One of the less noticed consequences of the ALP's pre-election promise to take a "meat axe" to the federal public service has been the impact of the cuts being made to cultural institutions.
The 2008-09 budget cut cultural agencies' funding by 3.5%, including the new 2% "efficiency" dividend and the standing annual 1.5% "productivity" cut being applied to all public sector institutions.
On May 30, the ABC's News Online reported that Jan Fullerton, head of the National Library of Australia, had explained to the Senate Estimates Committee what these cuts will mean for the running of that institution. The library will have to find $200,000 of savings this year, and a further $1 million in 2009.
On June 6, the Canberra Times reported that the National Museum has started offering voluntary redundancies to meet the "efficiency" criteria, and that the National Gallery was looking at significant cuts including halving the number of travelling exhibitions.
The combined cuts to the three agencies totals around $20 million over the next three years.
For years, museums, libraries and art galleries have done badly under the federal funding model. The Coalition government applied the 1.5% annual cut to each department and under agency-based wage bargaining each agency then also had to find a way to fund pay increases from "productivity" gains.
In most government departments, this slow starvation of funding is mediated by the occasional new government initiative, programs accompanied by significant funding that provide some relief. The more this funding is available, the easier it is to offer competitive pay increases. However, in cultural institutions, such funding has been scarce.
The real dilemma facing the cultural sector, however, is that technology is opening up the possibilities of drastically democratising access to Australian heritage. This is particularly acute for the national institutions based in Canberra. Until now, access to the vast resources has been restricted to those who can travel to the capital. But with faster, more accessible access to the internet, digital collections can be made available much more readily.
This is particularly significant because many of these resources are primary materials, and making them easily available will allow for Australia's history to be understood and interpreted by many more than attributed academics and researchers.
The National War Memorial, for example, has digitised thousands of pictures, military records and diaries, which allow for a much more direct understanding of the experience of war.
This was a point made by the British Library in 2007, under the threat of budget cuts. Writing in the September 23, 2007, British Observer, Lynne Brindley, the chief executive of the British Library argued: "If the suggested cuts to the nation's greatest library go ahead, large parts of the UK's digital output will be lost. Gaps will open in the intellectual record of the nation. As our global competitors forge further ahead in the digital world, the British Library will be marooned in the analogue era, ceasing to be relevant for future generations."
In coming years, the Australian National Library is leading a project to digitise the contents of early Australian newspapers. By providing easy, and free, searching across the earliest written reports of life in Australia, valuable information about the flora and fauna, land clearing, relations with Indigneous peoples and early labour history may be accessible for the first time. Then everyone can make up their own minds on the history wars, and track their own history.
And it's not just libraries: one of the recommendations of the 2020 summit includes the digitisation of art, allowing much more of Australia's artistic tradition and understanding to be spread. Online exhibitions and interactive spaces could provide valuable resources for high schools.
But all these initiatives are jeopardised by cuts from a government that appears to have no interest in facilitating public access to invaluable information.
Digitisation is most cost efficient on a large scale, but funding for an ambitious project to preserve and make available Australia's heritage is not forthcoming. Without it, a great opportunity may just slip by.