The Arts Isn't Dead: Rethinking the Reliance on Government Funding
A couple of days ago, the Australian arts sector was rocked by news that the current Government will roll the Department of Communications and the Arts into a larger infrastructure-based department. Across all kinds of media, I saw so many of my friends and peers cry about this as being some kind of harbinger of doom for the arts, that this will lead to a major loss of funding which then means a lot of companies shutting down.
I find this kind of “woe is me” thinking extremely frustrating - primarily because, for the better part of the last decade, I’ve been staunchly advocating for the Australian arts sector to stop relying on Government grants so much and start expanding their horizons on other options for funding and development. I saw this cabinet reshuffle a mile away, I saw the impact of changing Governments on arts funding, and I thought it was dangerous to pin so much of your financial viability on the whims of capricious institutions.
I’ve been fighting so hard for an expansion on funding options because, for a long time, Government funding options were inaccessible to me by a technicality: my immigration status.
Almost all Government funding in Australia is restricted to permanent residents and citizens only (with the occasional allowance for refugees). This doesn’t just mean direct grants - this also applied to many scholarships, awards, jobs, residencies, creative opportunities, mentorships, anything else with a whiff of Government funding.
I came to Australia to study Creative Industries on an international student visa, which meant full fee tuition (I earned a partial scholarship, the only one available to me in my faculty as an international student), limited work rights, and no access to other support. Half of my artistic career afterwards was spent on a bridging visa: while I had the best kind of bridging visa you could get, with unlimited work and travel rights, I still could not qualify for Centrelink or any of the Government funding options my peers almost took for granted. Even jobs that technically did not have visa restrictions barred me from entry anyway, citing non-existent policy, a misunderstanding of my work rights, or “What if your PR application gets denied and you leave the country? We wasted time on you!” (It didn’t help that the Australian arts sector is super white and minorities in general face racism & xenophobia in the job market.) I could study if I wanted - but as an “international student”, so I still had to deal with full fees and lack of scholarships or loans.
All I could manage were casual gigs, occasional contract work, volunteering, and making my own work within my means. I’m fortunate that my family is still able to support me, but it’s not much in the scheme of things, certainly not enough to do more than very short pieces in variety cabarets. I couldn’t work on anything long-term because I had no promise of stability, and I certainly couldn’t afford to put on shows for Fringe Festivals or similar even without visa restrictions because I had no way to afford registration fees or venue costs or anything like that. I did sometimes try to get around the system, applying for things anyway despite it, but got disqualified from the jump due to my status. Even so, I built a massive portfolio of work and experience, building a name for myself locally and internationally.
After being so depressed to the point of paralysis, I decided to get a fresh start in the San Francisco Bay Area. The differences were stark. Even though I was on a student visa (and then a one-year extension), I was still eligible for so many opportunities, funding, scholarships, and so on (including Obamacare!!!) because all they cared about was that I was resident in the US - my specific visa situation wasn’t as important. I did have much more restrictions on working rights compared to Australia, but there were ways to make it work - I managed to turn a year-long contract working in a youth arts education program into my Masters project (legally!) and even get paid for it. During my year-long extension, which was meant for graduates to find work (paid or volunteer) aligned with their degree, I was getting a lot of interviews for pretty high-ranking jobs, even without very specific qualifications: they were more willing to consider my transferable skills and give me a chance.
What I also saw in the Bay Area was a lot more willingness to look outside the Government for arts funding. Some groups (especially those working with “controversial” topics such as sex or social justice) saw it as a point of pride to be independent and not be beholden to the whims of an institution. There were many levels of private philanthropy - not just from corporations, but also from community groups supporting each other and specific individuals who were using their financial privilege to good use. Government funding, while still existent, was just one of many options - artists didn’t live and die on it alone. And because they weren’t tied to US Government funding (which also sometimes was more restricted), they were able to be more accessible to people regardless of visa status; in sanctuary cities like the Bay Area, that meant a lot more access for undocumented people.
I came back to Melbourne as a permanent resident (I couldn’t make the US work visa-wise alas), which should theoretically qualify me for all the options denied to me previously. And while I did manage to access more opportunities, I found that my bridging visa past still came back to haunt me. I still struggle to gain stable employment because my portfolio & resume seemed a little too helter-skelter. I’ve aged out of many entry-level jobs but can’t get interviews for jobs even a level above (let alone the kinds of jobs I was interviewing for in SF) because I “didn’t have specific enough experience” - which in this case meant time in very specific Australian organisations in a very specific direction. I managed to earn my first grant this year, but it’s not the first grant I’ve applied to: many others rejected me because I couldn’t demonstrate prior success in fundraising. I’m too old, too far away from graduation, and have been in the biz too long to count as “emerging”, but I don’t have enough to show that I’m “mid-career”. I’m still reliant on my parents, to my dismay.
