I'll just pick up my easel and go to the arse end of the world...

It's been a long time since The Arts have made media headlines in Australia. All of a sudden, however, there has been parliamentary argy bargy, press club speeches, opinion pieces, public forums, letter page debates and a healthy banter occurring within the industry as a whole.

If anyone can recall a time since Don Dunstan (right) where The Arts has been discussed as a policy platform in the manner in which it is at present, I would be intrigued to know when.

All this debate and policy discussion can be put down to two simple events; the appointment of George Brandis as Federal Arts Minister and the appointment of Peter Garrett as Opposition Arts Minister.

Taking these two highly extroverted characters and placing them at each end of the arts portfolio has created some lovely looking fireworks, but how much of it is just hot air?

The positioning of Brandis on one side, with the conservative foot soldiers of Glenn Milne, Paul Kelly and the News Limited stable can be summarised by what the Arts Minister stated at a National Press Club address on 19 September:
The truth is that, in Australia today, the creative arts are in good shape, as those who actually work within the arts sector – as opposed to some in the commentariat who are unaffected by such quotidian concerns as budgets and programme funding – are the first to acknowledge.

On one level, the Arts Minister has a point. Since Howard was elected as Prime Minister in 1996, federal funding for the arts has risen in nominal terms from $410 million to $680 million which represents an increase of 65.8%.

To distance itself from the top-level funding approach, Peter Garrett, along with the left-wing chorus of ex-PM Paul Keating and the anti-Howard camp of opinion writers are taking the debate to a more theoretical level. The key themes of this angle are centred on themes of accessibility and sedition laws.

Unfortunately, the ALP's shadow-boxing election campaign won't allow for concrete proposals on exactly what a Federal Labor Party will invest in any of the major streams of the arts infrastructure (ABC, SBS, Australia Council).

This has fuelled commentators such as Glenn Milne to suggest that if artists really want a thriving industry they should support a Howard Government stating that, "at the same time as the federal Government has increased spending on the arts, Brandis points out that it's the states, the Labor states, that are actually letting down the ensemble. Only in Western Australia, according to the Australia Council, has there been a significant increase."

Hard figures really do speak volumes and that is what the Howard Government is very good at. While Peter Garrett holds grassroots forums, such as the one I attended last night at the New Theatre in Sydney, Brandis is screaming from the pulpit that the Liberal Party are the true arts party.

This is certainly true on some levels. Most specifically, on the institutional level. The way that the Federal Cabinet faced a backbencher revolt over reduced symphony funding is testament to many of its members enjoying the high arts. But the recent funding increase in this years budget, which came about because of Brandis' great political skill, is a much needed catch up for a sector that has been falling behind on a federal level since even before Howard. And this doesn't even cover the decreases in higher education funding, which can be seen as the beginning of artist and audience development.

So what does a Federal ALP offer the arts community? At this stage it's really hard to say.

At the Your Shout forum held last night, Peter Garrett certainly offered a theoretical point of difference to The Arts. The very fact that he was meeting with artists around the country and listening to the community's concerns is a big point of departure from previous office-holders who mostly listen to the arts elite.

The somewhat tangible things that the ALP is proposing are:
- a Dance Action Plan to be implemented by the Australia Council
- a Small to Medium Theatre Action Plan
- the implementation of ArtStart, a social security plan to assist artists' incomes
- a program of mandatory presentation by major performing arts companies of emerging talent
- further support of Regional Arts financing
- expansion of the schools touring programme
- major support of new media and digital technologies
- to continue 'adequate' funding of film and television
- an Indigenous Arts resale royalty scheme

Aside from the investment on digital technologies, there has been no commitment to additional funding.

The audience at the event centred a lot of their concerns on the ALP's refusal to re-implement universal student unions which is a major concern for the industry. Indeed the highlight of audience comments during the evening came Van Badham, a young playwright whose claim to fame is a successful residency at the Royal Court theatre in the UK. Her comments go to the heart of the problems of the arts industry, not just Voluntary Student Unions and I reproduce her comments below.

"I am heart broken to hear you reject re-instating student unions just because in my experience and with my career trajectory I understood what it meant to become an artist and to be a part of my community. Coming from the University of Wollongong, being involved in student unions and clubs and societies and an entire infrastructure for arts development which has just disappeared.

"And I feel betrayed by the Labor Party for your abandonment of universal student unionism. And it's not only artists but it's everything with the university system. Because the problem with the performing arts in this country is we are losing our place to develop and losing our place to fail.

"If we don't even have the access to university drama societies to learn our craft... and most people don't make their way through high school and say 'mum and dad, I'm 14, I want to become an actor or a theatre director'.

"The amount of pressure put on you as an emerging artist in Australia to do something for life is absolutely overwhelming. And we don't have the institutions here or the investment or the economic foresight to look how we develop artist so that we could culturally renew regional areas and look at arts production as an industry which can rescue places like Wollongong.

"What's been going on in Newcastle has all been coming from the ground up and through initiatives of the local council where you are looking at arts industries in Newcastle that are employing people that are bringing in a different kind of investment... looking at art as an export industry and at the long term investment in what we as Australians are to the rest of the world.

"I know it's not cool to talk about culture as an industry, but it's what other countries like the United Kingdom are very good at and recognised a long time ago how important it is to have that development in place as part of the educative process for artists.

"And this is the thing, we don't have the Battersea Arts Centre here, we don't have developmental labs attached to major performing arts companies. We have tokenistic education programs - they're tokenistic because they are under funded.

"When Universities got all their funding cut in 1996 and it's been on-going. The first thing to get cut where artist training programs. The squeeze got put on my university - the University of Wollongong where we went from having ten elite acting students to have it decline to an open door course.

"Since the introductory of Voluntary Student Unionism it now costs $50 to join the drama society and at least they have one! The ones in regional universities have all but disappeared.

"There is no infrastructure to provide people with the opportunity to become a part of an arts career introductory that is getting lower and lower and that's the crisis we have got at the moment.

"For people that came through that student uni experience... all of that's gone. We have been abandoned and I want to know why."