Arts needs political will, vision

Imagine this occurring in Australia’s richest state: an election is held, the victorious party anoints its premier and he or she announces that their portfolios will include arts and culture.

It’s never happened in Western Australia, yet most other states in the nation have enjoyed the benefit of their premier taking on that portfolio, whether it’s labelled arts and culture or creative industries.

Think Don Dunstan and Steven Marshall in South Australia, Jeff Kennett and Ted Baillieu in Victoria, Neville Wran, Nathan Rees and Gladys Berejiklian in NSW, and Annastacia Palaszczuk in Queensland.

I put the idea to Premier Roger Cook recently when he attended a Murdoch University art show, asking him whether he would consider taking on the arts and culture portfolio if victorious at the 2025 election.

The premier heard out my unsolicited inquiry, and said it was “an interesting idea” and he’d think about it.

In the months since I wrote about the state of the arts for Business News many people have told me that serious advocacy from the very top is needed for WA’s creative sector.

After all, it employs thousands of music, visual art, performance, writing, design, film and digital professionals; or ‘creative tradies’, as someone jokingly suggested they should be called in WA.

The topic is timely.

Current Arts Minister David Templeman – a genial man who genuinely loves the arts and has held the portfolio for seven years – retires soon.

He would probably approve if Mr Cook took over his portfolio, judging by an episode he described to me recently in a recent interview for Business News.

Mr Templeman said the growth of WA’s screen industry was one of his proudest achievements.

“If there’s a segment in the [arts] sector that has seen the most investment by this government, it is this one,” he said, citing a $300 million investment to attract more local and international large-scale productions, and to build a $233 million screen production facility by 2026.

Mr Templeman said it was the personal backing of then-premier Mark McGowan that inspired the investment.

“The way he [McGowan] understood the importance of investing in the screen industry was when I took him to a film set of [TV series] Mystery Road 2 in Broome,” he said.

“He’d said to me, ‘I want to do something within the cultural side of things, what’s happening in Broome?’

“It was the first time he’d ever been on a film set, and what he instantly grasped was how many people were working on a production, the individual jobs and how they were all related to the creative team.

“He met the actors, writers, producers and people plugging in the audio.”

Tania Hudson says CPI needs to be added to organisations’ future operational funding. Photo: Michael O’Brien

Vision on exit

Mr Templeman’s own parting gift to the creative industries has been the recent launch of the long-awaited 10 Year Vision for Arts and Culture in Western Australia.

So what does the ‘vision’ need to deliver to the sector, and is it likely to be delivered?

In my previous article, I explained how every arts organisation in the state is suffering from a crippling post-COVID trifecta: rising production costs, the inability to increase ticket prices due to cost-of-living pressures, and static government funding.

The most pressing issue is the last one, and it boils down to this: how many of us would pay our plumber the same amount today for their services as we paid them 10 years ago? Nobody.

This is the reality for almost every government-funded arts body.

The problem is that consumer price indexing, or CPI, is not applied to arts funds, so companies cannot cover rising costs.

For example, for a decade now, the West Australian Symphony Orchestra has been paid the same sum to manage and program the Perth Concert Hall, despite a huge increase in the cost of doing business (insurance, freight, venues, staffing).

It amounts to an actual decrease in government funding.

“We get indexed funding from Creative Australia, even from Wesfarmers arts grants, but not from the WA government,” a source from another major organisation told me.

“It’s been on the agenda for years.”

Mr Templeman agrees that CPI increases have been requested for more than a decade, and that he has asked the Department of Treasury for CPI to be factored in.

“We ask all the time,” he said, adding that achieving that outcome would need a commitment by treasury to factor in CPI.

“That hasn’t happened,” Mr Templeman said.

What he said next was typical of the ‘next-best-thing’ approach of government to sector demand.

“An uplift” in funding had been delivered to major companies and a raft of smaller ones in the 2024-2025 state budget, he said, to help them cover increased costs.

That uplift is $5.9 million in new funding delivered over two years to five major arts organisations – Black Swan State Theatre Company, Indigenous dance group Marrugeku, West Australian Ballet, West Australian Opera and WA Symphony Orchestra – with $359,000 to be shared among 35 small-to-medium organisations.

“That was a direct response to the ongoing requests,” Mr Templeman said.

“It was presented to us that it was costing thirty to forty per cent more to do their productions and deliver. So we responded. It was important and I think was well-received.”

But nobody was fooled.

An article in Arts Hub noted that: “The funding announcement can also be read as the government’s covert acknowledgement of the degree to which not including consumer price indexing in annual and ongoing arts funding – without which organisations effectively have their funding cut every year due to the impact of inflation and rising production costs – has significantly impacted the arts sector in WA.”

