Arts fightback – breaking out of the goldfish bowl

How can the broad arts and cultural sector become a better organised, effective voice for arts and culture and its wider importance for Australia? These current dire circumstances, where we face a national arts crisis the seriousness of which can’t be understated, may provide the opportunity we have needed to look seriously at this question. It’s time for the big picture and long view for Australian arts and culture and time to get ready for a long haul effort to win hearts and minds.

We face a national arts crisis the seriousness of which can’t be understated. Looking forward, though, a far more important issue than arts funding is the question of how the broad arts and cultural sector can become a better organised, effective voice for arts and culture and its wider importance for Australia. Changes like this happen because they are able to happen – because decision-makers think it’s not important enough and they can get away with it. The arts and culture sector and its supporters have to be influential enough that decision-makers think carefully about the importance and the standing of Australia’s arts and culture and weigh any decisions they make carefully in terms of the strategic needs of the sector. The current dire circumstances may provide the opportunity we have needed to look seriously at this question. It’s time for the big picture and long view for Australian arts and culture.

Election poster from an Auckland, New Zealand street, 2014

Bigger pictures to paint – no less than a fight for the soul of Australia

While there is an important campaign underway around arts funding we shouldn’t get lost in that alone. There are far more important issues affecting the future of arts and culture in Australia that underlie the question of funding. Many issues have been thrown up about which organisations were funded in the Australia Council four year operational funding round. Without getting lost in these, the real issue is how the overall arts and culture budget, except for brief moments, has always fallen short of a serious commitment. On top of this, that limited commitment has been steadily eroded. Even more crucially, Australian arts and culture itself is being threatened, with crucial institutions and traditions and long positive histories being trashed for short term greed and gain.

Hoping for the best, preparing for the worst – the looming failure of arts support

With arts support continuing to shrink cultural groups need to hope for the best but plan for the worst – and build broad alliances – what’s happening in the arts and culture realm is just a symptom of what’s happening far more broadly.

In the slowly unravelling universe of arts and culture support, organisations – whether they be small arts organisations or the largest of national cultural institutions – need to think seriously about their future. They need to hope for the best but prepare for the worst. This means developing strategies to survive the combination of drastic cuts and slow erosion already occurring and likely to continue into the foreseeable future.

Australia is not one country but two separate ones heading in opposite directions. One of these countries is heading into a future which is only slowly emerging from the mists created by deliberately ignoring or distorting science and the evidence it relies upon.

Strategic leadership in everything
This means strategic leadership like never before – something sadly lacking across the sector, particularly at the top end where this should be expected and demanded. The relatively limited and mixed response of large cultural organisations to the last few years of budget cuts is a clear sign of this. It should be a moment for them to drastically rethink what they do and how they do it, not tidy the edges.

The language of success ­– recognising a great unsung community movement

What is especially significant about the Prime Minister, in his Closing the Gap address, recognising the importance of Indigenous languages is that this is the first time a Liberal leader has expressed such views. It’s exciting because for progress to be made it is essential that there is a jointly agreed position. This moment arises from the tireless work over many decades of hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language revivalists – surely one of the great positive unsung community movements in Australian history. By their hard work they have managed to change the profile of Indigenous languages in Australia. Unfortunately the address reinforced the tendency of government to overlook the success stories that are already happening in local communities and look for big institutional solutions.

I spent over five years working closely with Aboriginal languages revivalists who for many decades have been toiling away tirelessly in communities across the nation maintaining and reviving their languages – and I had the benefit of a good education on community languages as an unexpected bonus. I bring a particular perspective to it, as a former public servant who has had reasonably long and close experience with the role of government in supporting community efforts to save languages. I’ve seen the highs and lows and some of the successes and failures of government engagement with Aboriginal communities. Unusually this has been from a perspective provided by being only incidentally involved in the bloated government universe of ‘Indigenous Affairs’ and rather part of the support provided by the Australian Government for arts and culture.

The challenge for governments is translating inspiring speeches in Parliament into focused policy and action.

I don't particularly like talking about Indigenous languages because there are a host of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language revivalists who have plenty to say about them and know about them far better than I. However, because I am familiar with how government has intersected with Indigenous languages, I think I can add some useful comments about that aspect.

Long overdue – but better late than never
I was pleasantly surprised when the Prime Minister, in his Closing the Gap address earlier this month, recognised the importance of Indigenous languages. I’d seen the annual report being provided to Parliament, outlining the failures (and some successes) of the Closing the Gap effort but after a while it’s easy to skim over the details. I’d been impressed that the Prime Minister made the effort to begin his address in the language of the Ngunnawal, local Aboriginal people of the Canberra region. However, apart from that, I hadn’t listened closely. This meant I’d missed the part of his comments about languages. When I saw a report on them in the media yesterday I was initially excited. This is long overdue. We’ve heard it before from Labor politicians such as Peter Garrett, who recognised how interrrelated languages were to other issues. His recognition culminated in the joint announcement with Jenny Macklin of Australia’s first National Indigenous Languages Policy in 2009 – but that’s the Labor Party, only half the story as far as major political parties are concerned.

The Magna Carta – still a work in progress

Australian culture is inconceivable without the crucial role of Indigenous culture. In the arts and culture sector Indigenous culture has always been seen as a strength to be celebrated, whereas in the mainstream of ‘Indigenous affairs’, there has always been a faint ambivalence and a lingering concern that Indigenous culture might be holding back economic development and "full" participation in  mainstream society.

Chou En Lai, the much respected former Premier of China, once famously (and perhaps actually) said when asked what he saw as the long term effects of the French Revolution, that it was too soon to tell. The same could be said of the Magna Carta, the birth certificate of Western democracy. I keep being reminded that it remains a work in progress and that the hard won gains we enjoy are fragile and need to be constantly protected and extended. The Magna Carta and all that followed it is very much an ongoing project.

This blog is about Australian culture – not human rights, democracy or Indigenous communities. The problem is that culture is about all those things – that’s what makes it so important.

Stop the closure of Aboriginal communities marchers reach a Parliament House long since empty, in all senses of the word.

Threatened closure of Indigenous communities
A few days ago I stood up in my small way in my home town, Canberra, as part of the campaign to stop the forced closure of remote – and not so remote – Aboriginal communities. At the same time thousands marched in their own home towns, villages or tiny ‘remote’ communities across Australia – and Australians and others across the globe also marched in places as far apart as Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin, Tauranga Aotearoa and Hamilton in New Zealand, Chicago, Denver, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington DC, the United Nations Headquarters and Honolulu in the US, Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa in Canada, and Hong Kong, London and Berlin.