Saturated With Good Deeds

A Tradition of Giving:  Seventy-Five Years of Myer Family Philanthropy
by Michael Liffman
(Melbourne University Press, 2004)

In my article, "The Capture of the Myer Foundation" (March 2004), I criticised Myer philanthropy for its radical bent, suggesting it was of recent origins.  I was wrong.  It has been going on for a lot longer than I imagined!

The Sydney Myer Fund and the Myer Foundation have distributed almost $100 million, in present dollar terms, since their respective inceptions in 1935 and 1959.  That is a considerable amount of money "to do good".  Just how good is a question that can now be answered.  Michael Liffman's valuable history of Myer family philanthropy is a full record of the deeds of Australia's pre-eminent philanthropic family.

The book contains a brief account of the life and origins of Sidney Myer, the young Russian Jew named Simcha Baevski, who migrated to Australia in 1899 and founded a successful retail empire.  It also records the philanthropic deeds of his wife and four children.  It is also an account of the establishment of Myer philanthropy and its radical transformation in the hands of subsequent generations of the Myer family.  It is the latter part with which this review is concerned.

Not unexpectedly, Liffman's account is enthusiastic and "optimistic" -- he was, after all, employed by the Foundation for a number of years.  It is, nevertheless, a useful resource as it develops a number of key themes, which are an aid to understanding not just the Myer tradition, but also the place of philanthropy in public life.

GIVING MONEY AWAY IS NOT EASY

How does one decide what to do with the proceeds of an estate set aside for charity?  With benefactor instructions as broad as:  for charitable purposes "in the community in which I made my fortune", or for the "good of mankind", the job is not straightforward.  It is made more complex with the passage of time, when the actions of the benefactor as a guide to present needs and fashions begin to fade.  With the multiplication of descendants, even more so.  By 1996, there were 57 living descendants of Sidney Myer, many of whom were involved in the distribution of funds.  On the other hand, what is clear in the Myer example is that second and third generation members of the family have made their own financial contributions to the original endowments.  Such practice has overcome much of the dilemma of donor intent.

In the early days of the Sidney Myer Fund, "the Trustees were not called upon to consider controversial, politically shaped, or socially activist proposals".  The overwhelming bulk of requests sought to assist individuals facing some sort of difficulty.  "Rarely, if ever, did these activities seek to change, let alone blame, the larger structural arrangements of society".

With time, however, philanthropy, like government, became a moral pursuit.  It began to see itself as a force for the greater good.  Meriel Wilmot, the first executive secretary of the Foundation, put the case in 1976.  "Business can only be healthy if the surrounding community is healthy".  This is the sort of sentiment behind the currently fashionable discourse known as corporate social responsibility.

If there is to be a better world, whose view of the shape of that world should prevail?  Philanthropy faces this dilemma with one significant disadvantage, and one significant advantage over government.  The disadvantage is that, in government intellectual enthusiasms are tested and tempered by a public who have to pay for the enthusiasms.  The advantage is that, in the case of philanthropy, the public -- apart from some taxation advantages afforded philanthropists -- does not have to pay.

Liffman describes the situation some decades after the establishment of the funds.  By the 1970s, the "less rosy" and "[less] complacent view of the quality of life in Australia", as expressed by Whitlam, the New Left, the anti-war movement, feminism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, disability, welfare, and Aboriginal rights, was reflected in the Myer Foundation priorities.  "Over the next twenty years almost all these new social movements were to receive support from ... Myer philanthropy.  Social reform through critique and empowerment rather than through academic research and improved professional practice came to be seen as the way forward.  Optimists saw in this mood a better path to the future;  sceptics feared the negativity of this “culture of complaint”.  Myer philanthropy sided with the optimists".

Where one could easily part company with Lipmann is his characterisation of the Left agenda as optimistic.  The Left has never been anything other than pessimistic and distrustful not only of the private sector, but fundamentally of individual responsibility as well.  This encapsulates a fundamental shift in philanthropic thinking.  Philanthropy has a strong tradition that assumed that it did not need to change the world, but assist individuals to make their own way in it.  The new philosophy promoted by the "community sector" and various directors of the Myer funds, and apparently a number of trustees, was that the system was unfair and had to be changed.  The difficulty in funding enthusiasms among the "community sector" is that the citizens generally do not share them.

CROWDING OUT

The second theme Liffman raises is the relationship between philanthropy and government provision.  He traces the expenditure pattern of Myer gifts in the context of Federal government programmes of the day.  These varied from being crowded out of direct provision to the needy by a "generous" Whitlam Government, to the need to fill gaps in provision created by the withdrawal of services at the time of the Fraser Government's "razor" gang, and the new era of so-called "neo-liberalism" ushered in by the Howard Government.

When a government such as Whitlam's spends money like a drunken sailor, it rather leaves the philanthropist high and dry.  Then again, to suggest that Fraser ever seriously cut public outlays is a gross error.  So too the old chestnut that Federal governments have been withdrawing from the field of welfare provision in recent decades, either directly or indirectly.  Governments may have withdrawn their support for the ownership of government entities where mature markets no longer required the government to be the first entrant:  banks, airlines, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals.  They certainly have increased transfer payments and public provision of health and education services.  The perception of lack of support arises because the demand for subsidised services seems to rise quicker than the public's desire to pay for them.

Forgiving Liffman his mistaken characterisation of government patterns of expenditure, there is nevertheless the question:  what value does philanthropy add to an already well-provided citizenry?  The crowding out of philanthropy in some years and then a resistance to pick up the slack when governments are thought to withdraw services in other years has generated a view that philanthropy need not follow government.  Instead, it should lead government in the generation of ideas.

Compare, for example, an idea of Kenneth Myer (son of Sidney Myer) with Michael Myer (son of Kenneth, grandson of Sidney).  Sidney Myer's most famous single act of philanthropy, was to feed the Melbourne masses a Christmas dinner in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression.  Some 30 years later, the normally entrepreneurial Kenneth Myer decided that a Christmas treat for needy children was back in vogue.  He suggested a $25 Christmas voucher made out to the Myer store.  As Liffman describes it, this was clearly, in philanthropic philosophy, a "reversion".  Michael Myer, on the other hand, has extended the entrepreneurial dimension of philanthropy by providing "seed funding" to various groups, much in the mode of venture capital to inventors and business people.  The mode is known as "venture philanthropy".  The means of Myer philanthropy has, with some reversion been unerringly entrepreneurial.  The method is sound, the causes to which it has been applied are suspect.

For example, the Myer Funds were major sources of support for de-institutionalisation activists and their associated programmes for the disabled and orphaned and so on.  Rhonda Galbally, appointed as director in the early 1980s, who argued that "self-management avoids the dependency from being helped constantly", promoted this support.  Indeed, the argument was that "rights and empowerment had taken over from social improvement in the thinking of many social theorists and community activists".

There is now evidence to suggest that the outbreak of homelessness that commenced in the 1980s and is still with us, was caused by the emptying of institutions.  The grand experiment has had its victories, but it has also proved that there is a limit to which others are willing to support those people who, no matter how deserving, are unable to support themselves.  The radical philanthropic sector has come to the same conclusion as the welfare state.  No amount of "morally fervent analysis and action in the field of social welfare" overrides the right of the giver to say "no".  A plus for Myer is that, many years later, it funded a review of the experience of de-institutionalisation.

Liffman confirms the radical bent of Myer philanthropy and, in doing so, he has opened the debate of the role of philanthropy in a nation saturated with good deeds.