art market. The examples of Aboriginal artists in particular—who were often paid a couple of hundred dollars for a painting only to see it resold for tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars without them receiving a cent—was reason enough to have this scheme. But this scenario wasn’t confined to Indigenous artists; it was a feature of many outstanding artists’ careers. Music composers and authors had copyright that extended beyond their lifetime, so why shouldn’t artists have a similar right?

  Despite its obvious merits, the bill was strenuously opposed by the Coalition arts spokesman, Liberal senator George Brandis, and by a number of private auction houses and some galleries, on the basis of unworkability and extra costs. Given that the record-keeping requirements were modest, my suspicion was that some sections of the art world didn’t want the transparency and greater accountability that the measure would bring. Their ally Brandis appeared comfortable sipping champagne and siding with Sotheby’s and the professional dealers association, even if this meant denying the poorest people in the land some extra income. The critics fumed that the costs of running the scheme would eat away at the meagre royalties expected in the first few years, and once in government Brandis ordered a review of the scheme and threatened to repeal the legislation.

  In fact, after four years of operation the resale royalties paid to visual artists exceeded early estimates and will grow over time. The scheme already pays for itself and is achieving what it set out to do. This joining up of culture and creativity offers a solid platform for expression and livelihood for people in the future—as long as the free-enterprise zealots don’t tear the house down.

  28

  DAY OF RECKONING

  THE MOST PERPLEXING and ultimately dangerous feature of Labor’s first term was the disconnect between established climate science and the ongoing refusal of sections of the media and the conservative forces in the country to take the issue seriously.

  I found the debate around the issue utterly repellent, the balance sheet really was breaking up the sky, and the evidence was everywhere and mounting. Delegations of Pacific Islanders, now climate refugees, visited Parliament House to present the facts and press the case for action. Yet resource and manufacturing interests, and a large portion of the right-wing political classes, remained in a state of constant denial.

  And when it came to pass that terrible bushfires ravaged the land, woe betide anyone—like the Australian Greens’ Adam Bandt, the federal member for Melbourne—who dared suggest that pushing ever more coal-fired pollution into the atmosphere might have contributed.

  In 2009, the Black Saturday fires centred on the Victorian towns of Kinglake and Marysville, exacerbated by four consecutive high-wind days over forty degrees, had seen serious loss of life and hundreds of thousands of hectares of national park and farmland burned out.

  Parliament resumed three days later and question time began with a condolence motion for the victims. The first speaker referred to the numbers of deaths now standing at 107. By the time the speeches had finished, 135 deaths had been recorded and the toll was still rising. (The final number was 173.)

  Along with Victorian premier John Brumby, I visited Kinglake to participate in the first remembrance ceremony; the locals were still numb with grief and in shock, lucky to survive but really hurting. There wasn’t much we could do but listen and console people. I’d been asked to
sing ‘Advance Australia Fair’ with Ross Buchanan, who’d lost two members of his family in the conflagration. I wondered how he would hold it together after what he’d been through. Ross made it, showing yet more bravery in a town where plenty had been on display.

  Driving up to the ranges on the way to Kinglake had brought us up short. There was no sign of life as far as the eye could see. A week earlier, green swathes of eucalypt forest, myrtle, great mountain ash, wattles and orchids had covered these hills. Now, thousands of burnt black sticks stood on hills that resembled an abandoned battlefield. Sure, summer bushfires were a part of Australia’s weather pattern and the forest should bounce back in time, but it looked like an alien landscape, and I feared for the future: hotter days, stronger winds and bigger, meaner fires.

  There was an incredible outpouring of support for those who’d been affected by the fires, such was the scale of the loss of life. When Steve Waugh called to invite me to play in a charity cricket game at the SCG, I jumped at the chance—not only to be a part of something that was going to help those who had suffered, but also to experience the hallowed turf where my great-grandfather had thrown down a few curly ones.

  One look at me poking away at a few balls in the nets saw the skipper relegate me to number eleven in the batting order, and the one over I bowled couldn’t finish quickly enough, as our opponents scored freely. Mark ‘Tubby’ Taylor, a big John Howard fan, was the opposing team captain and came to the crease determined to make inroads on the score.