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Regional Arts Fund - Double or nothing?

3 December 2003

THE FUTURE OF THE REGIONAL ARTS FUND HANGS IN THE BALANCE as the Government enters into Budget preparation for 2004.

Established by the Howard Government in 1996 with an initial commitment of $7.5 million over three years, the Regional Arts Fund is a core component of the Government’s ‘Arts for All’ policy — a policy to provide ‘genuine opportunities for people in rural and regional Australia
to participate in and experience the arts’.

The program was renewed in the 2001/02 Budget with funding of $7.6m for a three year period, but this comes to an end next June and no commitment has been made to continue it.

The Regional Arts Fund (RAF) is unique in that it is the only source of Federal funding specifically targeted at arts and cultural development in regional and rural Australia. Unlike the other key elements of the Government’s Arts for All policy — the Playing Australia, Visions Australia and Festivals Australia programs, which fund the presentation of work mostly from ‘elsewhere’ — the Regional Arts Fund supports locally determined cultural development for people in regional, rural and remote Australia.

This makes it especially valuable to communities working to preserve their unique local identities and who wish to benefit from the powerful role that the arts can play in overall community development.

The Regional Arts Fund has been very successful in achieving its aims, chief of which are to support sustainable cultural development in regional areas — particularly in smaller and isolated communities — and to encourage the formation of partnerships.

An Overview of the first 18 months of the latest round of the program (July 2001 to December 2002) produced by the state regional arts bodies and Regional Arts Australia (RAA) in June, dramatically illustrates the positive impacts of the program, with project descriptions, testimonials, pictures and detailed budgetary figures.

The report reveals that the state regional arts agencies have together supported over 570 grants from the RAF in that period for projects with a total value over $12.8 million. This represents a national average of over $3.10 raised for each $1 from the RAF. An estimated 1.125m regional Australians participated in the projects and 2,300 artists gained employment from them.

The RAF Overview has been employed by RAA in intensive lobbying in Canberra in the past few months. Regional Arts NSW has also circulated the NSW section to every regionally based Federal MP in NSW, with a letter urging their support for the continuation of the Fund.

Along with the other state regional arts agencies, Regional Arts NSW also participated in a comprehensive formal review of the RAF conducted by the
Dept of Communications, IT & the Arts (DoCITA) in September for the Dept of Finance and Administration, which advises the Government on ‘lapsed’ programs.

The detailed NSW input to this review highlighted the truly unique place of the RAF in the funding landscape for arts and cultural development in this state. It provided compelling evidence of the ongoing need for the type of community-based cultural development program provided by the RAF in NSW and amply demonstrated the benefits of the program in terms of its social, cultural and economic impacts. It also mounted some persuasive arguments for the efficiency of the current administrative arrangements for the RAF. The results of the review, however, will not be known till next year.

Meanwhile, in a hopeful sign, the Federal Minister for the Arts and Sport, the Hon Mr Rod Kemp, requested from RAA a proposal for the continuation and extension of the Regional Arts Fund. Accordingly, the RAA Board met in October and developed a proposal for a new and more comprehensive RAF, drawing on the detailed information produced during the DoCITA review.

The proposal currently before the Minister seeks to maintain the Fund in real terms over the next four years with an annual index matched to CPI, and proposes funding for a number of new and much needed initiatives which are not currently addressed by the program. These include initiatives to target remote communities, increased support for individual artists and arts-workers, funding for smaller community festivals, arts partnerships with the heritage sector, a program for young people and a program to place more much needed specialist arts workers in regional communities.

An expanded Regional Arts Fund would go some way to meeting the significant needs of regional and rural New South Wales for assistance with arts and cultural development. Cutting the RAF altogther would be a kick in the teeth for a sector that’s already doing it tough.

CONTACT your local Federal MP and let them know the RAF is important to you. (If you are unsure of your electorate you can find it here).

For more information about Regional Arts Australia’s lobbying efforts, contact Ruth Smiles, Executive Officer, Tel 08 8444 0400 Email ruth.smiles@countryarts.org.au
Website www.regionalarts.com.au