Date: November 19 2012
Australia's ''obsession'' with sports is overshadowing the arts while governments are taking the ''easy'' option to cut university and TAFE courses because fine arts is too easily derided as elitist, say arts figures.
The host of ABC1's At the Movies, Margaret Pomeranz, says: ''The amount we're spending on sports medals and the amount spent on sports is obscene compared to the amount of money we spend on developing arts in this country.
''It's like a national obsession with sport - I've got kids who play sport and I like watching it, but our obsession is to the detriment of developing poets, artists, filmmakers.''
Her comments follow playwright David Williamson's comments on Thursday attacking the ''huge'' spending on sport while a ''pittance'' is spent developing the next Cate Blanchett or Geoffrey Rush.
Williamson took aim in his 2012 National Tertiary Education Union lecture at funding being ''ripped'' from universities and TAFEs.
''Why as a society we think it's legitimate to spend huge amounts on our sportsmen and women, but seemingly don't think the relative pittance we spend on developing a potential Cate Blanchett or Geoffrey Rush is as justifiable, has to say something about our national and political priorities,'' he said.
Theatre and film director Neil Armfield says the arts have suffered ''the curse of generations'' relieved only by leaders such as Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating bucking the trend and showing an interest in the arts.
''It's like this hideous default we keep returning to, in spite of the fact it's clear that the country has an absolutely original and hugely productive arts sector,'' Armfield says.
The TAFE cuts, aimed at 800 teaching positions in NSW and targeting fine arts courses, would hurt many visual artists who rely on teaching to maintain a basic income.
''It's not just killing off opportunities for people learning and growing but cutting off at the roots people who already have a meagre subsistence in maintaining their practice augmented by teaching,'' Armfield says.
Playwright Jonathan Biggins, director of the year-in-politics Wharf Revue at Sydney Theatre Company, says no national leader had championed the arts since Keating.
Politicians needed to stop putting the sector down. ''They should treat it with respect and engage the arts in a national conversation,'' Biggins says.
Biggins says he has never seen Julia Gillard at a cultural event - ''although I'm sure she's not a Philistine'' - and Tony Abbott appears to have instructed his office not to accept invitations to arts events.
Biggins notes that Simon Crean, the federal Arts Minister, was prevented from attending painter Margaret Olley's funeral a year ago because the opposition refused to excuse him. ''The perception of hanging out with 'elitists'; that's public suicide these days for politicians.''
Actor and playwright Toby Schmitz says organised sports seems a ''fascist idea with one common goal - to be better than someone else. All totalitarian regimes are proud of their sports teams - arts is the first to be thrown in the ditch.''
The team-building arguments of sport could be applied to the arts. ''Honing your acting skills in a play or a debating team is going to be far more useful in life when your knees have gone,'' he says.
Schmitz notes that, at just more than 200 years old, Australia is a young country: ''Maybe in another 200 years, when I'm long dead, they'll have more private sector funding of the arts like they do in the United States.''