Page 2281 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 9 May 2012
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(f) potential negative impacts these cuts will have on staffing, course option, education quality and the broader musical community;”.
(2) Add:
“(4) calls on the Chief Minister to write to the Hon Simon Crean MP, Minister for the Arts, requesting that the Canberra Symphony Orchestra receives a more equitable distribution of existing Federal Government funding to Australia’s symphony orchestras.”.
I am in the fortunate position of agreeing with basically everything Mrs Dunne has said. I think we will find at the end of this debate that all parts of the Assembly are united in the belief that the ANU School of Music is a very valuable addition to the ACT’s arts scene. That is why we are having this debate. I will not go through all the things that Mrs Dunne has gone through, except to say I agree with them. There is one performer, though, who she did not talk about who I would like to talk about. I am a big fan of percussion, and Gary France is one of my favourite performers from the School of Music.
I refer to a little bit from the Canberra Symphony Orchestra, which put out a press release on the subject. They talked about, as Mrs Dunne said, how there were many exceptional teachers and they pointed out what we are all seeing—that is, this is a shift in educational philosophy. Currently the situation at the School of Music is that there is an amount of one-on-one music performance training. I must admit I was shocked when I was doing my research and reading and found that it was only 13 hours a semester. In my innocence, I had assumed it was a lot more than that, but even 13 hours is a lot better than nothing, and nothing is the potential outcome of the changes at the School of Music.
There are currently 23 full-time teaching staff. They have all been made redundant. Under the proposed changes there will only be 13 staff; therefore you reduce the teaching capacity of the school by half. As I said, you will eliminate the 13 hour-long, one-on-one instrumental teaching lessons, and this will be replaced by an allowance of $600 to $800 per semester, which is not going to cover all the classes the students have had. Also, a one-off allowance like that I would think is probably very vulnerable to cuts in the future. If this goes ahead, I would imagine in a few years the ANU students will be complaining that this allowance has been cut.
Forcing the students to engage teachers privately rather than through the university is just silly. What do we have a university for? What do we have the School of Music for? It has excellent teachers. Why not use them? Presumably what would happen is that you would have the same individual teachers teaching the students; they would just be doing it through a private arrangement rather than through the School of Music. It makes no sense. The idea is that there will be more electronic lessons—e-lessons—from the Manhattan School of Music. I am sure that is a wonderful thing which has many pluses, but I suspect it just cannot be a substitute for one-on-one teaching.
I believe the idea is to change from a Bachelor of Music degree and replace it with a Bachelor of Professional Music Practice, which will have more focus on non-
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