The ABC’s The Drum has published an opinion piece of mine:
Taxpayer money wasted chasing film productions
I see very little merit in Government assistance to the film industry, apart from supporting the creation of genuine Australian content that helps tell the Australian story – i.e. movies like Picnic at Hanging Rock or Sunday Too Far Away. Movies like The Sea Hawk or Captain Nemo do not deserve assistance and money should be re-directed to more worthwhile purposes such as education and health. If job creation is the objective of such assistance, why not direct the money to schools, hospitals or cash-starved NGOs which I’m sure could use it to hire support staff?
Queensland Economy Watch 
Money invested in the Creative industries is money well spent. We loose so many of our most creative musicians, dancers, actors, and technical people to overseas creative industries.
The Government already spends far too much on Health. A large proportion of the population don’t actually want to be healthy. The 70% overweight males and 56% of overweight female Australians don’t want to be healthy. (ABS) If they wanted good health they would control their weight. So much of the health dollars is already wasted on people who don’t make the effort to care for their own health, but who prefer to over indulge, avoid exercises and ignore health advise. Overindulgence is a cost burden the Government should not have to bare, people should be responsible for their own basic good health. An increasing percentage of the health dollar is being wasted on people who make themselves sick.
Self-induced Sickness is a total waste of money, both in the dollars spent on the over consumption of alcohol , calories and cigarettes, and the dollars wasted to treat the result of overconsumption. By all means spend money on health, but spend much less on sickness.
Governments need to ration the health (sickness ) dollar – it would be far better spent having people participating and enjoying dance, music, theatre, movies making and the arts in general. See you on the dance floor !
Thanks for the comment, Katrina. Lots to think about. I don’t object to funding the arts, but I think there’s a big difference between funding a symphony orchestra or ballet company, for example, which I don’t object to, and subsidising a movie production with little cultural merit.
Re. health, we possibly could spend less on health over the long-run if we focussed more on preventive health measures. While the campaign against smoking was a big success, I’m unsure how successful other measures have been to date. It’s something I might investigate.