The State Theatre Centre and its two performance spaces are underutilised and often empty. Photo: Gabriel Oliveira

The Chamber of Arts and Culture WA chief executive Tania Hudson welcomed the extra money at the time, but said it was not sufficient.

“At a minimum, CPI must be added to all future operational funding for organisations,” Ms Hudson said.

So here’s another odd fact: arts companies cannot afford to perform in the venues built for them by the state government.

The situation borders on farce.

Contemporary dance company CO3 is a resident company in the State Theatre Centre but cannot afford to hire the venue in which it resides.

From 2025, it will perform in less-expensive facilities.

Elsewhere, WA Ballet has dropped its State Theatre Centre season for 2025 following a 37 per cent increase in theatre hire costs since last year, meaning it loses money if it uses the venue.

The WA Opera estimates that 30 per cent of its state funding ends up being handed straight back to government in the form of venue hire and ticketing fees.

Yet the State Theatre Centre and its two spaces – the 575-seat Heath Ledger Theatre and Studio Underground – are underutilised and often empty.

Meanwhile, the body tasked with running the government-owned venues, the Arts and Culture Trust (ACT), was bailed out last financial year for $4.6 million.

Ms Hudson said the net effect was a round-robin of funding where government gives with one hand and takes with another.

“It is frequently recouping the grants it provides, via venue and other costs and charges by the ACT, (which) has little net benefit for the organisations involved,” she said.

The chamber has drawn up a series of requests it hopes will be met in the government’s 10-year plan.

Those requests include unlocking government-owned venues “to promote greater use of venues by WA arts and culture organisations all year round”.

Lowering venue hire costs to more commercially sustainable rates could be one way to achieve this.

Second, remove the round-robin effect by cutting redundant charges.

And third, invest in upgrading ageing venues “to ensure they meet the needs of today’s arts organisations, reduce risks and enhance audience experience”.

Level playing field?

Something worth noting here is that, in WA, sporting organisations pay far less than the full price for the hire of state-owned sporting venues.

Some estimates are as low as 25 per cent, whereas resident arts companies can pay up to 75 per cent of the commercial full hire rate in state performing venues.

Ms Hudson said the exact figures were unclear but there was a clear issue of inequity that needed to be addressed.

Mr Templeman acknowledged that the financial viability of venues run by the Arts and Culture Trust was an issue.

“Ultimately we want to keep the lights on by having our state-funded entities performing in them,” he said.

“And if there’s an issue of costs that have gone up, we need to look at those.”

But the minister seemingly contradicted himself when he added: “Co3 and other companies are not as resourced as the other majors and I think considerations about the places they perform should be a little creative. It doesn’t have to be in a trust venue.”

Sporting organisations pay far less than the full price for the hire of state-owned sporting venues.

How we got here

So, how is the arts and culture sector funded in WA?

It harks back to a quaint arrangement from 1990, when a new Lottery Commission Act allocated a fixed percentage of gaming revenue to the arts and culture sector, with a similar allocation for sport.

Two years later, another gaming revenue formula allocated specific funds to Perth Festival and the film sector.

Since then, the state government has leaned heavily on Lotterywest to pay for the bulk of arts companies’ operational funding: the total Lotterywest arts allocation of about $30.8 million (2022-23) includes $7.7 million each to Perth Festival and Screenwest.

Smaller Lotterywest grants go directly to community arts projects and festivals.

WA is the only place where arts funding is heavily and directly reliant on lottery income stream.

The advantage of this financial crutch is that state treasury doesn’t have to invest in the arts in the way it does in hospitals, ports, schools, tourism, or main roads.

“Lotterywest has increasingly become a government slush fund to pay for items that should be coming out of consolidated revenue,” an insider tells me.

From the government’s perspective, Mr Templeman said he had argued for more money to come out of treasury to meet the real needs of companies.

“Yes, we have, and we’ll continue to do that,” he said.

“Building the consolidated revenue pie is a priority, but I can’t underestimate the importance of Lotterywest [money]. Its ethos is delivering to community and the [Lottery Commission] Act itself highlights the arts.

“We are very proud of Lotterywest’s unique role in funding a whole range of initiatives across a suite of portfolios that deliver quality, vibrancy and tremendous outcomes to community.”

A plethora of arts grants are administered by the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries (DLGSC), but also by different departments and Healthway (administered by Lotterywest).

They involve lengthy application processes and often only one in four is successful.

The Chamber of Arts and Culture has proposed a solution to what it calls: “the multiplicity of funding and grant processes that currently imposes unnecessary and unacceptable costs and inefficiencies on the creative sector and WA government agencies.”

It suggests that a ‘creative sector funding commissioner’ be installed to “streamline all arts and cultural funding through a single department or agency”.

