Australian idle by Simon Castles - 29th July 2006
(Credit: The Age)

Unemployment benefits have helped support the careers of many top Australian artists and entertainers, but the days of the dole as a quasi arts grant are passing.

CENTRELINK AND artists kiss and make up - that's the tagline on the website Art and Dole. It's a hope, but the relationship between fledgling artists and the unemployment office is one of mutual distrust. The relaxed affair they once had is in permanent decline, the good times a memory.

The young man behind the website, who prefers to remain anonymous for fear of attracting unwanted attention from Centrelink, says Art and Dole aims to help artists deal with the dole office. It's a place for exchanging tips and tricks. He reckons artists and Centrelink want the same ends - for unemployed artists to get paid work - but disagree on the means, and often the work.

Centrelink pushes artists to get real, and forces them into work-for-the-dole programs and CV-writing workshops. Artists - bitter, frustrated, sometimes lofty - grow skilled in the art of lying and evasion. "It's a pity," says the Art and Dole founder. "We're actually on the same page, really."

Same page, but one group wants to paint on it, the other to fill it with boxes and ticks.

Artists and the dole have long gone together. A secret and thorny history exists, one made up of thousands of personal stories told in - and hidden behind - dole diaries and fortnightly claim forms.

Occasionally a story gets special attention and is splashed across a tabloid: the painter, writer or musician who has produced a hundred varieties of sod all in a decade of collecting benefits. Taxpayers fume and the screws are tightened a little more down at handouts HQ.

There is another story, though - one told less often because it's harder to quantify: that the dole has made a huge contribution to the arts and entertainment industries in Australia. Countless artists have used the dole to survive the vagaries of artistic work. It's the lark that dare not speak its name.

"I think for comedians, writers and musicians, the dole has been very important," says comedian, radio host and scriptwriter Dave O'Neil. "Nearly everyone I know has been on the dole. I used to go down to the Richmond DSS (Department of Social Security, now defunct) and see lots of comedians, musicians and artists. It was like networking down there."

The list of people in creative fields who have been on the dole is as long and stellar as the subject is sensitive and contentious. The nature of artistic work - insecure, intermittent, often poorly paid - makes the constancy of the dole understandably appealing to artists. According to an Australia Council report, Don't Give Up Your Day Job, between 1996 and 2001 about one-third of all artists experienced unemployment, and the average cumulative time out of work was 17 months, or about three months a year. Among all out-of-work artists, 56 per cent fronted up to Centrelink seeking benefits.

Some artists and entertainers talk about their dole experiences openly. Powderfinger singer Bernard Fanning once said: "My career highlight would be going off the dole, being able to earn a living." Writer-director Emma-Kate Croghan admitted to being on the dole when she made the surprise '90s low-budget hit Love and Other Catastrophes. Prolific arts critic Peter Craven has spoken wistfully of the years he "read Proust on the dole".

There are artists who refer to their dole life indirectly through their work. Think of Andrew McGahan's autobiographical novel Praise, or John Birmingham's cult classic about share-house living, He Died With a Felafel in His Hand. Both writers began their creative careers on the dole; McGahan's last "real job", ironically, was at the Brisbane dole office.

For comedians scouting for material, the dole has been a particularly rich mine. Dole-bludger characters helped kick-start the careers of stand-up comedians - and radio co-workers - Dave O'Neil and Dave Hughes.

"The dole became my signature routine," says Hughes. "The first thing I ever did on TV - on Hey Hey it's Saturday - was about being on the dole. I had this joke about me going into the dole office and saying to them, 'Look, I want to talk to the boss. The thing is, I think I'm worth a bit more. I've been coming here for five years and a guy can come off the street and get the same money as me!' "

Both Hughes and O'Neil recall things becoming much darker and tougher on the dole in the mid-'90s. Suddenly there were stricter requirements, mutual obligation, work for the dole, and case managers on your tail. Hughes was made to do a typing course ("So if I ever need something to fall back on, I've got that typing certificate," he says).

O'Neil says there was a case manager heading to his house on the very day he got a job and no longer needed unemployment benefits. The job was as a writer on Full Frontal, and the first skit he wrote was about life on the dole.

O'Neil would also later co-write a film, You and Your Stupid Mate, about two likeable simpletons forced into a work-for-the-dole program.

The film was a gentle nod to how life on the dole had changed since O'Neil did his time. "I think it's a real shame that they've made it so hard for young people today," he says.

The dole as quasi arts grant is slowly going the way of free tertiary education, a relic of a wonderfully innocent semi-socialist dream. It was naive to think it could last: a carefree dole is flagrantly contrary to neo-liberal market economics, whose steely acolytes rule the age. But perhaps it is also naive to imagine that the tightening of the dole for artists won't have any impact on the quality and quantity of art produced. There is surely a trade-off there, even if it's one we're happy to make.

Any artist over the age of about 40 is uncomfortably aware that the easy ride they got on the dole in the '60, '70s and '80s is denied their younger counterparts today. "We did get a good deal," says author John Birmingham, who was on and off the dole in the '80s. "It was a lot easier for us than it is for kids today. I wouldn't want to be kicking off a writing career now."

