The IAC inquiry into ‘whether assistance should be accorded the performing arts in Australia and if so what should be the nature and extent of such assistance’ was commissioned by Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in October 1974 and published in December 1976, by which time the Coalition government of Malcolm Fraser was in power. Reflecting on the saga that it became, Justin Macdonnell (1992: 142-3) argued that it is ‘doubtful if any government investigation has ever been so misrepresented and misunderstood, or vilified’. Whitlam later commented that he was glad it landed on Fraser’s desk and not his.
Although it has retrospectively been identified as part of Fraser’s ‘hard line’ economic policy, in fact the enquiry occurred because of controversy, fanned during Whitlam’s tenure, about the direction of arts policy and the increasing ‘arrogance’ of the Australia Council. Ironically, the Australia Council and commercial performing arts lobbyists, who hoped that the IAC would be able to increase subsidy to the sector, unintentionally initiated the enquiry. It was some time before they realised that the IAC agenda was very different from their own, or Whitlam’s, or Fraser’s, for that matter.
The enquiry has been commonly represented as recommending the withdrawal of subsidy to the elite performing arts and therefore as a collective ‘philistine’, unappreciative of Australian culture. In fact, the IAC had what might now be seen as a progressive stance on arts and culture, beginning from the question of what constituted the arts and culture and what public benefit flowed to the community. Explicitly, it adopted a broad anthropological definition of culture and rejected the intrinsic value and special pleading of the elite sector. Witnesses, while passionate about the arts, failed to convince the Commission of the community benefits of the arts or the ways in which elite culture contributed to the Australian community’s ‘way of life’. It took a broad-brush definition of the performing arts as ‘the entire range and … not [just] to the narrow but highly subsidised group of arts which many witnesses invested with a intangible and undefined ‘cultural’ value’.
The Commission dissected the assumption that the ‘flagship philosophy’ should be subsidised in order to produce ‘excellence’ that would somehow, intangibly, enrich the community at large and the related belief that this was ‘settled national policy’. Rather, this was a discriminatory policy that disregarded community values and the ordinary culture of citizens. To redress this, the Commission argued that arts and cultural policy should be based on the three criteria of innovation, disseminating and education, to which end, funding to the elite companies should be maintained for three years then phased-out over five. Funding should be re-directed towards the new objectives that met community expectations. Where existing [elite] companies failed to replace support by other means and show relevance, they might face the prospect of closure. The report concluded that:
It has not, however, been able to discern any rational reason why the community as a whole should not adopt a partisan attitude toward distributing assistance from which it could not reasonably expect to benefit.
When the draft report was released, it stunned everyone: Whitlam, Fraser and the arts community included. Prime Minister Fraser distanced himself from it, rejecting the ‘harsh economic criteria’ and ‘user-pays principle’ it had employed and confirming a commitment to continue to support ‘individual art [and] also the major performing arts companies in Australia — the opera, ballet, and drama’. Despite widespread criticism of the report and a new round of submissions and responses, the final report was largely unchanged. The government quickly rejected its findings to phase out ‘existing patterns of assistance to the performing arts’. Rather, it enunciated its policy as follows:
The Government considers that the promotion of excellence in the arts is of primary importance and continuation of assistance to the presently subsidised companies is seen as being consistent with this objective.
While the IAC report was officially dead, its musings on the elitism of the performing arts and its community of interest — especially the elitist fortress mentality of the Australia Council — slowly percolated through subsequent debates about the arts and cultural sector. It is fair to conclude that the logic of the report slowly transformed the terms in which arts and culture was discussed and eventually the basic premises on which policy strategies were couched.