I’d like to make some observations in the context of my belief that folk music is critical to the ongoing development and maintenance of genuine, genuinely accessible national musical culture.

Folk music, all its multifarious guises, has been and continues to be the genesis of vast amounts of successful contemporary popular music.

I invite you to consider the Angels - a very successful unadulterated ball-tearing rock ‘n’ roll band from South Australia that started life as the Moonshine Jug and String Band. Moonshine could be considered as nothing other than a folk band

I invite you to consider my own band, Redgum. With 2 acoustic guitars, a flute and a violin - we were seen by the music industry as a “folk” band for quite a number of years.

This was problematic in any number of ways. In the first instance, I remember being told by an endless succession of earnest, bespectacled, waistcoat wearing, Osama bin Laden-bearded musicians that we weren’t “folk” and we werent to claim that category for ourselves. Frankly, at that time - and without the benefit of reflection and a bit of education - the very last musical category on earth I wanted Redgum to be associated with was folk. Folk, for me, conjured up songs about sheep, cows and improbable bushrangers leavened ever so slightly by songs about English squires, crumbling castles and virtuous maidens - all delivered in unconvincing, faux Celtic accents.

It seemed to me that before you could claim the status of folk musician - as if you would want to - you had to be able to recite all 91 verses of Spencer the Rover without dropping and beat.

In 2004 the then Minister for the Arts and Sport commissioned a report which examined the state of symphony and pit orchestras, arguably the least viable of the performing arts sector.

Chaired by James Strong - who used to run Qantas among other large organisations - the committee examined a range of operational, marketplace, financial and governance issues facing Australian orchestras focusing on artistic vibrancy, cost effective access, financial viability and financial transparency. 20 recommendations were made - most of them precipitating howls of outrage from the usual suspects - and by the usual suspects I’m mean those inhabitants of the eastern suburbs who believe that their rarefied taste in music should be subsidised by the taxpayer.

While I didn’t contribute to the cacophony, like lots of South Australians I had no wish see the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra diminished, especially while orchestras in the eastern states are allowed to thrive. I am an infrequent member of the ASO’s audience but I don’t go to the Velodrome at Gepps Cross much either. I’m happy that some of my fellow South Australians can go the ASO and I’m happy that some have a place where they can ride their bikes in circles. I just think we need to be mindful of the “user pays” principle because a lot of working Australian men and women are helping to fund art forms and sporting facilities they don’t use.

Among the complaints that followed the release of the Strong Report, some fascinating claims were made. For instance, Gary France, Head of the School of Music at the Australian National University, claimed that the implementation of the Strong Report would “… affect everybody…every Australian”.

I’m not so sure. In this I can only quote from 2012 - the Australian Bureau of Statistics records that 1.25 million people attended a paid, school or free symphony orchestra concert. On the other hand, 5.5 million people attended a contemporary popular music performance. If the ABS is right, Gary France’s claim that every Australian will be affected by the Strong Report is a big stretch.

Fact: more people go to contemporary popular music gigs than go to classical music concerts. However uncomfortable it might be, we can’t ignore the inherent inequity of arts subsidies. Seats at orchestral concerts, the opera and the dance are heavily subsidised by the public purse. In contrast, concert seats at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre are not subsidised nor are tickets to the concerts at Adelaide Oval.

However hard the arts mandarins try to spin it, the fact is that the lion’s share of performing arts funding finds its way to the orchestras, the opera and dance companies. I know this at first hand. Between 1994 and 1996, notwithstanding our political differences, the then Arts Minister, Di Laidlaw, engaged me to help develop some policies for the contemporary popular music industry in South Australia. To her credit, Laidlaw accepted the proposition that as one of the most accessed and accessible art forms, contemporary music ought to be at the funding table. As I drew up my chair to represent the sector, it’s fair to say that I was not exactly a welcome guest. It wasn’t meant personally. There is never enough arts funding to go around and the ASO, the Adelaide Chamber Orchestra and the Australian String Quartet, among others, saw contemporary music as just another hungry mouth at a sparse table.

I want to see a strong, vibrant symphony orchestras in South Australia and elsewhere but I don’t want it to be at the expense of the folkies, the jazz players, the country music community, the blues fraternity and rock-and-rollers. In general, the supporters of what used to be referred to as the ‘high’ arts are educated, politically savvy and noisy in the genteel sort of way that governments of both persuasions are more likely to respond to.

A few years ago I was invited to see the Eagles at the Entertainment Centre. As the crowd snaked its way along aisles and between rows, it occurred to me that the tickets represented a big outlay for a lot of people there. These people pay their taxes and some of their tax dollars go to fund the arts. And so they should as I shudder to think of our society without the arts. But someone needs to explain to me why, in our democracy, one person’s cultural experience is subsidised and another’s is not.

ARTS FUNDING

A number of years after this, I was invited to contribute to a panel at Flinders University on funding for the arts. The scenario was that the Government had conducted yet another one of its reviews and decided that it could only afford to support one art form. Each art form had to make its case to the panel for funding in furious competition with the rest of the arts world.

