Dr Margaret Seares

Thank you, and firstly thank you to the elders of this region for your very generous welcome to us.

This is a fantastic turnout of people from all over the country. Brisbane, as I have found, is not the easiest of places to get to if you're from a long way over west. It's expensive for everybody and it shows a commitment that I think is really quite stunning. I was mentioning to some people this morning that we had a regional cultural development conference in Busselton - about three and a half hours drive south of Perth - a few weeks ago and again 200 people turned up in WA from all over, from Kununurra right up the top and Esperance right down the bottom and a minority of people from Perth. I think that was fantastic and it showed what an incredible grass roots movement there has been in the arts in this country.

I was asked today to look first of all at where the whole community cultural development movement has come from, from the Australian cultural perspective and from that of the Australia Council. As you all know, there has been a sort of long struggle in some senses and a great degree of exhilaration in others. In 1977 the Community Arts Board as it was then, had just been established after a five year battle and was in quite a fragile position because of funding cuts from the new government.

In 1997 we find we're again working with spending restraints across all governments, but the situation seems to be different now. The energy is different. Community cultural development is very, very clearly here to stay, just manifested not only by the people here today but by the general interest in our wider communities in arts and culture.

The place of the Community Cultural Development Fund within the Australia Council is firmly established and is broader and more secure than it's ever been. That's a tribute to everyone who's been involved. It's a tribute to the people in the Council who have been tenacious in their support for the field and most of all, it's a tribute to the field, and I'd like to congratulate all of you for having done in such a short time such an extraordinary thing, because the issue about culture in our communities is a very strange one in a country like this with an Anglo-Saxon background. We come from a cultural tradition which has such an incredible division between art and life.

As you know, in many other cultures there's no such word as arts or art because it is totally part of what you do, how you live, how you view the world. But in our culture we've had centuries of division between arts and everyday life, starting off right back in the days where the only people who could write were in the church and the only people who could write music were in the church. We've had this incredible divide which was exacerbated in the 19th century under a sort of a bit of a cult of the artist as hero, where it became a bit of the thing to do to be seen as to be separate from your community, and we are still struggling to overcome that, so in 20 short years you have achieved absolutely enormous things after nearly 2000 long years of moving in the other direction, and I think it's an amazing tribute there.

The issue about the future and the current environment in which we are working and living in Australia has come up today, and the Lord Mayor made two very, very important points, one of which was the issue of censorship and moral rights. Some people in this country have been urging towards a degree of conservatism in the arts which we haven't seen for many, many years and it's been paralleled by the conservatism which has occurred in the United States and fortunately been overcome.

As some of you will know there was a vote in the US Congress to overturn the federal grant to the arts in the USA. It looked as though they were going to lose that money progressively over time. There was a huge backlash mainly from the community arts sector in the US and that decision was overturned. But the decision in the first place registered with the politicians through the sort of rank conservatism of the type that we saw recently in Melbourne over the Serrano exhibition, the sort of conservatism we've seen in Adelaide over the censoring of a play, the sort of conservatism that we're hearing all the time in criticisms about works which might depict the seamier side of life being presented to the public.

It's absolutely crucial that we all stand out against those criticisms. We have to see a range of art and life and experience because that is what the arts are. If arts are going to be sequestered into something that is only nice and neat and content-free really, but pretty and are saleable to the ear or the eye, then we have really no richness in our culture. That is something which I'm afraid is being pushed a little bit in Australia at the moment, only in very certain quarters, and we have to work very hard to overcome that.

The Mayor raised the issue of economic rationalism. Within this notion of economic rationalism I know there has been a lot of concern in the arts community over recent years about changes in government policy both at state and federal levels and at the requirements that are being made of arts organisations particularly in terms of reporting and in terms of accountability. I have to say from a personal perspective that when I went into government in Western Australia in 1995 I was a little bit taken aback, at what seemed to be a whole lot of hoops that needed to be jumped through by government departments. These in turn often have to be passed on to client organisations as part of the accountability cycle.

I think there are two ways you can do these things. You can either see them as hoops that you reluctantly have to jump through and put the least energy and the least time and the least thought into them or you can really see them as a tool to help your organisation go further. If I could just say for a few moments about some of these changes in government and the ways in which we had to deal with them in WA and perhaps on the broader national scale, it might help make my point.