All of this because of the Australian arts sector’s over-reliance on Government funding, replicating the restrictions placed on that funding in their own offerings.
Some make the argument that this is taxpayer money. Non-PRs and non-citizens get taxed too! If you’re not a tourist, you’re pretty much an “Australian resident for tax purposes” and get taxed the same or similarly as everyone else - you just can’t access most public services. So in effect, people like me are funding the rest of the Australian arts sector, with not much in return. Hell even Low Income Healthcare Cards, which a lot of arts places use for concession pricing, is inaccessible if you’re not a PR or citizen - and even PRs have to wait 2 years in the country before they can even think about applying.
(I have noticed that some non-Government funding sources, such as the Ian Potter Cultural Trust, also have restrictions on immigration status. I have no idea why, since they can’t use taxpayer money as an excuse. My hypothesis is that they’re uncritically following the precedent shown by the Government to make it look the same, without regard for whether those restrictions are necessary.)
Some also make the argument that if larger companies die out, smaller companies will suffer and that will translate to indie artists, so even people like me will suffer more. There are many problems with this: it’s trickle-down economics, which is already a dodgy proposition. If you already don’t have any opportunities, the lack of more opportunities isn’t going to make a difference (zero plus zero is still zero). And, as explained above, a lot of these large or even small-to-medium companies replicate the restrictions enforced by the Government grants funding them, so it’s not like their presence necessarily made much of a difference to people like me. Many of us ended up finding work outside the system - private gigs, online, self-producing.
Over the last decade or so that I’ve made this argument, I kept being told that I’m being “neoliberal”, that this is absolving the Government of their responsibility to support the public good, that “corporations are bad actually”. Firstly, having directly come from a Government that only ever funds art that spreads bigoted propaganda and is generally very hostile to minorities, I have no trust in any Government to have my needs at heart. I can’t vote anyway (and who knows how long it will take me to gain Australian citizenship given the constant rules-changing), so “my local representatives” are less inclined to want to support me because I can’t guarantee my vote in return.
A friend who is Haitian-American and lived in Melbourne until very recently also made a very good point about the ethics of accepting money from a colonialist institution on stolen land (emphasis mine):
[O]ften time we have to question if that system was even truly offering equitable access to funds in the first place... the little time I spent Melbourne has me thinking that most of the funds go towards white colonial propaganda. Given that the government is a leg of the British Empire and most of the funds given are fueled by stolen resources from stolen land, should we even be allowing ourselves to be so dependant on government funding for the arts? In my experience government funds usually, derail arts capacity to envoke revolutionary conversations that liberate and nourish the community. instead, we get a bunch of whitewashed bs.
More to the point, though, our options are way more than just Government vs Corporation. Making it just about those two options betrays a lack of imagination. We’re artists! Our whole deal is to reimagine our possibilities - why not add funding to the mix?
Indeed, in Australia we already have some examples of other options for arts funding. Pozible is possibly the biggest Australian innovation in arts funding - they’ve grown their crowdfunding platform to include subscriptions and investments and they’re always keen to experiment. Creative Partnerships Australia also does crowdfunding but with a focus on sponsorships and private philanthropy. There are community-based giving circles such as The Channel and Lesbians Incorporated. Artists are embracing fundraising cabarets and parties: Queer Lady Magician was funded in large part by a cabaret hosted by Mama Alto and Mx Munro, and Finucane and Smith throw massive Christmas parties as fundraisers for the next year of work. (If only I had $148 to spare…)
The point is, we can’t let the whims of the Government hold our art hostage. To do so would be to, in essence, let the bastards win. So many artists have managed to make work despite lack of Government support (whether by choice or by circumstance). Artists around the world have dealt with especially hostile governments (the kind that will arrest you or even kill you for your expression) and still managed to make something happen. Art has existed before the Government, before this Government, and will continue to exist no matter which cabinet is being named what.
Now is not the time to wither and die because the old systems have been failing for a long time.
Now is the time to come together as community to research, devise, and develop new possibilities.
Now is our golden opportunity to break free.
I’ve been in touch with Pozible to look into organising a meeting for the sector to brainstorm new approaches to arts funding and learn from people that have made it work in other ways - they’re very keen to help. I’m also planning to reach out to the organisations I’ve mentioned earlier, as well as any other artists or groups that would be interested in contributing. If this is you, please get in touch!