Cultural Money and the Country

Landline is currently in its summer recess. The programme runs in a 3 stories of 20 minutes format. During the summer they are running repeats of 3 popular stories for a selected industry. Today it was Wines turn.

The last story was a 'human interest' story, about an Opera Event at Jimbour House on the Darling Downs.

Cut into the story was an interview with someone from the Queensland Music Festival. The first parts talked about the funding, saying the people in the bush pay taxes, so are entitled to some state government funding.

LYNDON TERRACINI: Well, I've always said you know, that people throughout regional Australia pay the same taxes as everyone else. Fortunately the Queensland State Government believes that people should have access to the activities that take place in capital cities and so they've supported the Queensland Music Festival and in fact increased the funding this time, so that we're able to go to more places and stage events people want to go to like this event here. We've got 23 centres all over Queensland this time and we play more than 2 million kilometres and to over 200,000 people, and I think that's a wonderful thing.

In the second part, talked about the future of the event, its commercialisation and that the Queensland Music Festival would be withdrawing funding. The speaker didn't actually say weather there was any link between the too.

LYNDON TERRACINI: Well, I hope that over time the Queensland Music Festival actually won't need to exist, that all of these places will take on these events and ideally they run them themselves and so tourists come from all over Australia to experience those events and be part of it, which will assist the local economy, and also it brings communities closer together, so I hope that's the legacy we can leave.

This last quote is not what I remember from the TV. Maybe I'm mixing what two peolpe said. I cut the quotes in after I wrote the rest. The last bit of the second quote does sound like he does not expect funding to continue long term.

So is this going to be another example of government putting in some money and yelling 'Look what we are doing for the country' (in the city media). Then a few years later it withdrawing the money while no one is looking!

Maybe I’ve spent too long in the public service!