Page 928 - Week 03 - Thursday, 10 March 2016
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them there. Those that can afford to do so will come by car. But the artists will have arrived there, and the artists will go home, because it will be very hard for any artist to live on the Kingston foreshore.
It is a matter of having those precincts. Time and again throughout the history of mankind areas have developed. A whole lot of American art hopefuls in the early part of last century moved to Paris, to those quarters where the arts were in the brickwork, in the grit in the pavement. The government’s land policies and delivery of accommodation policies have made Canberra virtually unaffordable for many people. Let us face it: artists, unless they are world stars, do not earn a lot of money. So the fear there is that they will simply be priced out of the agenda.
It is important that we work out what the value of the arts to the community is. The minister talked about the contribution that is made. I have quoted these figures before and I will quote them again. I note we have now got an answer regarding the figures. Under the review of the arts in the ACT we know that it added $426 million to the value of the economy, 1.3 per cent, and that it was equivalent to 3.1 per cent of ACT employment. In the Australia Council’s Arts nation: an overview of Australian arts—and, as I said last time, there is always a difficulty in trying to compare like with like, but these are the only figures that I can find—cultural activities are estimated to make up about four per cent of Australia’s GDP. So it is 1.3 to four per cent. In another section the report says they generate over $93 billion in economic activity, or 6.6 per cent of GDP, and employ eight per cent of the nation’s workforce. So you can compare our 1.3 per cent to either four per cent or to the copyright industries at 6.6 per cent, and employment at eight per cent as against 3.1 per cent.
It suggests that we are underperforming. The cultural sector contributes four per cent of Australia’s GDP, similar to levels in the United States, Canada and Spain. Again I am happy to say it is a matter of what is being compared, but by any measure we are underperforming. Peter Drucker, the management expert, said, “If you don’t measure it, you can’t fix it.” There were numerous requests from various estimates committees for the scope—how big the arts sector in the ACT is. Well done to the government; I think I congratulated them when they finally did it. But we need to do it again and again. We need to reform the measurement to make sure we are getting it right, so that it is comparable.
Obviously it has touched a nerve either in the minister’s office, the former minister’s office, or in artsACT because when you turn over the page in the minister’s statement he said:
Our report did not set out to compare the ACT against the rest of Australia …
The fundamental question is: why not? Why didn’t you, in your report, try to find out whether or not we are performing better, the same as, or worse than the rest of Australia? It would be a useful measure, I would have thought—unless you already knew the answer, which was, “Yes, we’re underperforming and we don’t want to highlight it.” I will read the paragraph:
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