How Neoliberalism Swallowed Arts Policy

To work in the framework of existing arts policy is to live in a state of suspension; planning, envisioning the future, saving, progressing—all of it hangs in mid-air. The distance between salaried arts professionals and unwaged artists runs more vast than ever. Being an artist can seem like nothing but a hereditary privilege dependent on your access to unearned wealth and family networks. And now, the decades of funding neglect are worsened, but not caused, by COVID-19. The recent Federal Budget has seen arts funding cut by 20 per cent over the next four years—Screen Australia losing more than two-thirds of its funding, regional arts nearly halved. Most of the responses by writers, artists and commentators to the arts funding crisis have been reflections on the affective dimensions to worsening economic circumstances—the hurt, the feeling of striving within conditions we know to be unbearable. Despair and helpless acceptance pervade the sector: why do the Liberals hate the arts so much, is Labor going to save us?

I get it; I’ve had six grant refusals from my local state-based arts agency since the pandemic, many more from the other state and regional units. It hurts me too, and it’s hard to consider what happens next when the sector is so bone-tired. But, as another election approaches, what can we do about it? To answer that, we have to rewind: how did we get here?

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Arts policy in Australia began innocently enough in the 1950s—an era of postwar boom, when it wasn’t controversial for the government to provide things that might, you know, benefit society. The Liberals took the first steps towards national cultural projects, providing funds for the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust and the ABC, with the goal of building a collective, national identity apart from that imported from the British Empire. With the country’s first comprehensive national cultural policy, Gough Whitlam became famous for his advocacy of the arts as a form of social improvement, and arts policy went into a period of rapid expansion. He also had expectations that I think many young artists would disagree with today—namely, that the arts should sell the idea of Australia to the world, as a form of soft diplomacy and cultural nationalism. Though this was perhaps justified in the 1960s and the early 70s when it was hard for arts practitioners to have a career without moving abroad, there was no such thing as Australian cinema, and the accents you’d hear on the radio were BBC-style voices.

Like much of the world, Australia endured profound political and economic crises in the 1970s. The political class attributed these deadlocks—including the dismissal of big-government Whitlam and the energy crisis—to an overburdened model of governance. In the coming decades, major parties across the political spectrum converged on a solution: to open up society to the free market. At first called economic rationalism, we now call this neoliberalism. Unlike the UK and the US, the Australian neoliberal transition was undertaken by the centre-left party, but the effect everywhere has been the same: to reduce the state’s responsiveness to the public’s needs. This idea of the market over the state animates and deadens much in cultural policy, which Australia still hasn’t begun to discuss in a mature way.

This idea of the market over the state animates and deadens much in cultural policy, which Australia still hasn’t begun to discuss in a mature way.

It was Malcolm Fraser’s Liberal government that began to assess the arts as an ‘industry’ and its economic viability in a post-Whitlam world. The other colonial party followed suit. Dr Philip Parson, director of the Australian Theatre Studies Centre at the University of NSW, noticed the shift in justification for government support towards the idea that the arts is an industry, lamenting how even progressive arts spokespeople in Bob Hawke’s Labor government in the 1980s had

turned away from the quality-of-life arguments of the sixties which had identified, accurately, the intangible value of the arts to the human spirit, and instead addressed the political managers in their own language. They pointed to benefits created by past funding, spectacular increases in turnover and job creation, spin-off benefits to the tourism industry and the rationale for arts funding became pre-empted by its incidental benefits.

The Keating government’s much-reminisced-about 1994 Creative Nation document marked the point at which the arts’ economic contribution became deeply embedded in the rhetoric of cultural policy. The policy increased funding to major institutions, but failed to implement the basic provisions for professional practising artists that many in the sector had been campaigning for. Economics scholar David Throsby writes that ‘the thrust of Creative Nation has remained broadly consistent with the approach to arts policy espoused by subsequent conservative governments.’

Within the political memory of today’s working artists, the neoliberal trend accelerated in 2013 with the election of the Abbott government, whose special little anti-arts crusade went beyond cost-cutting and efficiency dividends into the realm of pure ideology. The attacks led by then-arts minister George Brandis in 2014–15 were an effort to erode many of the fundamental principles of public provision on which arts funding is predicated. As market-driven policy wreaks havoc on the job and affordable housing markets, artists, public-sector journalists and educators have been easy targets for a Coalition government looking to service anti-elitist sentiment in the electorate. Sustained cuts to national cultural institutions, tertiary education and the ABC—tangible, associated workplaces for artists, as well as the art world’s partners in creating spaces where ideas can be explored—mean that, for independent artists, the COVID-19 collapse has been a long time coming.

