Article by ShowLoop member, Matthew Peckham reposted from LinkedIn.

Last week the Live Entertainment Industry Forum (LEIF) presented findings by EY, summarising parts of a report entitled The Economic Cost of COVID-19 on Australia’s Live Entertainment Industry. The statistics are grim.

• A year ago there were 122,000 equivalent full-time Australian jobs in Showbusiness. 79,000 (two-thirds) have disappeared. One of them was mine, by the way.
• Last year, Showbusiness tipped $36.4 billion into the economy. Two thirds of that is gone as well.

Notice that I’m calling it Showbusiness. Most people use terms like performing arts, live theatre sector, even (though rarely), entertainment industry. What we are talking about covers comedy, drama, opera, dance, live music – the MSO playing Beethoven, the Resignators playing the Espy, and everything in between. It covers circuses and stand-up, blockbuster musicals and kids’ shows touring in a Kombi van. It’s all Showbusiness.

I started working in Showbusiness in my twenties, with neither expectation nor intention of a career, but I caught the bug, became proficient and professional, then permanent. It was years before my mother stopped wondering when I would ‘settle down and get a proper job’.

There is the first problem: I caught the bug. I went to work to do a job that I loved, that was fun, as well as being so intensely rewarding that I and 122,000 others worked stupid unsocial hours to do it. To all the people with proper jobs – making things, mending or selling them, drilling your teeth, doing your tax, and so-on – perhaps it’s a bit of an impertinence for us to want the business we love to be supported or just recognised, in the mainstream, in the market or in public policy.

Instead, we are looked on as a luxury, an indulgence that the economy can probably do without.

In the early days of COVID-19, barely a fortnight after we had been summarily shut down, we heard the NRL Chairman declare, with a straight face, that rugby is an essential service. Soon after that, we learned that JobKeeper had been designed in a way that made most of our workforce ineligible for it. Then when supermarkets were overwhelmed by rampant panic-buying of baked beans and loo-rolls, we heard that the Qantas CEO rang up the Coles CEO and transplanted a few thousand employees. He also rang up the Prime Minister, who handed over $165 million to keep his planes in the air.

Australian showbusiness has barely ever had an interaction with government at any level that wasn’t about funding. Google ‘Creative Victoria’ (as our state Arts Ministry is now known), and the first words on the home page are Grants and Support: Find a funding program. The Department, under Minister Martin Foley, has been more conspicuous in its support of the business than any I can remember. The impact of the new appointee, Danny Pearson is yet to be felt, and we hope that oft-repeated calls for the ministry to take on a more active, participatory role will yet be heard. Too many hours and resources that ought to be spent putting on shows are wasted writing applications, in competition with other, similar organisations, for grants.

The Ministry is perfectly placed to set up conduits between producers, presenters, venues and performers, to broker relationships, to promote the arts, to add value in so many ways, and never, ever, was the need greater than now.

In June, after three months of shut down, the Prime Minister announced the Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund – a $250 million rescue package. As the fanfare’s echoes faded, it became clear, not only that the sum announced was exaggerated ($90 million will be loans, not grants, and anyway only $75 million will be allocated in this financial year) but that the funds were not intended to relieve the present crisis, but to support future projects. The amount set aside is a meagre fraction of what has already been lost; the application process is competitive; the only eligible projects are those already planned by pre-existing organisations; the decision-making to distribute funds will be opaque and not a single dollar has yet been awarded.

That is the second problem. As an industry, we are weakened by being divided. Every organisation in the business must bid against every other for proverbially narrower slices of an ever-smaller pie – and the terms on which they bid grow ever further from what motivates producers to produce, or performers to perform. Instead, the obligation is to conform to the vernacular of Government – words like inclusiveness, accessibility, engagement and authenticity are spread like pizza-toppings, while talent, entertainment and excellence are avoided at all cost, and commercial success means instant disqualification.

Showbusiness has no all-powerful advocate, no-one who can ring up the Prime Minister, no bullying billionaire. We have a well-meaning union, the MEAA, but with so many casual employees and so entrenched an expectation of irregular and seasonal employment, it lacks the resources and the horsepower of its trades-based brethren. Live Performance Australia, the peak body for showbusiness employers, can align itself with MEAA on some issues, but only some, and its members – half of them venues, the other half producers – are not habitual allies.

When we read of the situation in the UK, our first thought is of the West End’s famous theatres and their even more famous shows, but of over 1,100 active theatres in the UK only 39 are in London. The Society of London Theatres (SOLT), UK Theatre, the Professional Lighting and Sound Organisation (PLASA) and other bodies have joined hands to rally support for an industry that, in numbers employed, is six times the size of ours. The have secured COVID-19 relief funding totalling £1.57 billion, almost eleven and-a-half times the RISE fund’s $250 million. And it’s already being distributed ­– £257 million was handed over last Monday.

Australian showbusiness will recover; it will, because it must, and it must because it is full of people trying to make a decent living doing what they love. We have been made weak by being fragmented, by being made to squabble like jackals over the leftover scraps of budget-night.

Can we unite for long enough to shout together the message that must be heard? We are not a luxury, nor an indulgence. We are an essential industry.

And just for context: the 79,000 jobs we lost – Australian vehicle-building never employed half that number, not even at its peak.