Page 2640 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 5 June 2012
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The arts community will remain divided, and that rests at the feet of Joy Burch and the ACT Labor government.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (3.51): We started the day with a discussion about how incompetent this minister is, and we look like we will come close to concluding the day on the same note. This is a slap in the face for the committee, who worked diligently and, as Mr Hanson said, came to this with an open mind. I was not part of the inquiry, although I was afforded the courtesy of being able to attend hearings, but I believe that Mr Hanson and Ms Bresnan came to this with an open mind and looked at the issues, in the same way as I understand Ms Porter did for the most part. This is a sorry day for the arts community when a weak minister, who is incapable of making a decision by herself, a strong decision showing some leadership, has fallen in behind the flawed decision making of her predecessor.
We know that this was a whim. We know that this decision-making process revolved around a letter from Megalo to the minister that flattered the minister at the time and the minister said, “That is a really good idea.” We know that that letter was never responded to. The only response Megalo got from that was a budget allocation. It was a decision to place Megalo in the Fitters Workshop.
After that, when other things were discovered about the Fitters Workshop, there was steadfast resistance by this Labor government, under successive ministers, to say, “There is new information on the table and we are going to have”—their favourite term—“an evidence-based approach to policy making.” They love to talk about evidence-based approaches to policy making—and if ever we have seen anything that is lacking an evidence-based approach, this is it. Two successive arts ministers in the ACT have steadfastly refused to have the acoustic reports done, because it may have told them something that was inconvenient.
From the outset I have been saying: “At least get the information. Know what you are doing. If the acoustic reports come back and say that it is not a goer as a music venue, I will be satisfied. Then you can go ahead and do this.” But they would not do it. Eventually there was this committee of inquiry, and the committee rightly sourced the acoustic work that should have been done by the government. It was very inconvenient for the government that the acoustic work should come back in such a way that showed that there was a great deal of potential. It was very interesting to listen to the sound engineer who did one of the acoustic studies who said: “Yes, it is edgy, but that is where you want to be. If you want to be making music, you do not want to be making music in a place where the acoustic is perfect, where there is no reverberation and all these sorts of things. If you want to be at the cutting edge of music, you want to be in this edgy place.”
That is what the sound engineers were saying. But Minister Burch did not hear that. Minister Burch did not want to hear anything contrary to the position that she had taken on as Minister for the Arts in the baton change from Jon Stanhope. We know that in the past the minister has done this and on this occasion she did it again: she put her hands over her ears and said, “La, la, la, la, la; I don’t want to hear.” That is what she does. She is an incompetent minister. She has been divisive in the arts community.
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