Page 4118 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 26 November 2014
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Rather than actually doing the job, we have a minister who is constantly on the defensive over her decisions and her management of this portfolio. One could well say that if the comprehensive list that Mr Rattenbury refers to is an outcome of the arts policy framework then why were the minister and her officials not in a position to tell the annual reports committee that? It is an interesting question, isn’t it? If you had all this detail, why could you not tell the inquiry? The official said it most clearly when I asked, “You cannot table a policy?” He said, “No; I cannot table the developments that you are asking for.”
Many of the things that the minister just read were already in the policy framework. They are things that had occurred. They were going to happen anyway. They did not happen as a consequence of the arts policy framework because they were already funded. To read a list and say, “We fund things,” is the standard Labor Party approach. “We put more money, we put extra money, we put different money or we changed the money.” They cannot table any outcome or analysis of the value for money or the benefit that the people of the ACT got from having this framework. The minister went straight to the old trick of taking credit for everybody else’s actions: “We funded an artist and that artist got a prize; therefore, we’re really good.” But we were funding artists to compete, contribute, create and enliven and to make the city a better place anyway. Tell me the comparisons.
In the annual reports hearing I asked, “Can you tell me, as a consequence of the funding, whether the number of people engaged in the arts has gone up or down?” They could not tell us. That is the problem. This further shows the contempt that this minister holds for this portfolio. It is a further example of why the minister should not actually have the portfolio. Again, you go through the logical steps as outlined in the book called The Economics of Cultural Policy by David Throsby: the specification of objectives—you could say that that is the arts policy framework—but we have not had an allocation of responsibilities, policy coordination, the choice of delivery instrument, the implementation of the policy measures and the monitoring and evaluation of the effects of the policy and feedback to inform future policy development.
We could not even get the review done on time. It is a really simple review. It is a questionnaire and a panel. But, no, we could not even get that done in 2014. It will not be done now till mid-2015. So three years after the introduction of the arts policy framework we will still have no new policy, apparently. We will have no goals and we will not be measuring outcomes because we have no goals. To simply say, “People are participating because we put money in,” well, that is what was happening before the arts policy framework. I know that there are people concerned. People have said to me that they intend to write to the minister to find out what is happening with the review. They are not happy with what is happening in the arts in the ACT.
I think it behoves the minister, the government and Mr Rattenbury to actually stand up for the arts community. Is it really that bad? Or is it that impossible for the minister at the end of February to detail the policies developed, the goals of those policies and the outcomes achieved? That is what the minister is actually saying. She is confirming, by moving this amendment, that there are no new policies, that no goals have been set and that she cannot measure the outcomes because they never had a starting baseline.
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