Page 5130 - Week 12 - Thursday, 27 October 2011
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Ms Le Couteur—and accuse me of bias and prejudice, I want to put it on the record that the opposition believes that the move of Megalo to the Kingston arts precinct would be a good one. I have said it to Alison Alder and I have said it to the members of her board that I have discussed this matter with. I have said it in this place on a number of occasions.
The synergies and the narrative of putting an industrial-style visual arts facility in an industrial facility next to another industrial-style visual arts facility, the Canberra Glassworks, are very strong. The narrative is very strong. The problem that I have, the problem that the members of the community have and I suspect the problem that Ms Le Couteur has, but she can speak for herself, is that while all of that narrative is strong, there have been significant pieces of information that have been just ignored by this government.
Quite recently, at a briefing, my senior staff asked officials, “Has there been any acoustic study done of the Fitters Workshop?” The response was, “The government has made up its mind that Megalo will occupy this place, so we have not done the work.” There are things that may indicate that what I was told at that briefing are not strictly correct, but I will come to that later in my speech.
We believe that Megalo will bring new opportunities for the Canberra community to develop their skills in the arts and to build their appreciation of the arts. As I have said, there are strong industrial characteristics of the print making process that make the reason for Megalo’s move to Kingston, an old industrial space, a strong one. Minister Burch needs to understand it so that she will not verbal those people who support this motion today, so I will repeat it and put it in simple terms.
Megalo and the Fitters Workshop could fit hand in glove, but we have to make sure that it is the right hand going into the right glove. There has not been consultation; we have not sought expert advice, considered the options or developed a master plan. We think that there needs to be more done.
A casual trawl through the FOI documents that have been given to me show one important thing. They show that a “what if” statement went up the bureaucratic line from artsACT. Let me quote from that “what if” statement. It was made on 21 June this year, well after all the public outcry started about the future of the Fitters Workshop. It says: “If there was an appetite to retain Fitters as a shell for creative use … the rawness of the space makes it attractive for … gallery exhibition, dance, music, film, museum display, working arts studios etc etc etc.” To quote Yul Brynner as the King of Siam, “Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” They are the most important words in that statement, because they indicate the flexibility, the potential and the range of interests here that could be accommodated in the Fitters Workshop by the arts community in the ACT—“et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”
This is exactly what I, the music community and the wider arts community have been advocating for the use of the Fitters Workshop. It could be a multipurpose space that could create all sorts of as yet unarticulated synergies across arts disciplines. The government has not considered this. It made its decision in 2008 with a 12-word ministerial annotation on a two-page letter. On the basis of a two-page letter and those
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