This report came after a period of energetic development of the arts and cultural sector and expansion of policies designed to facilitate cultural activity. It was also responding to the furore that ensued on the release of the Industries Assistance Commission report of a decade before that had adopted a stringent rational economic framework of analysis.
The McLeay report was an attempt to define (or redefine) the role of the Commonwealth ‘in assisting the arts’. The committee took a broad view of the arts as one component of culture and saw the role of government as one of maximising the benefits of the arts to society as a whole. Specifically, it rejected ‘the view that Commonwealth assistance is a right of the arts because of their merits’ and that ‘arts assistance is a specialised form of welfare for artists’.
The Committee accepted that ‘the arts are not homogeneous’ and that different artforms provide different public benefits, thus requiring different mechanisms of support. In particular, the Committee distinguished between ‘heritage art’ (survivors of past artistic activity), ‘innovatory art’ (new methods of expression or interpretation of culture) and ‘new art’ (the mass of contemporary art work which falls into the mainstream of cultural activity).
Accordingly, the Committee recommended that heritage and innovatory art required mechanisms ‘to sustain adequate levels of conservation of art’ while new art should be prioritised because of its ‘public benefits’. A key phrase of the report was: ‘Access and diversity should thus be principal objectives of assistance to new art’.
The key objective:
Of government arts assistance [was] increasing cultural democracy. We define this not as wider access to the so-called high arts, but rather as access by the community to a diversity of cultural experiences from which individuals may choose for themselves the cultural activities of most benefit to themselves at any time.
To this end, the report recommended that:
the Australia Council confine its activities to the subsidised arts in the form of the administration of grants while the broader arts and cultural agenda be facilitated by a federal department, namely the Department of Arts, Heritage and Environment;
in order to retain the professionalism of the major performing arts companies, they were centralised under the Australia Council to administer grants and institute accountability processes;
an overhaul of tax concessions that were deemed ‘relatively unaccountable’, ‘inequitable, inefficiently targeted and open ended’ was proposed by instituting a system of Ministerial approval;
support for popular contemporary music was recommended; and
addressing alternative models of support, the Committee recommended establishing the International Cultural Corporation of Australia, Artbank, and the Public Lending Right Scheme.
The McLeay report set the scene for arts and cultural policy for the next decade.