Page 3511 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 22 October 2014
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government should fund—and, indeed, the government’s knowledge of what was going on, because the FOI revealed that the minister and her officials perhaps did not know as much as they should have, or in some cases knew too much but did not do anything about it, even though they were warned about the activities of the director of the fringe festival.
If you want to see whether this minister truly has her thumb on the pulse of the arts community in the ACT, you have only to go to the removal of ArtSound FM from key arts organisation status and what it means and the lack of understanding of the officials, and indeed the minister, of what they have done. At this stage ArtSound’s funding has not been reduced. The government’s policy in relation to how the funding can be used has changed. The policy was introduced without consultation, again against the way the government are meant to operate, or say that they will. ArtSound was given no advance notice.
The new policy requires that the funding ArtSound receives cannot be used for administrative purposes; it can only be used for the development of artists. For a community radio station, the former is essential to enabling the latter. So we have this chicken and egg situation. This change puts enormous pressure on ArtSound’s ability to deliver on its funding obligations and, as a consequence, staff numbers have been cut back. Now, that is supporting the arts! And on top of that, the remaining staff have had hours cut back.
But even worse, the government’s policy means that ArtSound must now rely on volunteers to do the work that would be otherwise done by paid staff. That is contrary to the government’s own policy on the use of volunteer labour in the workplace. It would be interesting to see how the government might deliver its programs without administrative support. This is what the government is expecting of ArtSound.
The government argues that ArtSound receive administrative support funding from the commonwealth through the Community Broadcasting Foundation. Yes, they do. The CBF provides some small salary subsidy—in this case only $10,000, I understand—which is applied for competitively against 350 other community radio stations. So there are no guarantees. Other grants are sought but are restricted to specific projects, equipment capitalisation et cetera—hardly sufficient to provide the administrative support that a busy community-based organisation needs and certainly not enough to justify the government’s policy of prohibiting the use of government funding for administrative support.
The government has said it does not provide funding so that ArtSound can “just play music”. How patronising is that? ArtSound has never used government funding so that it can “just play music”. All ArtSound radio programs are presented by unpaid volunteers. Running costs for broadcasts are funded by membership, sponsorship and donations revenue. Further, included in ArtSound’s volunteer presented and produced programs are around 10 hours of work of broadcast time, and an additional 30 hours per week of pre-production time for programs devoted to and associated with artistic development in Canberra. Developing the arts community—there is a noble challenge, Madam Speaker; and including broadcasts of locally recorded concerts and live studio performances.
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