Red Symons thinks the opportunity for idleness he was granted by the Whitlam welfare state helped him learn to play the guitar. "Indolence is an important component to any training in the arts," says the former member of Skyhooks, now a writer and radio host.

Symons says getting the dole in the '70s was a doddle. "The requirements for the dole, commensurate with our high standing in the community as graduates, were pretty minimal. I seem to recall you simply had to turn up irregularly and be well-mannered."

Conservative commentator Christopher Pearson reminisced about similar halcyon days in a column in The Australian late last year.

"Until a suitable job in a suitable area came along, unemployment benefits were readily available to subsidise your garret and la vie Boheme," he wrote. "It was almost expected as part of your career path in literature and the performing arts."

Hence the many euphemisms for the dole - the fortnightly creative arts grant, the Whitlam scholarship and, with the passing years, the Fraser, Hawke, and Keating scholarships.

The Howard scholarship, however, isn't handed out so readily. To receive the dole today, the unemployed must apply for 10 jobs a fortnight, up from two in the early '90s. They have to complete a dole diary. After three months on benefits, they get intensive assistance to find work, and after six months those aged 18 to 39 must do a work-for-the-dole project or undertake education or training. La vie Boheme it isn't.

Nevertheless, some artists still somehow manage to chase their dreams on the dole.

In 2003, animator Adam Elliott had to explain to a disbelieving Centrelink that he was leaving the country to attend the Academy Awards. But in the main, artists today complain that Centrelink does not see art work as legitimate work, and pressures them into seeking and taking other work.

The federal Minister for Workforce Participation, Sharman Stone, denies there is a policy to discourage unemployed artists from seeking the work they want, though there is some coaxing for them to think more broadly.

"We'll help creative types in every way we can to find work related to their capacities," she says. "But if they're still unemployed after six months, we will require a mutual obligation of them and through the Job Network we will try to help them into like-minded work which mightn't be ideal. A musician might be encouraged to become a teacher of music, for example."

The National Association for the Visual Arts says, however, it gets many complaints from artists who claim Centrelink has tried to force them to take any work available, on the threat of losing the dole.

Tamara Winikoff, NAVA's executive director, says Centrelink doesn't see art as legitimate work.

The organisation recently heard from an artist who had received funding to do community art projects but was told by Centrelink that the work wasn't legitimate and he shouldn't do it. "So he had actually generated his own opportunities and Centrelink was getting in the way of it," says Winikoff.

She believes this gets to the nub of the problem: Centrelink has no appreciation for the unpredictable nature of artistic work. She argues the flexibility artists have to show is actually a template for what many workers will face in the future. "Because artists are kind of a one-person business, and the fact that they secure different kinds of work, means art isn't well understood as a pattern of legitimate work," she says. "The challenge is to try to get a better understanding within Centrelink of what the real world of work is for artists, and to facilitate that rather than stand in the way of it."

NAVA has been pushing for a program it calls ArtStart, which is modelled on the New Zealand scheme PACE - Pathways to Arts and Cultural Employment. Established in 2001, PACE is a welfare support program specifically set up for struggling New Zealand artists. It seeks to legitimise creative work and help artists deal with unemployment and the vicissitudes of their profession.

Predictably, PACE - commonly called the artists' dole - has its supporters and detractors. The New Zealand Labour Government says that as of January 2005, the scheme had helped nearly 3000 people into paid creative work. Critics, however, say the artists' dole is abused; that florists and even fashion models have signed up for it. New Zealand's National Party has promised to axe PACE, with its leader Don Brash saying of the scheme: "Ambition is one thing; fantasy is another."

Special schemes for unemployed artists also exist in many European countries, including Norway, Sweden and Ireland. In 1999 the Netherlands passed the Income Provisions for Artists Act. It allows artists to receive 70 per cent of the minimum wage for four years (and earn up to 125 per cent of the minimum wage if they pick up some work), and is aimed at helping them establish themselves professionally. The artists don't have to meet any job-seeking obligations.

Minister Stone says there is no plan to introduce a special scheme for unemployed artists in Australia, but she points out that there are many work-for-the-dole programs with an arts focus. Government arts funding, she says, is solely the job of the Australia Council. The council hands out 1700 hotly contested grants to artists and art organisations each year.

Ultimately there is little pressure on the Federal Government to change the current arrangements. John Howard might have introduced mutual obligation but it was Paul Keating who told a protester in 1995 to "Get a job - do some work like the rest of us". In the main, Australian taxpayers would like to see unemployed artists do just that.

Some artists point out that this attitude isn't directed at athletes dreaming of Olympic gold. (It is estimated that each Olympic gold medal costs Australia more than $40 million.)

Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt has no time for artists using the dole as a pseudo government grant. "Who appointed them an artist and decreed they were owed free money?" he says. "Why does work stop you being creative? Trollope wrote wonderful novels while working full-time in a post office. Dickens worked as a journalist and editor while dashing off some of the greatest novels in the English language."

It's a fair point, though we might wonder how much more Trollope or Dickens could have produced had they not been stuck at the office for years. That Dickens had to clock on like the rest of us appeals to our desire for egalitarianism, but with hindsight, might not we bend the rules a little for another Great Expectations or Tale of Two Cities?

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