Download Post by Dick Letts, October 7th, 2014 Maria Vandamme, director of

Post by Dick Letts, October 7th, 2014
Maria Vandamme, director of Melba Foundation/Melba Recordings,
has written a very high-pitched defence of her millions of dollars of
grants from Commonwealth Ministers.
So what’s to defend? Wouldn’t we all like to be in her happy
position?
The upset started with a piece by Ben Eltham in ArtsHub. It began
“Arts Minister George Brandis approved $275,000 in special funding
to classical music label Melba Recordings without peer review or a
competitive process.” The funding decision was made in April and
was not publicly announced or reported.
Eltham explicitly or implicitly asserts that there was secrecy about
this grant, a lack of a competitive process, and that the funding was
achieved outside the normal funding processes for the arts, through
direct lobbying of the Minister and bureaucracy by an organisation
with strong connections to important Liberal Party figures. All this at
a time when the Minister cut funding to the Australia Council.
Maria Vandamme
Melba was previously funded from 2004 to 2012 and Eltham
examines the 2012 audit for the Melba Foundation, published
online, and concludes that the outcome in record sales has been
minuscule. However, Eltham did not find the financial report of
Melba Recordings, the private company supported by the Melba
Foundation, that would provide information about record sales. A
private company need not publish a financial report and Vandamme
regards the sales information as commercial-in-confidence. The
Foundation report gives some basis for speculation about company
matters, but that is as far as it goes. It does give information about
number of releases, distribution, reviews and so on. Melba
Recordings’ first releases date from 2002.
The Department for the Arts responded to questions from Radio
National about the decision-making process. It states that the
Minister had met with Ms Vandamme as with many others, that it
conducted an appraisal of the Melba application, that the award of
the grant was published in the normal way in the Attorney-General’s
Grants List (http://www.ag.gov.au/about/grants/Pages/default.aspx)
and that it is a one-off grant to assist with completion of recording
projects and development of a business plan.
A trip to the grants list is an enlightening experience: 539 arts and
culture grants ranging from $292 million to $5,000. Most think the
action is at the Australia Council. There is a story waiting to be told.
Among these grants Melba’s $275,000 is not especially significant
in size; it is atypical but not unique in character.
-0There is history here.
Maria Vandamme set up the Melba Foundation as a conduit for
public funding and private donations to Melba Recordings, her forprofit private company. She sought to build the status and influence
of the Foundation by early enlisting the support of Dame Elizabeth
Murdoch, Richard Bonynge and Joan Sutherland, Lady Potter. In
her letter she mentions supporters “Sir Zelman Cowan, Vladimir
Ashkenazy, Barry Humphries, Geoffrey Rush, Sir James
Wolfensohn, Barry Tuckwell, Lady Marigold Southey, Jeanne Pratt,
Victorian of the Year, and Dame Quentin Bryce, recently re-elected
as our Patron-in-Chief”. Not all Liberal Party members: “Gough
Whitlam is one of our patrons,” says Vandamme.
Vandamme attracted the support of these high status individuals
with a vision: to produce very high quality recordings of eminent
Australian classical musicians and to build a reputation for both
artists and record company through an international marketing
campaign at a level not then achieved by other Australian classical
music record companies.
She states in the letter, written in response to the ArtsHub article,
that in 2002 she took her scheme to the then Chair of the Australia
Council, David Gonski. Presumably she was seeking support at
around the level shortly afterwards achieved: $1 million/year.
Gonski suggested she should approach the Minister directly.
Why would he do that? Answer: The Australia Council Annual
Report for 2004 shows total expenditure on assistance to recording
projects was $151,000 with a limit of $7,500 funding to any project.
An application for $1m would have been, shall we say, outside the
guidelines.
It could also be said that while Gonski’s recommendation is in other
circumstances business as usual, it fitted a little awkwardly with his
role as Chair of an arts funding authority placed officially by its
legislation at arm’s length from government: i.e. the government
was not permitted to instruct the Australia Council in its funding
decisions. The principle is that arts projects are funded on their
merits, not on the political or personal proclivities of the Minister.
Gonski’s suggestion was not quite in the spirit of that principle.
Indeed, he later made a speech to the Melba Foundation
congratulating it on achieving government support and noting that
the Government did not side-step the Australia Council since they
could “give monies to whomever they choose”. Could we imply that
he knew there was a principle at stake?
Vandamme went directly to the Government and in fairly short order
there was a decision, said to have been made by then Treasurer
Peter Costello, who was less than generous to the Australia
Council, to provide funding of $1m per year for five years. This was
to a company with little track record.
Other small companies had been producing recordings of our
classical musicians for years and given the available resources,
were doing it tough but making a great contribution. When the $5m
in funding was announced, there was outrage in the music world.
Why was this upstart organisation with fancy backers to be
privileged with funding seven times the total given to all other
Australian recording projects?
To add insult to injury, the supposedly arm’s-length Australia
Council was lumbered with administering the grant. So somehow
Costello was instructing the Australia Council to fund a particular
entity. Presumably there was some legal tap-dancing to make that
possible. Remember it was Costello who banned funded
organisations from advocating the needs of their constituencies on
pain of losing their government support. Perhaps not a man finely
attuned to the niceties of life in a democracy.
When Labor took power, Peter Garrett became Arts Minister. He
extended the Melba funding for three years, halving the amount to
$500,000 a year. Then Simon Crean became Minister and
terminated the funding. That is where things rested until in April,
after a meeting with Vandamme, Brandis restored funding, now at
$250,000 plus GST. Vandamme refers to this as “bridging” funding.
Bridging to what? We do not yet know.
