Over the last few weeks, Adelaide Festival’s implosion of its own Adelaide Writers’ Week program has provided a startling case study that is likely to be used in governance training contexts for years to come.
This entirely avoidable governance failure, and the predictable responses that followed, have revealed that Australia’s arts and cultural sector still has much to learn in terms of fiduciary duties and duty of care, risk and crisis management, communication and response, and navigating the difference between censorship and cultural safety.
These longstanding issues have become particularly urgent now that organisations and boards are governing through a polycrisis, where national arts workforce and volunteering shortages mean we have fewer and more burnt-out people making more (and more complex) decisions more quickly, and in more challenging situations – often while being actively lobbied by government, the media or other third-parties.
While we need to get much better at avoiding and addressing these symptoms, we also need to acknowledge and eliminate their cause, which is Australia’s unfit and outdated not-for-profit governance models and so-called governance ‘best practice’ models that are setting our boards and board members up to fail the artists, audiences and constituencies they were set up to represent and serve.
Arts governance challenges – quick links
Government involvement in arts boards
Most arts and cultural organisations in Australia are incorporated as state or territory associations (most common historically) or are national companies limited by guarantee (most common today).
While there are minor variations between the two business structures, both are guided by legislation that requires them to elect or co-opt a group of low-paid or unpaid non-executive directors, who are tasked with their organisation’s governance. Usually known as a board, council or committee, this group provides what most arts workers and board members know as common-practice governance.
By contrast, Adelaide Festival provides an example of statutory authority and publicly-owned company governance. These institutions are established by State, Territory or Commonwealth Governments to distance decision-making and service delivery from the whims of politics, while recognising the importance of and commitment to ongoing public investment in their work.
Each is incorporated under their own specific piece of legislation – of which South Australia currently has the largest number of cultural statutory authorities and public-owned companies in the country. Their board members are appointed by their respective Ministers – but should operate independently and with the same general and fiduciary duties as other boards from that point forward.
Issues with government appointed boards
The government appointed boards of statutory authorities and publicly-owned companies are based on an inherent contradiction, in that they are appointments to organisations intended to be arms-length from government that are made by the government of the day.
These sorts of appointments are often aspirational, in that they can come with and create great prestige. But there is often a cultural difference between being appointed to a board that you haven’t had much to do with, and being elected or co-opted to support an organisation or artform you already have an interest in or connection to.
Appointments rarely consider the skills or demographic representation those boards need at any one time. Instead, they can often be strategic for other reasons – such as providing rewards for past favours, acting as incentives in hope of future ones, or being attempts to put key cultural assets into the ‘safe hands’ of people who share the government’s agendas or politics.
As a result, appointed board members tend to have fewer skills, knowledge or direct experience of the sectors they are asked to oversee (in this case, the arts sector) than board members governing incorporated associations or companies, and they represent significantly less diversity (which is already a very low bar).
Their boards are also tasked with a job that is arguably much easier than their volunteer counterparts in the small-to-medium arts sector, given they are larger organisations with access to larger staff teams and paid expertise.
Through all of this, ministerial or governmental involvement and control over those board members’ appointments (and in some cases, over their not-insignificant salaries) increase the risk of the political interference these organisations were set up to avoid.
The cost of cultural labour
Most statutory authorities and publicly-owned companies pay their board members. But while what they pay varies hugely (currently anywhere from $200 to $8000 per meeting), this means government appointed boards have greater vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
Read: Cultural safety isn’t a shield, it’s a mirror – organisations need to look into it
Critiquing this practice doesn’t mean that the cultural labour of these board members isn’t valuable. But it is a startling reminder of how current governance legislation values and reinforces power – with only those at the top of the largest and most well-resourced organisations coming close to being paid what that cultural labour is worth. Ironically, the Chairperson of Australia’s peak arts body, Creative Australia, is paid more for attending a few meetings a year than the average Australian artist earns over the same period.
Effective arts governance needs more than more artists on boards
There has been a big call over the last week for more artists and arts workers to be involved in organisational decision-making – as they should.
However, just allocating a few board places for this purpose is also not enough of a solution. In fact, representative governance structures can be just as problematic as appointed boards in different ways.
All of this means we need to rethink our unfit and outdated not-for-profit governance models – including the idea of whether we need ‘boards’ at all.