I think we had probably one of the earliest changes from the Labor to Liberal governments in Western Australia with the government changing in 1993. We'd come out of the period of the so-called WA Inc. There have been sort of so-called financial scandals in all states it seems. Many of the great society leaders of the 1980s, and political leaders, have ended up in Perth gaols over the last few years. We've had two premiers in gaol, one deputy premier in gaol, a number of business entrepreneurs in gaol. So we've had enormous reactions in Western Australia over what people saw as a lack of accountability.

This extended to the arts. There was this feeling that grants were being given out - you know, the old whiteboard syndrome. The perception was that grants were being given wherever there happened to be a weak political seat or grants were being given to people who were favoured by the ministry of the day. I think that, patently, if you sat down and analysed it, it wasn't the case. But this perception led to a wholesale change whereby the terminology of "grants" was to be removed and the term "investment" to be brought in. Thus the arts grants section of Arts WA was changed and it became the arts investment section.

At first that seemed to me a very semantic and pedantic way to go but in fact it had some reasonable rationale behind it if you really stopped and thought about it. The idea was that the arts were there to serve the people of Western Australia in this case, and the notion of the investment was - "If I give you some money, what are you going to do for the people of this state." When I thought about it in those terms, I didnšt actually have a problem because I do believe that if we're not communicating through the arts, then we are not doing what at least my world view of the arts is about.

Seeing it in that way rather than seeing it as an economic rationalist plot was a lot easier to handle and a lot easier to explain to people in terms of why we changed the terminology and why we were requiring them to tell us as a bureaucracy how they were going to use that money. There were things like the need to do business plans and corporate plans, and that has caused a lot of angst again with a lot of people. I suppose those of us in bureaucracies are also having to do these things. Issues of corporate governance, again, are the hoops you had to jump through and which, increasingly, your boards must jump through if they are to stay out of the courts.

Just reading on the plane coming over here last night the papers for the next Council meeting which we're having in Tasmania on Thursday, and there are 32 points that have been given out by the Federal Government in a document called Public Sector Corporate Governance, A Chief Executive Officer's Check List - 32 points on leadership, statutory accountability, communication with clients and stake-holders. Roles and responsibilities go on for 10 points on their own; accountability for agency resources, internal controls, committees and external reporting.

But there is this issue of accountability. It is actually your and my money that is being used here and I guess we would like to know how it is being used. Can we use accountability to make it a workable tool for us? Can we use a corporate plan to make it a workable tool? Perhaps we remove the jargon and stop using words like "mission" and "vision"? Instead of "vision", can we just say, "Well, look, where do we want to be?" Can we not use "mission" and say, "What are we all about here?"

There's been a very interesting study in the United States done of organisations in the not-for-profit sector, including a number of arts organisations and the book is called Profiles of Excellence. In that book the authors have looked at a number of successes and failures and the single success factor in all the organisations was a commitment to what we might call the mission statement or to the mission of that organisation, by the board, by the workers in the organisation, by the people who are perhaps volunteers within that organisation.

It sounds simple but I think we've all worked in organisations or may still be working in organisations where that shared sense is not as shared as it might be and I think that's where the value of things like corporate plans comes in. Remove the jargon, remove the business jargon and look at whether we are all sharing in the way we want to go and if not, how can we change things so that we do.

There are a lot of issues to consider in managing a not-for-profit, like risk management. One of the first things we had to do, when I walked into government, was set up a risk management plan. I thought, "What the hell is risk management, falling down stairs, or whatever?" and there are numerous ways to go with that one, but basically I think we've all got to sort of strip it away and see it as a method to protect ourselves. So this whole issue of response to government of accountability - it probably won't go away. The positive thing is to turn it into something that works for us.

Many of these are difficult and time consuming issues, but why do we do it? I think at the end it comes down to a quotation which is in the American Canvas, a very valuable book about the community arts in the United States, which says: "The arts are like seeds, planted in our community. With minimal attention the seeds will grow but with nurturing they will grow and bear fruit for the whole community."

I think that's what community arts here is all about. I think that's why CCD, community cultural development, has grown and will continue to grow in this community and I think that the struggles that you have had, seeing the so-called high arts or the so-called sort of traditional arts, consuming so much time and energy, is nearly over. You can see the changes already taking place. We would like to see from this conference another 10 years of great renewed energy so that in 10 years' time I think that we will first of all have achieved a different sort of capitalism, we'll have achieved a modus operandi that's going to suit all of us a lot more and we will have much more community, real community arts, so that we don't need a word "arts" in our society any more. Thank you.