Page 3516 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 22 October 2014
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ACT young Australian of the year; Fiete Geier, one of Canberra’s most respected and loved guitarists and musicians; Bernie Slater, an acclaimed visual artist; Karen Vickery, an actor and director who has taught at NIDA; and Professor Jen Webb, a poet and a writer from the University of Canberra.
It is a shame that Mr Smyth has attempted to smear this entire project funding round and, by extension, the other 48 artists who have received funding. His political attack diverted attention from artists such as Sparrow Folk, who will take their glam folk act celebrating Canberra’s suburbs to the Edinburgh fringe festival, and writers like Irma Gold, who secured project funding to travel to Thailand to research her two new picture books for children.
I will quote from Ms Gold, where she recently informed the Canberra Times:
We are fortunate in the ACT to have a government that has consistently provided a strong funding program to support the arts. This is so important with writing projects that can take years to come to fruition. The grants I have received have enabled me to develop my practice in ways that otherwise simply wouldn’t have been possible.
They are the words from a grant recipient, local writer Irma Gold. It is typical of how Mr Smyth ignores the views of the ACT arts community but, again, prefers to attack me and individual artists to score some cheap political points. He has mentioned his conversation with arts groups that think that the arts framework is failing. Well, he must be talking to a different group, because the artists community that I talk to value the arts framework and value the funding programs that sit under it.
Of course, this was another chance for Mr Smyth to get all outraged and indignant, as Mr Hanson did earlier in the day and trotted out the tired old example about the Nazi stripper. His motion refers to consenting to a fringe festival act which included a performer in Nazi uniform wearing a Hitler moustache who stripped down to her underwear. When I look at the daily program I see that Mr Smyth had nothing to say about our multicultural community, had nothing to say about the OECD ranking Canberra as the world’s most livable city, had nothing to say about the work of carers, had nothing to say about early intervention and therapy services, had nothing to say on marriage equality, but he had plenty to say about strippers and underwear. This is not an intellectual policy debate; this is Mr Smyth taking cheap political shots at me at anyone’s expense.
If we get to the fringe festival, through the 300-odd pages that went to the Canberra Liberals as part of an FOI request, they will know absolutely that I did not consent to that act; we engaged an artistic director. That artistic director, Jorian Gardiner, delivered a successful festival—18,000-plus visitors went to the fringe festival. It was well received and well regarded. There were over 100 artists and Mr Smyth is worried about this one act. He made some comment that it was a family event. It was not a family event; everybody in that audience was advised that this was adult content.
But just on this, I will quote Jewish writer-director-actor, Mel Brooks, who said in regard to Hitler:
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