Page 2380 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 12 August 2014
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Before I ask a supplementary—and Mrs Dunne has one—I would like to acknowledge the presence of the chair of the Cultural Facilities Corporation in the gallery, Mr John Hindmarsh, the Canberra equivalent of Lorenzo the magnificent for his patronage of the arts over many decades. You are more than welcome, Mr Hindmarsh.
The minister then said:
Can I echo that? He has been a very sound and good chair of the corporation.
As chair of the corporation, I think it is important to acknowledge the voluntary work that John and his wife Rosanna do. It is not just years of support; it is decades of support of the arts in the ACT. We are a much more enjoyable society for their presence here and their contribution.
We then went on to a discussion—it is not often one gets to gazump the Speaker, but I took the question rather than giving Mrs Dunne the supplementary—about what was happening with the new Canberra theatre scoping project. Mrs Dunne has spoken about this in the past, as have I. What is happening with what has potentially been called the Kennedy Centre equivalent in the ACT?
There is one thing that the ACT lacks amongst the cultural icons that we have. The cultural icons are all related to the visual arts, but there is not a performing arts icon that we have. Washington, as the capital of America, has the Kennedy Centre. As I said to the committee on the day, Father John Eddy, who set up the School of Australian Studies at Georgetown University, had said to me that in his view, having lived in Washington on and off for 30-odd years, the thing that changed Washington in the eyes of Americans and made Washington the great capital that it is today, remembering that in the 1960s Washington was the murder capital of America—there were about 400 gun-related deaths in Washington a year in the 60s—was the establishment of the Kennedy Centre as the national performing arts centre of America.
This is where contemporary American culture is put on display. There are a number of free concerts every day. There are three major theatres plus a number of smaller performance spaces where the best of American culture is put on display. I asked the question:
Is there a bigger vision behind a new theatre than just a new theatre for the ACT and if there is not, should we be having that discussion?
Ms Elvin, to her credit, said:
I certainly think that this is a theatre for the national capital and that always has the status of a national theatre. And when you look at this suite of cultural facilities that we have in the ACT, they are dominated by collecting institutions like visual arts. We do not have an equivalent in terms of the performing arts. So I think our vision should be grander and should contemplate that the national capital deserves a performing arts space of a national status indeed.
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