It would be a temporary position for the next term of government to draw together into a single, effective process all disparate forms of arts and culture funding, the chamber said.

Get in the game

Still on solutions, the chamber has proposed a state-sponsored initiative to interest young people in the arts.

By 2031, one third of WA’s population will be under the age of 24.

Currently, the WA government offers KidSport vouchers to help eligible children aged five to 18 participate in community sport and recreation, with an upper limit of $500 a financial year towards club fees.

That commendable offering is not made in the arts.

The chamber hopes this gap will be filled by its proposal to create an arts voucher for up to 340,000 school-age children, who would receive $100 vouchers to spend on any performance or art form (book, movie, gallery etc) produced by WA creatives.

“This type of funding would ensure that the WA government places creative learning and experiential activities on a similar and equitable level to sporting activities,” Ms Hudson told Business News.

“The beauty of this initiative is that all the funds would remain in WA and circulate within the creative sector.”

Sport in WA has enjoyed huge advocacy from SportWest, the peak industry body for sport in the state that works “to promote, strengthen and advocate for the sports community”.

It receives ongoing funding from DLGSC, whereas The Chamber of Arts and Culture is on a drip-feed government assistance program that is due to run out in a year.

For context, a 2022-23 state government report scored participation in organised sport and recreation at 63 per cent, while the arts polled higher, at 78 per cent, among Western Australians.

SportWest helps to develop the next generation of sports players across sporting codes, with programs for club and volunteer development, coach and referee training, particularly at the community sports level.

It makes perfect sense. As one enthusiast put it to me: “In sport, you don’t just have the Eagles. You need Auskick all the way up to create the elite players you need. But the arts is the same.”

There are many cultural organisations that train youngsters in WA to become tomorrow’s actors, directors, performers and technicians: Barking Gecko, Spare Parts Puppet Theatre, CircusWA, DADAA, and WA Youth Theatre Company, to name a few award-winning organisations.

They are all desperately underfunded, ranking among the 35 small-to-medium organisations offered an uplift portion of $359,000 over the next two years.

Whether that allocation is considered beneficial or not depends on whom you ask.

I randomly contacted a couple of the companies and was told they each stand to receive less than $3,000.

Mr Templeman said he was keen to see the success of the SportWest model replicated in the arts.

“I want arts and valuing of arts to be as embedded as community sport is, for all the reasons people see value in community sport,” he said.

But there’s a long way to go.

CircusWA recently won the Fremantle Chamber of Commerce Creative Industries Champions award.

Every week, 180 children and young people turn up to a big tent with visible wear and tear on a vacant building site in Fremantle.

They train in extreme physical challenges on a par with sport.

The participation rates rival any local football club, but so far CircusWA has failed in numerous attempts to secure a proper home.

There is talk of relocating several smaller companies, possibly including CircusWA, to Midland Cultural Infrastructure Project, to share facilities and breathe new life into the magnificent Midland Railway Workshop buildings.

The idea has been tossed around for decades and, with Mr Templeman an enthusiastic supporter of the concept, companies are hoping it may feature in the 10-year plan.

ECU City campus is due to open in 2026. Image: ECU

There are other exciting prospects on the horizon, not least the ECU City campus due to open in 2026.

The $853 million building will house Edith Cowan University’s law and business schools, as well as the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.

WAAPA says it will conduct more than 300 performances a year in six new public venues inside ECU City.

So, how will that affect the myriad existing city venues struggling for relevance, cost competitiveness and customers?

Has any modelling been undertaken to determine how the State Theatre Centre, Studio Underground, Blue Room, PICA, and even His Majesty’s Theatre may collaborate or compete?

“In terms of whether someone has been contracted to do that modelling, no,” Mr Templeman told Business News.

“The feedback from ECU and what it will deliver in economic and cultural perspective is probably being done in various forms. What we do know is it will bring a huge number of professionals into the city centre, and students.

"Already there’s impact on demand for student accommodation.

“It will have an obvious flow-on effect to businesses, to institutions that already exist.

“I think there’s a huge opportunity for all the institutions in our cultural centre to cross-pollinate, to collaborate.”

Many sector professionals ask whether an overarching plan informs the state government’s cultural infrastructure decisions, or if they amount to an ad hoc response to a problem.

For example, the Perth Cultural Centre will soon undergo a $55 million upgrade to improve and ‘activate’ a precinct that the general public views as unsafe.

Yet the redevelopment will lack any semi-permanent performance infrastructure, meaning the companies that will ‘activate’ it, in festivals like Fringe World, will be forced to spend considerable sums bringing in lighting and stage equipment.

