Inma performance Adelaide Fringe 2021 Credit: Jordan Gollan. For Adelaide Fringe 2021, a total of $52,000 was raised for artists through the new ticketing initiative ‘Double Your Applause’, which invited audiences to buy two seats – one for themselves and one as a donation for the empty COVIDSafe seat next to them.
Boot up the Arts Research shows that Australian arts and culture will need a ‘total reboot’ after COVID. Karen Sweaney explains
A
newly released study from the Australia Institute warns that the ongoing effects of the Coronavirus pandemic will see some “big casualties” in the cultural sector and that a “total public-led reboot” will be required to the ways that governments back the arts. Published at the end of July, the new research from the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work, by Senior Economist Alison Pennington and Monash University’s Ben Eltham, reveals the ongoing and devastating impact of COVID-19 on Australia’s arts and entertainment sector and provides a series of recommendations to governments to reboot the creative sector after the crisis. Advising that the sector needs a reconstruction program of substantial, coordinated and sustained public investment if it is to survive let alone “snap back” after the COVID shutdown, Eltham of Monash University’s school of media, film and journalism, explained “it was urgent last year, (but) now it’s beyond urgent. “We’ve already seen a wave of small company insolvencies across the sector over the past year. “One of the tragedies the sector faces now is that the government has dismantled so many of what were already late policy responses, JobKeeper, for example. Without it, a lot of major companies are in trouble.” Worse still, he said, the loss of jobs and the exodus of skilled live performance workers into other areas would blight Australia’s culture sector for years. The picture captured in the report, Creativity in Crisis: Rebooting Australia’s Arts & Entertainment Sector, which was commissioned by the Media, Arts and Entertainment Alliance, is grim. 44 Australasian Leisure Management Issue 145
Eltham and co-author Pennington estimate the arts and culture sector employs (at its broadest measure) more than 350,000 people but that this employment, even prior to the current pandemic in February 2021, was characterised by about 45% of employees being in casual roles without access to basic entitlements including holiday and sick leave and superannuation. Advising that casual employment has since increased and job insecurity was “endemic”, the report noted that, even with JobKeeper, wages in the sector declined sharply last year, dropping from an average $1,525 a week in November 2019 to $1,464 in November 2020. Cairns-based artist Hayley Gillespie with her roving puppet show Tropical Punch to Carnival on Collins as part of Cairns Festival 2021
