AustLit

Late in 1999 the Commonwealth of Australia's Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts released Securing the Future, the final Report of the Major Performing Arts Enquiry chaired by Helen Nugent (commonly referred to as the Nugent Report). The operations of the committee and the findings of the Report occasioned considerable public debate in the Australian arts world in the late 1990s, as the Enquiry solicited and analysed information and opinion on the financial health and artistic practices of thirty-one national major performing arts companies producing opera, ballet, chamber and orchestral music as well as theatre. The Report saw the financial viability of Australian live performance as deeply affected by the impact of globalization, especially by what elsewhere has been called 'Baumol's disease' - escalating technical, administrative and wage costs but fixed revenue - which threaten the subsidized state theatre companies of Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth with their relatively small population bases. The structural implementation recommended a considerable financial commitment by Commonwealth and State Governments to undertake a defined period of stabilizing and repositioning of companies. Early in 2000 both levels of Government committed themselves to this funding - in fact increasing Nugent's requested $52 million to $70 million - and to the principle of a strengthened Australia Council dispensing arms-length subsidy. In an economically philistine political environment, these outcomes are a tribute to Nugent's astute use of economic rhetoric to gain at least a symbolic victory for the performing arts sector. In 2000 New Zealand arts gained a similar major injection of funding, while a commissioned Heart of the Nation report, advocating the dilution of the principle of arm's-length funding through the abolition of the national funding organization Creative New Zealand, was rejected by Prime Minister Helen Clark.