How to rethink arts funding.(Culture)

IN THEORY government supports the arts. In reality the arts are directed by politicised bureaucrats who privilege the Left's cultural domination. A major disburser of money is the Australia Council. Where razors and structural change were needed, the Howard government chose pragmatic, short-term measures and they parachuted intelligent individuals behind the lines, onto Australia Council boards, where they had little real effect. The Coalition had no policy for dealing with the Left's corruption of our culture-through funding they themselves provided. No attempt was made to eradicate the welfare mentality that had grown up around the arts industry since the Whitlam reforms of the 1970s, or to overturn the cultural dictatorship assumed by the Australia Council.

The Coalition is notoriously uninterested in funding culture: this is an advantage. If the Coalition drew on their free market and individualistic philosophies to encourage the resurgence of a cultural free market and aided artists to become capable of supporting themselves instead of beggars, they could open the door to long-overdue cultural renewal.

Cultural policy deserves serious study by the free market think-tanks, and the Coalition in opposition. Unless it is undertaken, and plans for reform adopted, the next period of conservative government will face even more cultural hostility than the last. Kevin Rudd, even in a single term of government, is capable of introducing changes which could corrupt our cultural life for generations; the situation is bad and could become much worse. Once more, the lack of a conservative humanities research institute or think-tank is felt.

In April, Rudd's invitees, mainly selected from the Left intelligentsia, came to Canberra for the 2020 Summit. Labor's election campaign had profited from their help, and invitations were their public reward. Howard had been an affront to the self-esteem of the intellectual Left and they responded to the new Prime Minister's affection in sometimes naive terms. Robert Manne expressed feelings surely shared by many of the delegates: "When I read in the paper that I had been invited, I was relieved. Because of what happened in the Howard years, I was by now keen to contribute to the summit's Governance stream." He was serious. Kevin Rudd has aroused high expectations and the stage is set for some monumentally wrong decisions to be made. The unconscious elitism of the so-called "creative" delegates was deftly delineated in a publicity piece written by Summit organisers Cate Blanchett and Professor Julianne Schultz:

 
   The centrality of creativity to living full and rich 
   lives is what will define the deliberations of the 
   creative stream this weekend ... The fact that we 
   have economists, business leaders, educators, 
   researchers as well as actors, directors, musicians, 
   writers and many others in the group will put flesh 
   on the bones of this truth. 

At 2020 the only truth, apart from the fact that there wasn't much testosterone in the room, was that Whitlam's corrupting 1970s financial compact between Labor and the artists was as strong as ever. Educated into a strongly corporatist culture, the delegates were unable to offer individualist arguments or consider a culture not maintained by increased handouts. Their proposals, which Rudd promised to respond to, were for a never-ending child's party with prizes and cake for everyone--on the Left.

In the following list of briefly annotated suggestions taken from the Summit Report, note both the lack of clarity and the obsequious flattery of Kevin Rudd, a marked change from the lack of normal courtesy usually received by John Howard.