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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (24 May) . . Page.. 1694 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (Treasurer, Attorney-General and Minister for Justice and Community Safety) (4.47): As a former minister for the arts I want to make a comment about this motion. It needs to be recorded, Mr Deputy Speaker, that in the last couple of years since the 1998-99 budget, when there was, as members know, quite some controversy and debate about cuts to the Institute of the Arts, there has not been much discussion in this Assembly about the role of the arts in this community, and particularly about the benefits that a triennial arts funding arrangement brings to this community and to arts organisations.

I am sorry if members begrudge taking a little time to talk about the arts in this context, but it is important. Members in this place value the arts, value the role of the arts, and believe that it does behove us once every two years to spend an hour-and-a-half talking about the role of the arts in this community. The vehicle for that on this occasion is the motion moved by Mr Hird about triennial arts funding and the importance of ensuring that we have appropriate vehicles to provide the ACT's arts community with the means to deliver a high-quality product with the certainty of knowing that the considerable energy dedicated each year in the past by each arts organisation and individual receiving funding no longer needs to be devoted on an annual basis to securing continuation of that funding.

It is certainly a matter of record that the ACT government requires, as do other governments, a high degree of accountability on the part of those to whom it provides funding to indicate the purpose for the funding, the basis for the project or plan that the funding will be used for, and details of how it will be acquitted over a period of time. We want to know what particular goals and milestones will be set in that program. In recent years the ACT government has moved away from the idea of simply making untied grants to organisations or individuals of any description. Instead, we now focus on the idea of having funding based on a contract, a performance contract in effect, whereby a person is to perform certain work or produce a certain output as a condition of receiving funding.

I am very pleased that we have recognised that each arts organisation or arts provider that needs to spend a certain number of days or hours preparing the necessary documentation to seek funding diverts some of their energy and their creativity away from the skill and the attributes they possess into things rather more mundane. So the certainty, the capacity to be able to deliver all of their energy to their arts product, is a very important development. Triennial arts funding, as you know, Mr Deputy Speaker, as a former minister for the arts, is a vehicle for arts organisations to be able to do that.

I have made this comment before but I will repeat it now. There is the suggestion that people are more creative when they are under pressure and that some of the greatest art produced in the history of humanity has come from people who have been under incredibly difficult circumstances. I could cite many examples but I will not do so now. The suggestion has been made, perhaps cheekily, that having this pressure on arts organisations to write reports to the government on what they are doing and what they are hoping to spend their next lot of money on is a very suitable form of pressure to place on arts organisations to improve productivity and the quality of the output.

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