This was a Facebook post. But someone asked for it and it took ages to find, so I’m putting it here for easy access.
A quick post about why we can’t make the Basic Income for Artists available to ALL artists/creative workers. The argument against permanance will start off with the cost problem but lets consider this for a moment. Farm Assist (and indeed Fish Assist) are statutory categories that recognise farmers and fisherfolk as self-employed people whose chosen occupation is accepted as their work despite the fact it doesn’t pay them. There is no “availability-for-work” test. The level of payment is set against income (there are of course various disregards etc.) Now the rational economic thing to do if a farmer can’t make a living is sell the farm to a larger farmer, and go off and get a job. The larger farm has economies of scale etc. so there would be no real loss to agricultural output, and very probably a rise in productivity. But we don’t do that. What the Farm and Fish assist payments establish is that a citizen has the right to chose what they work at, and has a right to be self employed without earning enough to make an effective living. Although no one would deny that the financially unrewarding work of this farmer makes a valuable net contribution to society at large.
Is that not a very similar economic situation to the average artist? And yet for some reason we get into a moral and legislative hizzy over the right of artists to pursue work as freelance workers that cannot provide an acceptable income but contributes to the wider social and economic good.
Think about it: if we added “Art Assist” as a welfare payment category then EVERY artist would be eligible. They could receive weekly payments via the Welfare Budget with no requirement to prove that they were becoming more employable, with no 3 year cliff edge, and without renouncing their freelance status.
We move from a scraps from the table “lottery” which you might win twice in a career to an entitlement that once we quality for it is paid indefinately. And you don’t have to defend a fixed budget line item every year at budget time. The welfare budget simply adjusts around the demand.
From a policy perspective we need to ask what problem are we solving? If the problem is artist poverty produced by precarity, poor funding models, and cost disease then the “Farm Assist” model is a far better policy instrument in that it is targeted, its an entitlement, and its permanent. BIA is none of these things.
Of course some changes would have to be made to the Assist framework (move to individual as opposed to household assessment for example), but making it a welfare payment on this model means that we acknowledge the right of the individual artist to choose a form of work that fails to produce a sufficient income; we acknowledge the right of that individual to be freelance and in receipt of state support; and we acknowledge the reality that some work is valuable in aggregate while failing to support at the individual level. And we stop treating people (artists) as problematic and acknowledge that the problem is systemic.”