This was my presentation on behalf on contemporary popular music.

Some years ago, in a moment of unbridled idiocy, I agreed to take my son, then aged 15, to see AC/DC perform at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre.

It was, ladies and gentlemen, a wondrous experience, the culmination of which was the performance a song of five minutes 19 seconds duration, entitled “She’s got the jack”.

Lest you think I jest, allow me to recite the verse.

All the cards were comin'
From the bottom of the pack
And if I'd known what she was dealin' out
I'd have dealt it back
She's got the jack, she's got the jack
She's got the jack, and who knows what else?
She's got the jack, yeah, yeah
She's got the jack, she's got the jack
She's got the jack, she's got the jack
She's got the jack, jack, jack, jack, jack, jack, jack
She's got the jack

As if this proud moment in lyricism was not enough, around me twelve thousand people extended their flannetted arms and, in evident delight, chanted the chorus in unison.

And this is what I am asked to defend this afternoon. You might appreciate, therefore, the magnitude of the task before me this afternoon.

For the very future of music in Australia, in all its forms and styles, from the music of AC/DC to Peter Sculthorpe, I am Fidei Defensor – the Defender of the Faith.

In the face of a depressingly predictable attack on the arts by a government that has raised philistinism to an art form, I find myself here, alone on the rampart.

Below me, milling around and utterly dependent on my advocacy, I see an endless procession of pretty boy bands and pneumatic blonde twenty-somethings.

On the other side of the square there’s the ASO, writing string arrangements for Led Zeppelin’s third album and grizzling about the cleanliness of their tea cups.

I see the country music fraternity, all hat and yankee accents.

There are the folkies, earnestly committing to memory all 91 verses of Spencer the Wild Rover.

And I see the jazz school, deep in esoterica, showing each other chord progressions and time signatures that no ordinary musician could conceive of - let alone play.

And I stand between these all musical forms – and oblivion.

Or do I?

The premise which I presume underpins the competitive pitch this afternoon is that the withdrawal of government funding will consign each of our art forms to oblivion.

But the fact is that most forms of music, though not all, have survived quite well, thank you very much, in the absence of government funding.

Whether or not the Federal government slashes arts funding or not, or whether Jay Weatherald decides to give it all over to film festivals, for most of us out there on the Pacific Highway in a rented Tarrago, it will matter not one jot.

The symphony and chamber orchestras, opera companies and the various classical ensembles differ in that they lean heavily on taxpayer funding for their survival. They always bristle at the charge, but it’s true.

However, rock, blues, folk, country, hip-hop and to a lesser extent jazz, have all survived, and indeed prospered, down through the years, with little no input from government.

I remember being in Parliament House in Canberra in the late 1980s and being told by the then Minister for the Arts, a rude and belligerent little John Dawkins, how grateful the contemporary popular music industry should be to him for an allocation of $1 million.

I told him, to his visible irritation and the discomfort of everyone else in the room, that in my industry $1 million dollars would amount to a half-way decent album budget, a carton of Heineken and a couple of grams of what we used to refer to as Bolivian Marching Powder.

The clear implication from John Dawkins then was that if you accept funding from government, you are to be grateful. Even though you are only getting some of your own money back Personally, I’d rather starve to death.

My view is that art’s most important function – bar none - is to critique society.

In fairness, art forms other than music have made some splendid efforts in this direction over the years but none as demonstrably and repeatedly successful as contemporary popular music.

Of all the art forms, music is the one with the demonstrated capacity to change the world – usually for the better, though not always. (Woody Allen said that listening to Wagner made him want to invade Poland.)

But when was the last time a painting changed the world? When was the last time a modern dance company ousted a government?

When was the last time a piece of theatre changed the entire nation’s view of an issue?

And so my question is this? Why, when we in the music industry have paddled our own canoe for so long, would we want to compromise ourselves and surrender the high moral ground by taking the government shilling?

I acknowledge there are some musical genres that genuinely can’t survive without funding –simply because they are expensive little pets and there’s not enough public support to enable them buy their own beer and Bolivian Marching Powder. Let them make their own case.

Classical music for instance – music for intellectuals - the sort of people who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of the Lone Ranger. The rest of us think classical music is the kind you keep thinking will turn into a tune any time soon. Or there’s opera, which is where a bloke gets stabbed in the back and instead of bleeding, he sings.

So let me make it easy for my opponents this afternoon. I dare speak not for classical music, or opera. But I do speak for the people’s music – for rock and roll, country, folk, blues, hip-hop and jazz.

Keep your miserable, begrudged funding. We’ll do what we’ve always done. We’ll do it ourselves. We’ll take our music out into the market place, to the people, into the pubs and clubs and theatres. Into the cities and regional centres, into remote Australia - and when we’ve done all that we’ll go overseas.

If we succeed we’ll have done it on our own. If we fail, at least we gave it a go without having to grovel before pasty-faced bureaucrats or glib politicians.

Government funding? Furnish it to film, donate it to dance, pander to painting, drape it over drama, lavish it on literature. We don’t care. Stick your money. Good afternoon.