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Federal budget time is looming, which usually heralds the traditional speculation about who gets what and who misses out.
Tomorrow, the Herald launches Save Our NGA, a new series exploring the plight of an institution that has missed out far too often over the past decade: the National Gallery of Australia.
The National Gallery of Australia in Canberra has been starved of funds and its building is falling apart.Credit:James Brickwood
In short, the Canberra gallery is in deep strife. Having been starved of millions of dollars by the imposition of an efficiency dividend introduced by Tony Abbott and retained by the Turnbull and Morrison governments, the NGA is now weighing up how to stay afloat.
The Herald revealed in December that the gallery’s leadership was contemplating drastic measures including forced redundancies, the closure of the building two days a week and the possible reintroduction of entry fees. Now Linda Morris reports, the funding situation is so dire that private philanthropists are paying the salaries of 26 staff – 12 percent of the NGA workforce.
On top of that, the gallery’s Brutalist building is falling apart. The lifts need to be replaced and the air conditioning is clapped out. The roof membrane and skylights leak in a downpour, threatening some of the $6.9 billion worth of treasures owned by Australian taxpayers, including the gallery’s most famous work, Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles.
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As we ask in an editorial to be published tomorrow, how did it come to this? How has Australia’s most prestigious gallery been allowed to fall into such a parlous state?
The editorial continues: “It is remarkable that the Australian public blithely accepted the scourging of such a beloved institution. But after a decade when the Coalition ran the arts down and sometimes traduced them as the playground of left-wing cultural elites, the NGA’s plight has prompted renewed calls for the abolition of a public service-wide cost-cutting measure, known as the efficiency dividend, for all federal collecting institutions.”
For many years now there has been deep unease about how Canberra’s major cultural institutions have been funded. I have no real interest in playing favourites but the comparison between the Australian War Memorial, which is undergoing a $500 million expansion, and the National Gallery, which is filled with buckets ahead of forecast downpours, is striking.