Minister for the Arts Tony Burke has been raising expectations – but not too much – that there will be money in the federal budget to stop the rot at the National Gallery of Australia. He acknowledged the funding crisis was “horrific” after the published images taken inside the NGA showing buckets and towels arranged to mop up leaks.
But the NGA’s problems, Burke indicated, were shared with those of the National Museum, the Portrait Gallery and the Museum of Australian Democracy. All had been underfunded, buildings were in disrepair and they were starved of funds to employ staff.
Further, they were not the only areas of the budget in crisis. “Big decisions have to be taken. We’re getting close to being able to announce that. But effectively, for all of those institutions, they’re facing a funding cliff, and it’s not the only part of the budget where this is happening,” he said.
It would appear Burke is clearing the ground for a short-term fix across collecting institutions. But it is inappropriate to put them all in the same basket. The NGA has suffered nearly three decades of neglect, and now prominent Australians, including former governor-general Dame Quentin Bryce and artists John Olsen, Cressida Campbell and Patricia Piccinini, have called for sustainable funding and support. More senior figures are preparing to speak up.
The Albanese government faces increasing pressure to address the NGA’s parlous state in the approach to the May budget. The push for more money comes as one-off Coalition government grants totalling $24.77 million for essential works expire.
The NGA needs $265 million over the next 10 years to waterproof and remediate its 40-year-old building, where the lifts and escalators, electric wiring and air conditioners are at the extreme end of their working life. Private philanthropists are paying the salaries of 12 per cent of the NGA workforce. Further, the roof and skylights leak during downpours and there is no money to fix the roof membrane that protects the gallery’s most famous work, Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles, and other pieces in the NGA’s $6.9 billion collection.
Burke has laid the blame at the Coalition’s feet. “Maybe they thought the National Gallery would hold the roof up with ,” he told parliament on Monday. “Or maybe it would be like and all the exhibits would start running around and fixing the building themselves every night.”
Burke was being disingenuous. Both Coalition and (Rudd and Gillard) Labor governments have turned their backs on funding the NGA properly. But that fact failed to deter the Coalition’s minister for the arts from 2019 to 2022, Paul Fletcher, from political amnesia. He took to Twitter on Tuesday to attack the Labor government’s tardiness in coming to the aid of the NGA: “After nearly a year in government, a budget and a national cultural policy, still Labor has provided no extra funding for the National Gallery of Australia!” He has a point. Furthermore, he also has bare-faced cheek. For undoubtedly, it was continuing neglect of the NGA by his government that largely brought the gallery to its current sorry state.
In 2018, the year before Fletcher was appointed minister, the gallery was already putting out drip buckets when it rained and had been doing since the late 1990s. The then outgoing NGA director Gerard Vaughan noted that government funding at $47 million a year was unchanged since 2007. Fletcher and his Coalition colleagues did little to mop up the mess.
As one of Australia’s most important institutions, the NGA deserves better. Burke should not compromise his declared good intentions by accepting a budget allocation that does not fully restore its pride of place.
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