So, the budget allocations for the arts seem fine and the new funds will be warmly welcomed by those who get them. To my mind the real problem is that I don’t believe the government’s optimistic forecasts for the economy that it is depending on. The arts like everyone else in the economy will be affected if Australia’s economy shifts into recession.

As Alan Kohler noted on The Drum the Budget is relying on a bumper 11% increase in revenue in 2012-13, including company tax up 9% and personal tax up 8%. That’s just not going to happen.

It is extraordinary that so few financial commentators, including the Reserve Bank have not, and continue not to see a slow down in the Australian economy coming, despite the signs that the asset inflation that has funded much of it for so long was inevitably going to slow down as households reached debt saturation and had to take stock of their debt ratios. Continue reading →

Still going over it folks but not a lot of excitement to be had from what I can see. At least there’s been no cuts and everything (at least for the arts) seems steady as she goes. Are they saving something up for the National Cultural Policy? Doesn’t look good does it?

The amazing thing is 20% of the funding boost Arts Minister Simon Crean has announced is going to attracting production of the feature film The Wolverine to Australia. Continue reading →

Last week I was reading the Women in Theatre report for my piece for artsHub, which has become part of its Special Report that went out today.

Excuse the slightly daggy headline but artsHub’s got a pretty tight character limit for title and you have to make it a bit catchy: Wherefore art thou gender-equity?

It was one of those rare reports you can read through from beginning to end and it had some fabulous quotes in it. The most saddening thing I found was how well I understood it, it did feel as though it was telling me what I already knew. My own career has followed a path that many of those interviewed for the report would find similar to their own. Continue reading →

Dear Blog,

I scrolled back in time and found my early tweets – I seemed to have quite the poetic bent back then. Wonder if I’ll find my way round that corner again. Here’s some of them:

@McFifi
so beautiful and strange-so Hindenberg-esque http://www.etravelblackboard.com/showarticle.asp?id=101689
11 Feb 10

@McFifi
Sky opened lightening flashed leaves flowed in veins over the tarmac water pooled and now all softly settles down in cool
11 Feb 10 Continue reading →

This is a pretty awesome article in the Guardian by Stewart Lansley, Why economic inequality lead to collapse. He’s the author of The Cost of Inequality: Three Decades of the Super-Rich and the Economy, published by Gibson Square, which sounds like something I should read. This is the sort of thing that always fascinates me – the economic bug that I’ve had to scratch at all my life.

It reminds me of when I was working in a deli in a shopping centre foodhall, my part time job while I did my economics degree. Exhausted on a 15 minute break, I doodled on a piece of paper trying to draw the appropriate graph for the relationship between hours worked and consumption demand. I figured I was spending so much time either at uni or working part time that despite earning money I didn’t get the time and didn’t have the energy to spend it. It was a curiously shaped curve I reasoned. To a point, working more hours and earning more money rapidly increased how much you would buy, but then I reasoned the curve would flattened out. If you’re spending all your time working, you just can’t spend. You need leisure to buy. An economy needs people to have time off. Money should buy that, but it wasn’t happening. Continue reading →