The recent emergence of AGWA Contemporary, a proposed new addition to the Art Gallery of WA, is an instructive case of how cultural infrastructure tends to emerge in the west.

AGWA Contemporary is an ambitious idea floated by Colin Walker, AGWA’s director and a former executive director of the government’s arts department.

It’s Mr Walker’s job to pursue such visions, especially when cities such as Sydney and Melbourne have invested heavily in enlarging their state art galleries.

Yet, up until a few weeks ago, few people in the sector – including AGWA’s near neighbours the State Library and WA Museum Boola Bardip – had much knowledge of the proposal.

Hannah Mathews has led PICA since December 2022. Photo: David Henry

Nor did PICA, the city’s existing contemporary art space where the state’s talented and emerging artists actually make and display art (more than 400 artists in the past two years).

Led by director and chief executive Hannah Mathews, PICA has tried hard – and drawn up two detailed business cases – to attract support for upgrading its Victorian-era premises.

“There’s a number of conversations that are going on about the progression of what AGWA delivers,” Mr Templeman said, adding that funding for AGWA Contemporary was yet to be determined.

(A target sum of over $800 million has been aired publicly, double the sum spent redeveloping WA Museum Boola Bardip.)

He said PICA’s future remained an important part of the ecology of the Perth Cultural Centre, and any future expansion of the art gallery needed to be done so they were complementary.

"I value PICA’s direct engagement with artists. They have presented in the past grand visions for PICA,” Mr Templeman said.

“The assurance from me is that PICA is not dissolved from being part of that landscape.”

The minister believes the Labor government deserves praise for its track record in fixing up the state’s arts and cultural infrastructure.

He cites work on the Perth Concert Hall ($200 million), His Majesty’s balconies (more than $15 million) and the upgrade of the Perth Cultural Centre.

It seems some cultural precinct plans can be finally ruled out, however.

The Sunset Heritage Precinct, on the site of a former hospital in Dalkeith, was once promoted by then-premier Colin Barnett as a future arts and culture precinct.

“The site at Sunset is problematic,” Mr Templeman said.

“It’s a highly treasured heritage site with strong heritage values, so its location is challenging.

"[A]ny investment to deliver a grand vision will require significant dollars. We’ve had interest from high-level private sectors and even they can’t get the dollars to match.”

Then there’s the East Perth Power Station, where former treasurer Ben Wyatt once envisioned an Indigenous art gallery within a renovated commercial and residential complex.

Instead, billionaire developers Kerry Stokes and Andrew Forrest got the site for $1 rental, later fell out over development plans and quit. In the meantime, the arts sector has come to the rescue.

In January next year, Perth Festival will ‘activate’ (a favourite ministerial term) the land around East Perth Power Station with a full program of music and performance, but the building’s interior remains so dangerous that the festival is banned from entering.

“The site itself is being brought up to a standard that could allow tenants,” Mr Templeman said.

“And it lends itself to quicker activation than a site like Sunset. Initially there is an opportunity for a cultural entity to have some tenure over it for a period.”

That last sentence sums up the status of culture as a lesser-ranking priority.

I asked all interviewees for this story what they considered the sector needed most.

A typical answer was a cultural vision; a sophisticated strategic plan that sought to prioritise the big ambitions of our institutions.

One commentator put it thus: “Ideas get prioritised through back channels; where’s the [actual] plan?”

Mr Templeman said the government’s 10-year plan for culture and the arts was highly consultative, based on 1,100 submissions.

He said engaging with children and young people would be a feature of the strategy, as would a focus on creating and delivering opportunities.

“The ten-year vision will build on the significant investment of government in arts infrastructure”, Mr Templeman said, referring to current planning for a world-class Aboriginal cultural centre by focusing on the artists and creative workforce that brings those places to life.

“Arts and culture are essential for our community wellbeing, and it is the artists who tell WA’s unique stories to the world and make our city and places more liveable.

“Aboriginal art centres, their artists, and preparing the workforce for the Aboriginal cultural centre is also of strategic importance to WA’s creative industry.”

The chamber has called for a partnership with the government to match fundraising up to a maximum $100,000 for organisations with Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission status.

“We need to find ways to boost the long-term financial security of the sector, and encourage even greater individual philanthropy and corporate partnerships,” Ms Hudson said.

“We need to ensure there are jobs and career pathways for graduates emerging from state-of-the-art facilities, tertiary institutions and school VET programs, or we risk continuing to lose our talent to the east coast or overseas.

“We also need a world-leading creative workforce to underpin WA government major investments such as the Perth Film Studios (and ECU City).”

As for a symbolic change, we’ll have to wait until the March election to see if a visionary premier steps up to become our state’s first-ever champion of creativity.

• Victoria Laurie is an award-winning feature writer for national and state publications