News: September 2020

A Parliamentary Inquiry into Australia’s Creative and Cultural Industries and Institutions has been called by the Minister for Communications and the Arts, the Hon Paul Fletcher MP.

Ausdance encourages you to make a submission by the closing date, 22 October 2020.

The Terms of Reference for the inquiry are:

• The direct and indirect economic benefits and employment opportunities of creative and cultural industries and how to recognise, measure and grow them.
• The non-economic benefits that enhance community, social wellbeing and promoting Australia’s national identity, and how to recognise, measure and grow them.
• The best mechanism for ensuring cooperation and delivery of policy between layers of government.
• The impact of COVID-19 on the creative and cultural industries; and
• Avenues for increasing access and opportunities for Australia’s creative and cultural industries through innovation and the digital environment.

Your submission can take several different forms. You can write a letter, a short statement or provide a substantial paper. You can choose to fill out the committee survey or you can choose to share your thoughts in an audio-visual format. 

Every voice put forward helps to produce a more informed appreciation of public opinion. Information provided through your submission may be referred to and included in the report compiled by the parliamentary committee, whose members may use the findings to influence public policy and spur governments into action.

Do note that to make an influential parliamentary submission you will need to provide information that addresses the Terms of Reference. If your submission is irrelevant it is likely to be dismissed.

Remember, your  audience is the parliamentary committee. Arguments should motivate them to consider the positive potential of your suggestions through the perspective offered, and convince them to embrace the rationale that has shaped it. The submission should illuminate the opportunity they have to show leadership in government to benefit the people of Australia. 

A constructive submission won’t continue to list the problems of the past, but will offer ways to learn from them by suggesting how to shape a better future. Try to position your arguments to maintain the integrity of the situation, bearing in mind their relevance to the government's agenda. 

It’s not a requirement to address everything in the Terms of Reference. If you know of other people who would offer something relevant to the inquiry and further contextualise or support the arguments you’re making, let them know about it and encourage them to make a submission too.

Here are some helpful resources:

• Submissions that have already been published by parliamentary committees.
• The Politics of Dance – an action plan (Ausdance National)
• ArtsHub’s eight arguments to include in your submission. (Dr Jackie Bailey also shares language to use that is relevant to the Federal Government).
• Creating Our Future: National Arts Participation Survey.
• A New Approach: Insight Reports.
• Tips for writing a submission by Penelope Benton (NAVA)
• Information about how to make a parliamentary submission.

If you come across other resources that you find helpful, please do share them with others!

Act today to shape the future you want to see tomorrow!

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A meeting with Greens Arts spokesperson Senator Sarah Hanson Young

What do the Covid-affected dance studio sector and the tertiary dance training sectors have in common? Where do they fit into the Australian dance ecology? Why are they not included in arts policy and funding strategies? And why are they not recognised as integral to the wider dance industry by politicians and policy makers?

These are some of the questions discussed recently a meeting between the Greens Arts spokesperson Senator Sarah Hanson Young and Ausdance National VP Julie Dyson at Parliament House in Canberra.

Sarah had recently expressed interest in (and sympathy for) dance studio businesses in the COVID-19 environment, and so the publication of Ausdance Victoria’s Covid-19 Business Impact Survey,  (focusing on dance studios), and the Federal Government’s proposal to increase tertiary fees in the Creative Arts provided a perfect opportunity for us to ‘join the dots’ and advocate for dance education and training and their centrality to the Australian dance ecology.

Dance studio businesses number in their thousands in Australia, and the Ausdance Victoria impact survey found that millions of dollars had been lost in Victoria alone with forced closures, and yet most were not eligible for government assistance. As the report notes:

Most commonly, studios have only been able to access JobKeeper for the owner, part-time and full-time staff, leaving 80% of workers in the sector unsupported.

And –

92% of respondents expressed concern about their business surviving until the end of March 2021. … If these businesses collapse, thousands of independent dance artists and associated workers will lose their primary sources of income, and the cumulative effect on local economies, such as performance venues, dance suppliers, and related retailers, will be exponentially catastrophic.

As well as the financial impact, we discussed the role of dance studios in communities, the value of their work with young people (including artistic, physical, social and educational), and the impact of Zoom teaching as an unsatisfactory substitute for face-to-face teaching. We also noted that adequate correction and feedback is not really possible in an extended Zoom teaching environment.

Our suggestion that Sarah make a public statement in support of the studio sector was well received, but she also undertook to look into better financial support for these small businesses.

We also discussed the impact of proposed Creative Arts fee increases on courses such as those training dancers at WAAPA, and provided a list of dance course alumni back to 1983 with graduate jobs listed, contradicting the federal Education Minister’s statement that Arts graduates are not ‘job ready’.

Ausdance’s submission to the Senate Inquiry into the Government’s Higher Education Support Amendment Bill 2020 notes that –

Ausdance is well aware of the exceptional career pathways these courses offer their graduates, both in Australia and overseas. Australian dance companies and independent artists’ projects are almost entirely made up of graduates, and international companies look to Australian-trained dancers for technically and artistically mature artists.

Our submission to the Senate inquiry goes on:

Australia's arts industry is already in a precarious situation as a result of severely reduced government investment in artistic practice (as opposed to the ‘billions’ it invests in galleries, libraries and museums). There is also a complete lack of industry-based public policy.

Increasing fees for Creative Arts courses will severely exacerbate this situation, and we risk an imminent perfect storm for the $111b arts industry. The new fees proposal means that creative arts students will be squeezed from both ends – their opportunities within the course will be further reduced (due to university budget cuts) while the overall cost of their courses will increase.

Sarah noted that in the past she had left matters of arts education and training to the Greens’ education spokesperson, but that in fact she now appreciated the need to ‘join the dots’, and include dance studio teachers and tertiary dance educators in arts policies, rather than siloing them into education portfolios.

We agreed that these sectors must indeed be treated as an important part of the arts ecology, and that arts ministers, advisors, bureaucrats and other arts spokespersons must start to recognise the studio and tertiary dance education sectors as central to the wider dance ecology.

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