Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In Parramatta we have a theatre known as the Riverside Theatres. There are three theatres in all: the main theatre, Lennox and Rafferty's. It serves our community well. It's about 30 years old. It needs updating—there's no doubt about that. It's not big enough for large musicals, but it has an extraordinary program—thanks to its director, Robert Love—of national and international performances, as well as an extraordinary range of local performances across the full diversity of Parramatta's community.

Recently, as part of the planned move of the Powerhouse Museum to Parramatta, the state government announced that they will pay $140 million for one of our car park sites for the Powerhouse Museum, and that $100 million of that would go towards the redevelopment of the Riverside Theatres, of which the state government would keep a 50 per cent interest. Given the track record of the state government during the hiatus of the council amalgamations—we've had an administrator in the Parramatta council since May last year, and many of the decisions that had been made during that time were not ones that would have been made if we'd had a democratically elected council—I'm a little sceptical about whether or not this decision will turn out to be a good thing for Parramatta, or a pretty bad one. It depends very much on what the state government has in mind.

But, I would like to say this: all the people in the inner city and the eastern suburbs who think they know that Parramatta needs fixing, and who come out to 'fix' us, really should ask us first. They don't know us, they don't know who we are, they don't consult with us, they don't know what we want and they are potentially getting a lot of things very wrong. I do say 'potentially' because, try as I might, I can't see the clear plans. I can see announcements, but not plans. I can't see any real consultation on any of their projects. We have a history of having had decisions imposed on us in recent years, which we simply did not want and would never have approved of through a democratically elected council. It is an absolutely bad track record.

We deserve a little more respect. I just want to talk a bit about who we actually are, to define what my concerns are. Not long after I moved to Parramatta, I was walking along the street and I saw a street sign for an artist called Sivan Perwer. He's a Kurdish artist. I knew about him because, when I was working for the Australia Council, I funded him to come to Australia. I was part of the funding process for him to come to Australia twice. He is a Kurdish artist who has been banned in Turkey for essentially singing in Kurdish and who has moved to Europe. He's an extraordinary traditional artist. There were street signs, so I went along to this performance. There were 2,000 people in the room—just from following street signs—listening to this traditional Kurdish artist. All the young boys were out dancing and all the women were trying to rush the stage and the security guards were pushing them back. I sat there and I was at one of the most extraordinary performances I've ever been to. He's an extraordinary Kurdish artist called Sivan Perwer—go and look him up; he's amazing.

A couple of weeks later, I saw another street sign for a Carnatic classical saxophone player, an Indian musician called Dr Kadri Gopalnath. I went along to that one too, based on the street signs. There were 2,500 people, all in their saris, listening to what is extremely contemporary Carnatic music. It was the kind of crowd you wouldn't get at the Opera House, but you get it from a street sign in Western Sydney. I have been to the Swara-Laya music festival, which now goes for three days at the Riverside. It fills up; it is totally packed out. There are some of the most extraordinary musicians you'll ever see there.

Dr Balamuralikrishna did a 45-minute performance on five notes with just a few instruments on the stage. It's mesmerising stuff. We have the most extraordinary music. We have Sufi music. We have the Sydney Sacred Music Festival, which brings Sufi music. You float for the next week if you have heard a Sufi band. They are extraordinary, and we have them in Western Sydney. We have Koranic singers. We have Turkish music. We have Afghani throat singing. We have the National Theatre of Parramatta now—a great national theatre—and FORM Dance Projects. We have Bhangra, music from the Punjab. Even little kids do that. We have Lebanese drums. We have a growing African presence and we have the Sydney artist studio. We are an incredibly diverse community.

As a person who went to six concerts a week for seven years when I worked at the Australia Council, I actually do know when I'm hearing good music, and this is exceptional stuff. What concerns me about the decision that the state government has made is that we need an arts precinct in Parramatta that allows our art to grow. We've had stories in the past about the building of a 400-seat theatre in Parramatta so the big musicals could come to town, and that's really important. But, when you're growing the next big city—the next great city, as the state government keeps talking about—you don't grow into a great city because you build a venue where big companies can come in and treat you like an audience. You build a great city by building arts venues which can grow local art as well. You build it by making sure that you have a really healthy local art scene, which promoters of the big events will tell you actually grows an audience as well. It grows an audience for a more diverse range of work, which is what you need if you start building big theatres. We need the depth of facilities, and we will complain loudly if we lose the diversity of the Riverside in order to build a large-scale theatre, if that's all we get for it.

We have a right to complain and we have a right to be suspicious, because the history of funding of arts in Western Sydney is actually very poor. Western Sydney has never received its fair share of funding. Last year Deloitte found Western Sydney received one per cent of federal government arts funding and 5.5 per cent of state government cultural heritage and events funding even though we were 10 per cent of the population. In 2015 the gap between arts funding in eastern and western suburbs was 550 per cent—not in western suburbs' favour. In the eastern suburbs, the government poured $300 million into operating costs for five city arts and culture centres and another $244 million into expansion. One in 10 Australians live in Western Sydney, but there was 5.5 per cent of state government funding and one per cent of federal. The region does not have a single genuinely metropolitan facility. Four of our primary institutions are more than three decades old. We have only had one built since 1990, and that's the Blacktown Arts Centre. So we have a lot to complain about.

Again, I'm not complaining about the level of funding that goes to our big venues; that's wonderful. They are wonderful things. But, given that half the population lives west of Rydalmere, we are seriously undersupported. You'd think that on that basis I would be entirely delighted to have $140 million. It is of course the money that comes from the sale of a block of land, so it's not additional money; it's actually sale of land, not a grant as such. But I'm particularly concerned when the state government keeps 50 per cent of the interest. We're not sure whether that means 50 per cent of the loss or 50 per cent of the profit. We're not sure what that means for old plans to renovate the Riverside theatre and build a high-rise residential tower above it or to the side. We're just not sure what that means. But we have a right to be sceptical.

The arts in Western Sydney are incredibly important to who we are. We are an incredibly diverse community. We speak every language. We have music, art, dance, theatre and film within us from all around the world. We have independent filmmakers who work with companies around the world. If you go to the Riverside on any day, you will see extraordinary dance performances from any culture in the world, and we need to make sure that we are able to develop those art forms in the community in which we live. The benefits are extraordinary if you do that well. We will not be turned into a dormitory where we have residential and nothing else and we will not be turned into simply an audience. We expect to be treated as producers of art and we expect to be resourced for that.

The economy is incredibly important, and a large-scale venue would, of course, bring in money from time to time. But the economy is supposed to serve us, and we can also build our economy not by becoming an audience but by being the strongest producers of content that we can. Content is a key driver of prosperity as the world goes more and more online. You can sell to the entire world from your lounge room now, and this is not the time in any way for the state government, while our council has been abolished, to lessen our capacity to support our Indigenous arts community.