-0Maria Vandamme is not at fault in seeking Government funding nor
in enlisting upper-crust supporters to help her to get through the
Ministerial door. That is the right of every citizen.
Here are some of the statements she makes in her (unpublished)
letter of response to ArtsHub.
https://www.melbarecordings.com.au/news/enough-enough-letterartshub
None of the money Melba has received from government – not a
single cent – has been given at the expense of any other Australian
arts organisation or individual. Such monies were not diverted from
the Australia Council. Every cent, every dollar was in addition to
funding already conferred on the arts sector through the Australia
Council. No-one lost out.
Vandamme cannot know that. The Australia Council did not lose out
but its budget is only a part of the arts budget.
$1m a year was added to the Australia Council budget to pay
Melba’s grant. It could have been added to fund a recording project
that gave $1m a year to the best applicant. The government can
give a general instruction of that sort. The recipient might have
been Melba if Melba’s project stood up to scrutiny by
knowledgeable music industry people rather than an arts-amateur
Minister.
Neither Melba nor the Minister were acting improperly, writes
Vandamme. Many arts organizations have been and continue to be
directly funded by the government. Melba is not a unique case.
Australia’s leading orchestras and opera companies, the ABC and
ANAM are all directly funded without recourse to the Australia
Council and not, as a consequence, subject to peer assessment.
The orchestras and opera companies are in fact funded through the
Australia Council. But yes, there is direct funding to a number of
institutions which are not peer-assessed – for instance the ABC,
ANAM, National Gallery of Australia, National Library of Australia,
Screen Australia, Australian Ballet School, Australian Film
Television and Radio School (AFTRS), National Institute of
Dramatic Art (NIDA) and others. These are public institutions, not
small private companies.
Melba had a vision of creating a record label that matched and
exceeded the long-standing international criteria for excellence to
which no Australian classical music label had hitherto aspired…
Indeed, Gramophone, the world’s most respected classical review
magazine, acclaimed Melba’s recording of Wagner’s The Ring as
“the best sounding cycle on the market to date, bar none” and
hailed another of our recordings as “a magnificent release [and] a
truly revelatory one, not least in highlighting the outstanding work
being done by this distinguished Australian label.”
There are reviews of this sort that attest to an achievement of high
quality that is praiseworthy. But to say that only Melba had this
aspiration is mere conjecture and probably a nonsense.
Where, one might legitimately ask, were longer-established
Australian labels when it came to capturing and preserving on disc
an historic high-watermark in our cultural history: the first ever
complete staging of The Ring in Australia? Why did those labels,
with years of substantial government funding behind them, not step
up to the plate and record The Ring? And would they have done so
to the same universally admired standard that Melba did?
There is only one label with years of substantial government
funding, now well behind it: ABC Classics, which for some years
has had to survive without subsidy.
In 2004, the first year of Melba’s $1m/year funding, the total budget
of the Music Board was $4.19m. From that, it had to meet an
enormous range of needs and possibilities and make some fair and
judicious division of funds among them. To assign one quarter of
the funds to recording projects would have been irrational; to assign
them to one record company would have been suicidal. In those
circumstances, the allegedly missing aspiration could have seemed
quite fanciful.
Last year, the Australia Council funded six record labels, maximum
grant $50,000, total budget $253,000, the same in total as has been
given to Melba.
But Vandamme writes: It is the peculiar priorities and confined
criteria of Australia Council programs – lacking the flexibility or will
to consider the scale and intent of our operations and poorly
designed to accommodate them– that has barred Melba from the
convention of peer assessment. Melba has never sought to
sidestep such a process. If the failure of the Australia Council’s
funding programmes to accommodate the Melba proposition
compelled us to directly approach government for support, is that a
cause for complaint? Really?…
Despite Melba’s success we are treated as a football by
misinformed political opportunists pursuing a parochial agenda that
is as debilitating as it is demeaning to the whole of Australia’s
vibrant classical music scene.
Gee willickers!
-0This is gruesomely entertaining.
But are there some useful questions or lessons here?
• Melba did not accept the status quo. It made its case to Ministers
and won. Think outside the box.
• But it did not win in such a way as to change the status quo, the
obstacles it was trying to outflank.
It may have demonstrated that arts funding at the present level is
simply insufficient to achieve outcomes of international excellence.
A few Ministers agreed, implicitly and probably unwittingly.
Unfortunately, because the whole project has been supported as a
sort of aberration rather than a test case, no-one is putting that
argument.
• Why should an entity such as this with such a large proportion of
its funding coming from the public purse be able to claim
commercial-in-confidence on its sales outcomes? Why is that in the
public interest? How is it even commercially advantageous?
• There is an argument for direct national government funding of
cultural institutions that it owns. But what is the argument for
establishing an arm’s length arts funding authority which makes its
decisions through peer assessment (or indeed, by other fair and
credible processes) and also having a grants budget directly
allocated to grantees by the Minister with no public invitation to
apply nor published criteria or procedures to decide upon grants
and grantees?
• The reputations of Ministers who have supported Melba have
been diminished. Why? It would seem that they have been seen as
bypassing fair practice to favour an organisation on the basis of its
carefully nurtured connections with people of privilege and/or
political status.
• In the event, most of the opprobrium has been directed to the
organisation. But it did nothing wrong other than not play the game
by the rules accepted as unavoidable by the rest of the arts sector.
Or most of it.
And the Ministers acted within their accepted legal prerogatives so
they did nothing “wrong” either.
• But perhaps this does raise the question: what should we expect
in and of an Arts Minister? Has anyone asked that general
question? Has anyone answered it?
That might be the topic for another blog.