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What are we left with, then? A nation-state with so much nation (patriotic rhetoric, pageantry, celebrations of national identity, border-regime PR antics) and so little state (access to the public services and rights that were once part-and-parcel of a functioning social democracy), trying to normalise that public investment—in anything apart from finance, militarism and the private arenas of mining, big agribusiness, real estate and construction—is poison​. ​

This is why it’s been bust time for a long time in the arts. No jobs, just gigs. No upward mobility, just suspension. The Australia Council’s strategy vaguely promises to ‘support viable creative careers and business models’. The ​Screen Australia Act, written and passed by the Rudd government in 2008, states plainly that the agency’s function is to ‘promote the open market as the primary means of support for projects with commercial potential’. And yet, in the analysis of Justin O’Connor, Professor of Cultural Economy at the University of South Australia, arts funding cannot be so simply or fully tied to the neoliberal logic of ‘extraction’, which refers ‘not just to mineral resources but also the ways finance has been used to extract value’ from things that used to be in government hands. We’ve moved from the aged pension to superannuation investments, from publicly owned companies like Telecom and Medibank to publicly listed corporations geared toward mum-and-dad shareholders. Health tests are farmed out to private pathology units, whose profits have soared since the pandemic. Even Centrelink can be reimagined as a chute for corporate handouts, in the form of contracts to employment companies and cashless welfare cards redeemable at Coles and Woolworths.

It’s been bust time for a long time in the arts. No jobs, just gigs. No upward mobility, just suspension.

But the logic of art is different—how on earth could it ever entirely become such a beneficiary of what Malcolm Turnbull has called the ‘cult of consultants’? How could the sensibility of financial extraction easily be applied to an effective cultural policy? I don’t believe that the policymakers and lobbyists of this colony have the infrastructural imagination to vitalise the arts market. After all, it was a Labor government that allowed a large portion of the commercial gallery sector to close in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis in 2009, without any targeted stimulus efforts. The arts don’t play into the areas dynamised by neoliberalism—border defence, military and police, which all enjoy an open chequebook. And so, arts funding faces the guillotine decade after decade, with a new report finding that it lags ‘behind major world economies’ and has ‘failed to keep up with inflation or population growth’.

Meanwhile, the ALP’s lightweight arts rhetoric for the coming election—while a perfectly serviceable improvement on the Liberals’ non-policy—merges an incoherent mix of nationalist, cultural and entrepreneurial goals, without tackling the underlying dynamics of these ongoing neoliberal attacks on the arts. Their cultural policy hasn’t been fully articulated. Arts and culture is not highlighted on the ‘policies’ page of their website, unlike, say, ‘fighting online scams’, while their national platform contains a promise to integrate art and culture policy into broader economic and soft power strategies.

The Greens’ policy is an improvement: their election platform proposes doubling Australia Council funding, as well as a national paid artist-in-residence program in schools and libraries, and its broader plans around a liveable minimum wage will benefit artists too. But it too clumsily fuses the language of ‘soft skills’, ‘philanthropy’ and the ‘creative economy’. It is hard to know how much of this might materialise should the Greens gain the balance of power, or indeed, where the Greens’ economic philosophy lands. The type of transformation I am talking about—toward cultural birthrights, artist’s work rights and public culture buoyed by public funds—needs more than just a top-up of funding; what the sector requires is a fundamental challenge to austerity’s status quo. Beyond the Greens, most parties’ arts policies (where they exist at all—you may not be surprised to learn that the arts garner barely a footnote across the various crossbench parties of the libertarian hard right) vibrate with the sense that culture is peripheral to the ‘real’ issues of border security, defence, lower taxes, small-business boosterism and various ways of catering to middle-class aspiration.

The type of transformation I am talking about needs more than just a top-up of funding; what the sector requires is a fundamental challenge to austerity’s status quo.

At the very least, the ALP needs to commit to escalating Australia Council and ABC funding to 1990 levels, take a stance in favour of prioritising funding for independent artists (historically, funding of organisations has dominated support for individual artists; in the chase for funds, large performing organisations are able to assert a stronger bargaining position with politicians than can individuals such as writers and visual artists) and commit to overhauling the casualised employment statuses of unwaged artists. For this reason, the arts sector would benefit from reaching beyond the simple message of voting out the LNP and talking up a broader social policy around workers’ rights, a universal basic income and a more-than-livable minimum wage—to benefit arts workers, gain relevance with the electorate and build links with the community beyond itself.

