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The arts tax summit is a concession that, for all the glossy ambitions of federal and NSW’s arts and cultural policies, they are not lifelines. There are simply far too few dollars to stretch across a chronically stressed sector.

Business, peak lobby groups, and cultural organisations want more private investment, more incentives and rebates to create original work, and new and fairer ways to tax artists, musicians and performers to reflect their career long juggle of projects, grants, and second jobs.

Tax-free art prizes seem universally supported. The Prime Minister’s Literary Award is income tax-free, the Archibald Prize is not.

Exempting grants from tax, as Sweden and Finland does, would help more than the lucky few of prize winning creators, stretching federally and state awarded grants a little further while giving funding agencies more bang for their buck.

Axing taxes on royalties, commissions, sales of original works, advances, and appearance and performance fees are also canvassed by the submissions, to bolster average income from creative work measured by Creative Australia as a paltry $23,200 in 2021.

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In a context where only one in five artists are likely to be able to meet their minimum income needs from their creative work, according to the same research, Sureshan thinks the tax system needs to acknowledge the financial realities that artists need “more than one hustle to pay the bills”.

The poet was prompted to make her own personal submission after being unable to claim writing expenses in her last tax return because a second job had tipped her over the $40,000 threshold.

“We poets are not known for our bookkeeping talents,” she notes. It’s true of most creatives navigating an increasingly complex taxation system without the safety net of accountants or tax specialists.

Service and Creative Skills Australia argues for the introduction of a secondary tax-free threshold for income earned through creative careers as occurs in Ireland, which allows self-employed artists to earn up to $88,000 annually before paying tax on income from artworks, including sales, artist fees to show works and contracts for the commission of work.

Theatre director Margaret Thanos believes it’s impossible for anyone who does not come from privilege to enter the theatre industry as the system currently stands.

“The current tax system was not built for people like us,” she writes. “It treats our work like regular salaried
employment, even though our earnings are seasonal, project-based, and unpredictable. Our income goes up and down, sometimes a great year is followed by two or three very lean years.

“Grants and prizes are a lifeline, but when they are taxed, we lose a big slice before we even start the work they are meant to support. We spend too much time and money trying to follow tax rules that are complicated for one-off projects and irregular earnings. Most of us have little or no superannuation because we do not always have an employer paying it for us.”

Practical assistance could be given by averaging income over five years to smooth out the highs and lows, so creatives are not hit with a high tax bill in a “good” year and then left struggling in the lean years, she suggests. Under certain rules, artists should be able to receive donations directly for projects and have donors claim a deduction, especially for early-stage or independent work.

On the other side of the ledger, as a spur to audiences, the Save our Arts lobby recommends tax deductions for Australians spending $500 on books, albums and art or $100 vouchers for the under 21s. To cover any potential loss in revenue, greater taxes on miners and exported resources, AI tech companies and even a national lottery are proposed.

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Despite buy-in from NSW, Victoria and South Australian governments, the priorities of the tax summit will need to be championed by the Albanese government. Creative Australia would like the work to inform an updated national cultural policy.

State and local governments have little revenue raising capability. Former Coalition spokesman for the arts Chris Puplick points out that eight of the nine identified areas of tax reform require federal government action, namely tax exemptions and tax-free thresholds, GST (where agreement with all states must be negotiated) and tax deductions for expenses.

To rely entirely on tax reform to save the arts is for governments to abrogate their responsibilities to properly fund arts and culture, he said.

“Even if some limited tax reforms were made, that is, survived the scrutiny of the federal Department of Finance and the chaos of the Senate, none would be in place immediately and benefits would not be realised for some time,” he said. “In the meantime, more companies will fail, more venues will disappear, and everyone will be left waiting for Godot.”

For Sureshan the stakes are too high for Australia’s vibrant culture to let the sector wither.

“Many may not see poetry as something of everyday use,” she says. “But everyone turns to it for the big moments of life, from birthday cards to wedding vows, prayers to eulogies. We would all be poorer if this art form was lost.”

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By the end of the engagement, the princess and first lady had handed out badges to the four, five and six-year-old Scouts in the “Squirrel” group, and received honorary ones of their own.

