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Stuart Roberts spoke the truth when he called out the City of Launceston’s utter mismanagement of the QVMAG.
This latest effort of closing down two gallery spacers holding important works in a significant component of the collections is a diabolical exemplar of inappropriate management.
Anyone with the opportunity to dig deeper will discover that this Council operation is functionally unaccountable with almost all its decision-making made in a rather dark place somewhere.
Anyone who has looked at museums and art galleries around the world will know that there are other ways to achieve whatever the QVMAG is supposedly attempting to achieve.
What is lost is that the QVMAG costs each and every ratepayer well over $150 a year and as often as not they might ask, for what?
The Councillors are the ‘Trustees’ of important cultural material valued at something in excess of $240 Million and the institution’s policies are far from ‘best practice’.
In fact, the QVMAG looking forward, given the chance, could be the city’s most valuable asset rather than one of its largest non-performing liabilities.
This institution is not a fiefdom nor a theme park. It belongs to Tasmania and Launcestonians and it is past time for some real accountability.
What 'Council management' and QVMAG operatives are actually saying 'we will decide how conscripted investors funds are used and the manner in which their funds are spent' and by extension the implication is that 'no correspondence will be entered into'.
Perhaps the people at Town Hall and the QVMAG might want to stand on the sidelines as operatives at say 'a family business' attempted to ignore their shareholders/owners/investors.
The other point to be made here is that the Mayor and Councillors – the QVMAG's Governors – are standing by to allow the 'operatives in management' to determine policy and strategy by-and-large careless of the investors' – Community of Ownership & Interest (COI), ratepayers, taxpayers, donors, sponsors, researchers, visitors, et al – legitimate aspirations and expectations.
In short, and on the evidence, 'Council' is failing to deliver on the 'social licence' that came with their election and is allowing 'management' to run rough-shod over the aspirations ratepayers and the QVMAG's COI.
Put another way, wittingly or unwittingly, Council is allowing the tail to wag the dog.
Albeit manifested in multiple ways over time, all this has been happening for a very long time. In fact, the social dynamics are, and have been, such as to continue to allow the elected incumbents to blithely look the other way and hope for the best.
Nonetheless it is probably time to call 'game over' and begin to deliver on the the investment the QVMAG's Community of Ownership & Interest has in the institution.
Ray Norman
Gallery closures THE article in (The Examiner, June 22) advising that the Colonial and Federation galleries at QVMAG are to be shut for a year is simply another example of the council's disastrous management of QVMAG over a number of years.
The council spent millions of ratepayer dollars to move all the art from the Royal Park site to Inveresk, and then they spent a few million more to move it all back again.
Now they want to close the two galleries that are most appealing to visitors to Launceston.
The suggestion that those visitors can look at the art online is a joke.
Those same visitors could save a lot of money by visiting Launceston online instead of actually coming here (and it would also reduce the need for parking in the CBD.
Stuart Roberts, Newstead.
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