Now, normally I don’t respond to trolls. To paraphrase make Mark Twain, arguing with a troll is like wrestling with a pig, you end up all dirty and the pig loves it.
However, the other day, I happened to make a comment about the Arts Party and I received the delightful response about artists being WANKERS. I was tempted to respond and tell him that the great beauty of wanking is that it’s sex with someone you love, but when I checked out some of his posts to other people, I discovered that Mr Lime also had informed people about how all Muslims were terrorists and all women were disabled.
Yep, I thought, I’d just be mud-wrestling.
Before the day was out, I noticed another comment on Facebook from someone else who argued that we should totally defund the Arts.
“Lol stuff funding a bunch of art students who will sit at university for 15 years doing arts courses only to never pay back any HECS at the end of it. Dreaming. I’d prefer our tax paying money is spent on military over arts. You do realise we have a few financial issues at the moment? Priorities! You arts people expect funding from the government. You think it’s your right! Sorry but you’re at the bottom of he barrel when it comes to funding. Realise your place in society sooner. Give up!”
This was closer to someone I felt there could be a chance for a legitimate exchange, so I pointed out the rather obvious. “Sir, you have Mel Gibson as your profile picture and in case you aren’t aware, he is, in fact, an Arts worker.”
Unfortunately, he assured me that it was not a photo of Mel Gibson, but a photo of the wonderful “Marty Riggs” (Gibson’s lethal weapon character).
The conversation soon degenerated into mud-wrestling, even though I made no further contribution. He asked a friend to join in the conversation and they assured us that military spending was more important than “walking around Newtown with unshaven arm Pitts”. I refrained from asking about the cost of not shaving one’s arm “Pitts”. I also restrained myself from suggesting that it was the lack of submarines that made the USA vulnerable to the September 11 attacks.
And I guess that’s the trouble when we start to talk about Arts funding. Most people picture some whacky performance project or some council funded project to turn bus shelters into a Star Wars themed nativity scene, run by someone with a vocabulary peppered with phrases that sounded impressive while they were studying but seem rather trivial to the people who’ve just been complaining about the rise in their rates.
But not all Arts funding goes to the sort of projects that people would consider a luxury in our poverty stricken Australia. I mean, I know we’re poor. After all, some of the biggest companies aren’t even making a profit!! I don’t know why they don’t just close and invest their money in something that actually makes a return on their capital. Even bank interest makes a better return on investment than some of the top 100.
The Arts is a broad area, and most of us don’t take into account exactly how many people are actually employed in the Arts and connected industries. The Arts contributes to the economy with over 90 billion dollars in turnover and employs 600,000 people in creative industries. We can hardly just suggest that they all go and work in the auto industry.
There’ll always be arguments about funding priorities. And it seems hard to argue with maintaining funding to the Arts when we’re cutting money to women’s refuges. Of course, it could also be argued that it seems strange to spending money “raising awareness” of domestic violence when we’re cutting the services to the help the victims. But as has been pointed out many times, we can always find the money for an extra jail or an extra ten jets. It’s only Health, Education, The Arts and Welfare that has to fight it out for a share of an ever diminishing bucket of money.
And many of the Arts projects being cut are to things like Shopfront Theatre which has several programs aimed at disaffected youth and people with disabilities.
When you flick through the turnover of the top 100 companies who pay little or no tax, you have to conclude that their managers are either incompetent for not being able to generate a better rate of return, or determined not to contribute to the infrastructure that they all use. (I don’t think there’s a need for a poll on that one!)
Yet we have a Federal Government who resolutely sticks to the idea that we don’t have a revenue problem, and that nobody is cheating the system apart from those on welfare who – in spite of successive governments since the days of Malcolm Fraser as PM “cracking down” on payments – are still managing to rip billions off.
Daniel Kahneman (“Thinking Fast And Slow”) makes the point that humans don’t understand really big numbers.* When we hear about the billions in the Budget it seems an enormous amount, but when you compare it to the trillions in the economy and the potential billions that can be generated by the government encouraging a few strategic areas, then our $37 billion deficit is nothing. Cutting, cutting, cutting, on the other hand, just exacerbates the lack of revenue because all the cuts have a flow-on effect to other industries.
The Arts is one area where a small amount of support may improve the Budget’s bottom line.
*A great example of people’s inability to comprehend really large numbers is Victoria’s East-West link. Ignoring the fact that Labor are getting more flack for tearing up the contract than the Liberals are getting for signing it without a proper business case, it may be time to reflect on something apart from the sunk cost of a billion dollars (about $200 million of which is the houses which were bought for the project but which are still an assett which can be resold). The total cost of the project was to estimated to be $17 billion if built without adding anything because costs always blow out under Labor (They always blow out under the Liberals too, but nobody seems to bring that up). Dividing that by the number of Victorians, I suggest that we crowdfund the project with everyone contributing about $3000 each. I expect all supporters of the project to promise that within the hour. Or would some supporters be happy to get out of it with the $200 each which the government has already paid?
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