The engagements were the final royal moments of the state visit, after which Melania Trump travelled to Chequers to join her husband and the Starmers.

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On Wednesday night, all had attended the banquet in Windsor’s St George’s Hall, at which the president said his second state visit had been “one of the highest honours of my life”.

The following morning, after having breakfast separately, the King, Queen, president and first lady met again for an official farewell at the Sovereign’s Entrance of the castle.

They posed for another group photograph in the Green Corridor, joking about their mismatched expressions from the state banquet pictures.

“I looked at the picture we took last night,” said the president, as the King laughed. “But you were more serious than me… She [Melania] said ‘You’re smiling’ and I said ‘Yeah, I like it when I smile’.”

The Windsor Castle detachment of the King’s Guard turned out in the Quadrangle outside to mark Trump’s departure.

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The president, addressing the media, hailed the King as a “great gentleman and a great King”, pulling his hand towards him and patting him on the arm for extra emphasis.

Trump climbed into the Beast, his armoured car, and departed. Meanwhile, Melania Trump began her own programme with the Queen.

Queen Camilla showed her Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, the 1:12 scale replica of an Edwardian residence which was given to Queen Mary, the King’s great-grandmother, as a gift from the nation following the First World War.

The house features electricity, working lifts, running water, luxurious royal suites, below-stairs servants’ quarters, and a library of more than 170 works by authors such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Vita Sackville-West, AA Milne, Thomas Hardy and Aldous Huxley, who all contributed miniature books.

“It’s so cute,” said the first lady.

The Queen told her: “I love the garden. Look at the table. It’s so beautiful.”

Melania Trump replied: “It’s so beautiful.”

In the Royal Library, a short walk away, the women were shown some of the 200,000 items housed across three former state apartments, with a selection of miniature books including one by Tom Parker Bowles, the Queen’s son.

The library, the Queen said, is “full of such treasures”.

The first lady was then taken to the grounds of Frogmore House for an outing with the Princess of Wales, joining her in nature activities, a parachute game and a picnic with young Scouts.

The children took the chance to quiz their high-profile visitors about their roles.

One child asked the princess whether she wore a crown. The princess replied that she sometimes wore a tiara, but only in the evening.

Another asked the first lady whether she was going to be the “next princess”.

Melania is said to have smiled and gestured to the princess, saying, “She’s the only princess here”.

The princess told the child that Melania was “a very important person”.

She arranged packed lunches for her guests earlier in the day, with honey sandwiches made from her own beehives.

The princess is known to keep her own bees at Anmer Hall, a new hobby which she has spoken about on recent engagements.

‘The first ladybug’

Melania Trump, dressed in flat shoes for the countryside outing, allowed one little girl to sit on her lap as she joined in the nature activities, and gave each child a jar of White House honey.

Moving on to making bug hotels out of boxes, sticks and straw, Mrs Trump joined a conversation about the Scouts’ favourite insects, saying hers was a “ladybug”.

“The First Ladybug,” one of the children joked.

Afterwards, as the Scouts sat on hay bales waiting to receive their Go Wild badges, Dwayne Fields, the Chief Scout, told them they had all earned it, adding: “It’s very special because the first lady and the Princess are going to be handing them out.”

Fields gave the first lady his own Scouts neckerchief to take home. He said afterwards that it had been an “incredible” day.

“The Princess of Wales is an advocate for the outdoors and young people, so to have both those aspects here today has been amazing,” he said.

“The first lady was amazing, she came out and joined some of our young people making artwork. Their interaction was really key.

“She had a keen interest in nature and being kind, and those are key themes for us in the Scout movement.”

Speaking about the royal part of the state visit, a palace source said, “You can tell from the expression of the King, Queen, president and first lady how much they appreciated the awesome spectacle of the British Armed Forces in full pomp.

“It was very pleasing to see the way the state visit has been warmly received both by the guests and the media on both sides of the Atlantic,” they said.

“It’s a clear sign of soft power and diplomacy.

“The visiting party was very easy to deal with and very appreciative of the hospitality.”

The Telegraph, London