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Enter COVID, and the rhetoric of resilience. The 2020 Resilience Fund. Pivoting. Supporting sustainable business models. Even before the pandemic, individual artists were the unspoken subsidisers of the cultural events, festivals and exhibitions enjoyed by the general public. The financial and emotional stress of the disaster hasn’t built our perseverance—I can’t think of many artists who have come out of the last two years feeling tenacious and energised. To suggest otherwise is an almost sociopathic form of free-market psychology, when the pandemic has, in fact, pushed many practitioners to leave the profession. Are they less resilient? Are they quitters? Or simply weighing up what a floating life in the arts precariat really means for their future and their capacity to take care of themselves? Perhaps they have realised that their own psychological energies and a more ferocious work ethic can’t replace funding neglect and wage theft by arts institutions.

Rather than being in service to art, the rhetoric of resilience has been pushed by the salaried arts bureaucracy in order to privatise the true costs of pandemic arts management onto individual, unwaged artists, by enticing them to harden up and endure worsening conditions and scarcer grants. Enact self-care, avoid burn-out. Arts policymakers tend to talk up artists’ doggedness, their resolve for developing their disciplines and their wild determination to continue, further perpetuating the romanticised myth of the poverty-stricken artist. Enshrined in policy, this language plays straight into what Mark Fisher called the ‘business ontology’, a mentality that can only appreciate human activities insofar as they’re profitable or compatible with job creation and economic growth.

So too does the Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) fund, the major federal stimulus providing $200 million to the arts since the onset of the coronavirus. It’s the best crystal ball for the future of ‘arts funding’ in this country, in that it functions along the lines of direct administration by the office of the federal Arts department, with little transparency, and outside the ‘peer assessed’ arms-length approach of the Australia Council. Few artist-run groups, non-ticketed events, independent artists, volunteer-run groups, organisations without paid staff (which can allocate human resources to pump out professional grant applications) or even artist-run businesses have benefited from the scheme. Under the wafer-thin guise of arts funding, RISE directs handouts to the entertainment, tourism and hospitality industries—straight from the Arts office to the private sector. This marks the passing of a new threshold: arts funding’s misuse as a cursed smokescreen for corporate welfare, while failing to meaningfully support artists and their audiences.

Under the wafer-thin guise of arts funding, RISE directs handouts to the entertainment, tourism and hospitality industries, while failing to meaningfully support artists and their audiences.

It’s been widely reported that the biggest beneficiaries of RISE have been music promoters, commercial musicals and major festivals like Splendour in the Grass, a Guns ‘N’ Roses tour, Hamilton and Harry Potter musicals, to the exclusion of a more diverse range of applicants—and in particular, the literary sector. Some promoters are arguably more in the business of staging hospitality events with a sprinkle of live music, such Kicks Entertainment’s Spilt Milk festival and Loudness’ Wine Machine festival. The latter’s website bills it as ‘Australia’s very own premium, bespoke, lifestyle, destination, winery event’ in various wine regions, while its RISE description shifts the emphasis, describing an ‘annual, nationally touring, regionally focused music, food and arts festival’.

There’s some trickle-down to artists here, but not much, considering they’ve been excluded by other forms of government stimulus such as JobKeeper. Speaking on the phone to the RISE office last year, I was assured that economic returns were not the key priorities assessed in applications—that RISE was indeed a form of arts funding premised on creative merit. And of course, many of the recipients produce good work in and for their communities. But the list of successful applicants, as well as the application form itself, suggests an emphasis on profitable outcomes like ticket sales, job contracts, hospitality benefits and tourism flow-ons. Is artistic excellence now a market-defined value? Cultural policy exists because art and culture is too important to leave to the ravages of the market. We fund the arts and culture because the market cannot.

While it’s easy to think that Coalition governments—and it is the Coalition who win most federal elections in this country—have abandoned the arts and artists, the neglect goes much further than Scott Morrison or even George Brandis, and all the way to the heterodox centrists of the present. Fund the Arts, a campaign group that seeks to appeal to conservative voters, not just ‘inner-city lefties’, is specifically couching its appeals in terms of nationalism, tradition and the conservation of Australian stories. In the recent history of arts lobbying, that has never been successful; as Justin O’Connor writes, the ‘anti-arts turn in the global right has had a very definite impact in Australia’. A New Approach (ANA) is a think tank that advocates primarily for large performing arts companies, but not for the arts on the whole, to the extent that its insight papers make little mention of independent artists in the group’s policy vision. Instead of campaigning for a national cultural policy, ANA focuses on investment, benefits and return on public arts expenditure, and claims dubiously that ‘cultural and creative activity is a major economic driver; it generates income and it provides hundreds of thousands of real jobs.’ And industry body Live Performance Australia has already begun to publicly call for the abolition of the Australia Council, in favour of more direct subsidy from the arts department. Rather than centring cultural rights or the rights of arts workers, these strategies appeal to a normalised, idealised ‘middle Australian’ voter. More promising is the Reset Arts and Culture campaign (led by O’Connor and other academics). It advocates for ‘putting progressive ideas back into arts and cultural policy, and art and culture back into progressive imagination and activism’ while acknowledging the true economics of art-making and those labourers who bear its costs.

