At Opera Australia, they call him God. Bruce Martin need only say hello and you know why: his massive bass-baritone voice almost seems equipped with its own echo. Martin's latest role will reverberate, too. Its audience is his old employer. "Everybody thinks public money is being spent with the best interests of the public in mind," he says sonorously. "They don't expect all this money, and this organisation, to be used for the personal benefit of a few people." 

When Martin retired in January, after a 45-year career, it was with all passion spent. The voice of Wagner's Hans Sachs and Wotan was as rich as ever, but so tinged with bitterness that he declined a formal farewell. He would not be speaking now, save for the public airing of complaints by the mezzo-soprano Fiona Janes that the country's biggest and most heavily subsidised arts company is sliding into "an abyss of mediocrity" under its English music director, Richard Hickox - complaints OA dismissed, portraying Janes as a lone diva disgruntled by a lack of work. Martin says otherwise: that OA's culture is in crisis. "It's a culture desperate for everyone to say how well everyone is doing. That desperation is forcing people to cut ethical corners ... The board are not interested in what she has to say. They simply want her to be quiet. What's happened with Fiona is an affront to the Australian idea of a fair go."

Sitting a little uneasily in his office at OA's sprawling, lived-in headquarters in Elizabeth Street, in Sydney's Surry Hills, CEO Adrian Collette says he's used to disagreement. "It's a terrible, subjective world," he says mildly, citing a recent day when David Malouf, a board member, rang to recount why the previous night's performance of Don Giovanni was the worst opera experience of his life; then how Jim Sharman rang soon after to say it was the most relevant theatre in town. A personable, experienced executive, himself a former chorister, Collete has survived earlier storms, including the defenestration of maestra Simone Young, which was the stuff of unwanted front pages six years ago. "Everything is open to debate," he now insists. That claim is about to be tested.

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The ACCC chairman, Graeme Samuel, commented recently that anyone thinking corporate politics tough should try opera politics. He ought to know. It was Samuel who, as chairman of the Australian Opera, 12 years ago engineered the company's merger with the penurious Victorian State Opera, begetting Opera Australia. He remains widely unforgiven: the perceived inferiority of OA's Melbourne productions, in cast and staging, is an abiding southern fixation. More importantly, the merger yoked OA to a debt of operatic proportions: a decade ago, its bottom line showed a $6.5-million deficiency. For the same reason that many deem opera the greatest of art forms - combining the disciplines of music, singing, conducting, acting and stagecraft - it will always be among the most expensive; and that, in Australia, means government-dependent. OA is actually less dependent than most foreign opera companies, generating more than two-thirds of its own revenue. But that grant - last year, $22 million - exists to compensate for a general lack of corporate or private philanthropy here. "Donating to opera is not a feel-good thing in Australia," observes the former OA marketing manager Sonja Chalmers.

OA is also unusual among international companies in being its country's only source of full-time employment for opera singers. While the state companies offer only casual engagements, OA provides about 70 full-time positions: 20 principals, 50 choristers. Others take their chances; foreign guest artists, of course, are a local's opportunity forgone, traditionally justified on grounds that superior visitors lift the overall standard of performances. For veterans like Bruce Martin, this has unpleasant associations.

When I started, music in Australia was run by the ABC, who held "Celebrity Concerts" for which they imported everyone: as a local singer, you were automatically locked out. They even had two fee scales, and the lowest rung for imports was still higher than the highest for locals regardless of their standards. Were these the greatest artists? Well, some were good, but mainly they were has-beens and would-bes whose only distinction was coming from "over there" - that mythical place where everything is so much better.

Since a fabled, foreigner-full 1973 production of Tannhäuser, there have been restrictions on the number of principals the flagship opera company may import. Under the Foreign Artists Agreement of the early '90s, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance consented to ten a year.