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As the Art of Tax Reform summit drew to a close, suddenly Tim Minchin bounded up to the stage, with all the energy of someone who hadn’t spent all day talking about potential reforms to the tax system for creatives. As we were at the Opera House, Minchin took the opportunity to play his music video for Play it Safe, his paean to this monumental home for the arts, written for its 50th birthday. A rollicking exercise in irony, Play it Safe urges its listeners to keep it simple, don’t stick your neck out, know your place… all the while demonstrating that the Opera House, from conception to operation, has done anything but.
Unwittingly, Michin had provided an apt metaphor for the day, which had started with an overflowing funnel of big, bold ideas and filtered them down to a few options that might not be very exciting but might just be realised.
Even before the day had started, the day had been branded as a meeting of odd bedfellows. NSW Arts Minister John Graham was on morning radio, chuckling about collecting creatives and tax boffins (I’m not sure which camp I was meant to be in) and locking them in the Opera House to work out how to change the tax system to help the creative industries. To be fair, both creatives and boffins were there in abundance. The creatives were identifiable by their bright clothes, colourful eyewear and big smiles. The straight-laced boffins looked slightly bemused, as if their Uber drivers had dropped them off at the wrong place.
As the day went on, the divide between creatives and boffins proved to be wider than just their tastes in fashion. To generalise, the creatives talked passionately about the many challenges they’re facing in running their enterprises. Unhelpful tax issues, sure, but also a lack of government funding, algorithmic bias, a market that is still skittish after COVID, an increasingly competitive philanthropic market, the difficulty in attracting private investors and so on. And so, the summit’s scope crept on, past affordable spaces for artists, onwards towards a universal income for artists and a dozen other wild ideas, many of which were only tangentially related to tax reform.
The creatives had brought the “what about…” -ism, so luckily the boffins were on hand to hose down any rampant enthusiasm. To generalise again, they seemed to be mostly executives from mid-tier to large accounting firms, and as such, knew a thing or two about which tax reforms might have an effect, and which might have half a chance of success. They had the sensible air of people who had seen many noisy proposals for sweeping changes to the tax system fall over themselves on the ice, while subtle tweaks to the status quo glided over the line, Steve Bradbury-style.
The boffins advised to play by the rule book. Work with what’s already there and publicise underused benefits in the existing system. Don’t challenge the universality of the tax system. Understand that Treasury officials will concentrate on how much any change will cost, how it will be implemented, and whether any change will have unintended flow-on effects. Think tweaks to what’s already there, and if you want to – gasp – propose something new, at least have a precedent to point to.
By the end of the day, a small number of feasible ideas had emerged as front-runners:
- Removing the tax on arts prizes seemed like a no-brainer, and also probably makes so little difference to the national tax take that it might cost more to argue against it.
- Extending the screen industry’s Producer Offset to live performance seemed feasible as something with a template to follow (any potential changes to the Offset to make it easier for screen practitioners didn’t get a start, I noticed).
- Increasing the generosity of the non-commercial loss provisions for artists could work because it would amplify something already in place.
By contrast, the braver and more innovative ideas seemed to be inching towards the “too hard” basket. In particular, there were a range of suggestions on two themes which seemed to get lost in the corridors of the House: using tax incentives to stimulate philanthropic giving and using them to boost demand for the arts. This is a real shame, because while the aforementioned worthy changes might be easier to implement, they focus on creating more work in an already crowded market. These more difficult ideas have the potential to change the relationship between the arts and its key supporters: donors and audiences—people who could actually boost revenue, not just reduce the tax paid on it.
Compromise is inevitable; Jørn Utzon could have told us that. All those creative ideas had been well and truly boffinised. But shouldn’t we be careful not to take Tim Minchin too literally? We might get some quick wins by playing it safe, but perhaps we need some longer-term plans to lobby for the more substantial changes that could change the whole game.
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