Could you talk a little about Support Act?
In 1998 a group of Australians who were involved in the music industry, and these people had quite a substantial standing in the music industry, got together and wanted to establish a charity. At that time I was sitting on the PPCA board, the PPCA (Phonographic Performance Company of Australia) is the organisation, the collection society, for sound recordings. It collects the fees associated with the use of sound recordings, and they pay those fees to the labels and the recording artists. It is the equivalent of the UK’s PPL (Phonographic and Performance Limited).
I was mixing with the people who wanted to establish the charity and they knew I had a Social Work degree so they asked me if I would I like to help establish the charity. I worked for the first 5 to 10 years for three hours a week. Now that is ridiculous when you think about that, but I was already used to that with my work as a community musician. But over time my hours grew and grew. The charity is huge now. When Covid hit, the Federal Government gave Support Act $30 million to distribute. When I started I was going to gigs with buckets trying to collect donations. I would walk out of gigs with buckets with money in them.
You can imagine what it was like establishing the policies. The board, while they understood the music industry, they were older well established music industry people, and they didn’t really know anything about the lives of musicians and especially the road crews. The road crews are the most disadvantaged, they have very rough lives. They also knew nothing about social work.
In the beginning we started off helping people, we would provide grants to pay bills. And that was really tricky. People had to send us their bills, I would have to send them to the accountant, and the accountant would pay the bill.
It started off at $2000, then $3000 and it was raised later to $5000. You have to take into account that very few musicians have much financial literacy, and that is also true of people who work as crew. We had to teach people how to look at how they spent their money. Even the application form required quite a bit of effort to fill in, it went through every single aspect of their spending and what people’s income was, and we would receive application forms which were horrendous. But we worked out a way to help the musicians. And the charity has really built up since that late 90’s period.
I left a couple of years ago because I was pretty much spent. I had done enough and was quite happy to leave then, but it was an amazing part of my life.
For more information regarding the work of Lindy Morrison see the links below