Playing pretend politics to placate those in power hasn’t worked; we have to campaign for a different type of politics altogether.

We can’t become crumb maidens. Playing pretend politics to placate those in power hasn’t worked; we have to campaign for a different type of politics altogether. Mere advocacy has to be replaced with an effort for deeper political change. The era of big government was short, from the postwar rebuilding efforts to the 1980s. Austerity, with its almost religious faith in the market, has been the norm since then. So arts policy isn’t a unique failure of the Liberals, but of the whole political class, and its adoption of neoliberalism and extractionism, over the course of many decades. The failure of arts policy is intrinsic to the bipartisan pillaging of basic infrastructure.

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I’ve come to see Australian society as a grand, fictional set for myth and politics. I live in the countryside, and the nearest city to me is Canberra. As the nation’s purpose-built, administrative capital, made in accordance with the garden-city movement of 20th century urban planning, Canberra’s green-belt design has all kinds of odd distortions that make it a little inhumane. Absent is a culture of pubs or mixed businesses, vestiges of the kind of organic working-class life that the invented mini-metropole has always lacked. But the synthetic city reminds me that interventionist policy can and does shape and reshape us. What I’ve learned in my time in the arts, more than anything, is that any concrete, well-researched proposal for a better arts sector is immediately deemed idealistic and unreasonable. Actually employing artists? Nice idea, perhaps, but impossible! Are Berlin’s or New York City’s artist’s stipend programs utopian? The policies seem to work pretty smoothly there, as recognised by both policymakers and artists. Likewise in Iceland, where early pandemic support translated to additional months of artistic stipends, and in Ireland, which has just launched a 325-euro-per-week Basic Income for the Arts pilot program. These are highly effective and uncontroversial measures, and could easily be implemented here at the local government level.

Rather than the hyper-competitive treadmill of project funding, the emergency payments of 2020–21 offer one real-time blueprint for income support as a more effective way to fund the arts. Elsewhere overseas, it’s normal to subsidise artistic production by shuttling funds straight to independent artists. It’s not revolutionary. It’s a functional policy concept at the core of the Nordic model. Rather than creating investment opportunities, policy in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway is explicitly directed toward supporting artists and artistic work. In Norway, improving the preconditions for artistic creation also involves a guaranteed income to supplement artists’ creative work. This is because, like us, Nordic artists also have very restricted opportunities to earn income from their domestic markets; public support is a way of compensating for small markets. The solution to our woes is much simpler than it seems: use arts funding to directly pay artists good wages to make things.

Rebuilding the arts sector means rebuilding the role of government in providing jobs and serving society.

I don’t believe what artists do is special. I don’t even think it’s necessarily a privilege to make art. It’s a normal vocation; cool but unexceptional, generative and useful. It’s work. So, to respond to what’s happening and what’s needed in the sector, the policy agenda must be to normalise making art by normalising jobs for artists.

That task means something bigger than our rights as art workers. Rebuilding the arts sector means rebuilding the role of government in providing jobs and serving society. The state is now a feeble and perverted thing, serving finance and business growth, and policy—including arts policy—is framed in terms of a competitive market. For many across the economy, the quality, reliability and rewards of work have deteriorated. The pandemic can’t mean settling for being designated an extremely unprotected ‘small business’ with an ABN. It should mean a recovery from the pandemic by way of investment in basic infrastructure—of which art and culture should be seen not as an industry but as an essential service to a burnt-out, brain-fried public. Placing the working conditions of artists at the centre of cultural policy should mean that those organisations receiving public money from arts funding have to ensure dignified, good jobs for artists, paid—at the very least—at the annual average wage and with basic entitlements.

Underneath the arts crisis is a conflict in how we see ourselves and our audiences: aspirational individuals, or citizens in a fragmenting society. What lies on the other side of this pandemic? A better society, or more austerity? The pandemic has forced us to rethink the role of labour in our lives. What are we willing to settle for? In that sense, the worst aspect of neoliberalism may be our own low expectations for social change and dignity. For that, we can only hold ourselves responsible. For me, there is society as it is, and society as how it should be.