Peter Garrett Online Forum

Peter Garrett Online Forum

Federal Arts Minister Peter Garrett has launched an online forum to discuss Australia's Cultural Policy. In his speech to the National Press Club in October, the Minister identified three key themes for consideration:

1. Keeping culture strong; 2. Engaging the community; and 3. Powering the young.

These and other points are expanded on in the discussion framework, however this is not an exhaustive list. Use the web forum to talk about any cultural idea, issue or concern and help shape future policy.

The National Cultural Policy online forum will be open until 6pm Monday 1 February 2010. For more info, and to log onto the forum.

visit www.nationalculturalpolicy.com.au

I am always happy to see a politician outed as a hypocrite, and no force of earth will stop our PM from making stupid remarks, but why do we need a forum to discuss cultural policy. Let's just make culture and the leave the policy out of it. Culture is what has happened, and is happening now, not what is proposed to happen.   

The three categories remain satisfactorily empty of content. But please, could this government do some governing and give up on symbolic gestures, junkets to foreign chat-shops and ever escalating engagements with process.

Logos, I am running right beside you. Now, tell me where we are running to.

Noël Christian

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I agree absolutely. Leave it to the mainstream and to the 'professionals.' This will free up the artists, the talented and the courageous to get on with the real work.

Noël Christian

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Naomi

I'm sorry to have implied that this was a new thing - I meant to assert that it was a wrong thing. I am a fierce opponent of Government funding for the arts. It is not their business. If the Government wants to commission a particular work of art, then it has every right to do so, but it should not be allowed any greater role than this.

The villains in this piece are not merely the present Government, but they run in a long and unnterrupted line from Menzies onward (and possibly from even before that).

If the Government wants to support the arts then they, as individuals, can buy our books, attend our shows, listen to our music and purchase our paintings.

Using art as an adjunct to its own self-promotion - which is all that arts funding is - is offensive.  

Private patronage is okay - he who pays the piper calls the tune - but public patronage does not have my support. That is why I am an independent theatre artist, not a member of the mainstream.

A sad consequence of Government funding is that individual citizens feel that they do not need to support us themselves, as that is now the Government's job. Before the Elizabethan Trust (or whatever the damn silly thing was called) this was a culturally more vibrant and interesting country than it has ever been since. That is because culture is made by real and ordinary people on the real and ordinary ground, not by a set of isolated and self-affirming 'cultural producers' safely protected from the real world by free money.

I do not want a National Arts Policy and I will reject and defy it wherever I see fit. This is an issue that puts me in a fighting mood. 

Government is incidental to our lives, not central. It need to accept this and to get on with its job.

Noël Christian

homestead:Theatre of Words

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How sad it is that 'Walter' is so intimidated by us that he or she dare not make a point without hiding behind a fake name and a fake illiteracy.

Independent professionals are the only professionals that count. 

Incidentally, the theatre review in the latest issue of Quadrant is germane to this argument - it gives up on mainstream 'professional' theatre entirely and attends instead to a community theatre production in Hobart - which it loved. 

Noël Christian

homestead:Theatre of Words

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Naomi

At first blush, I would say that not being involved in the sciences, I have no opinion on the matter; but that is not really an adequate response. In short, however, I am not certain that I do want science in the hands of Government. Historically, it has been disastrous, and given the awful mixture of truths, half-truths and outright falsities that have risen up as the 'Climate Change' issue, history seems about to repeat itself.

More prosaically, science is not something that is done as part of ordinary life, but art is. The creation of a special cultural elite which can only exist because it is supported by Government erodes the arts by falsifying the larger culture of a nation. Worse than that, it makes art part of the function of Government and fosters the illusion that Government is central to our culture.

I am not prepared at this point (I mean intellectually, not emotionally) to argue civics at this level, (although I am happy to participate in a long discursive dialogue on the subject), so it might be simplest to say that it is Government itself that I disapprove of.

Given a hierarchy, I belief that the ward is more important than the shire, the shire than the region, the region than the state, and the state than the commonwealth. I would gladly see the Federal Government reduced in its powers to no more than border protection, defence, Treasury, the High Court and the management of standard weights and measures. Nothing else. 

I, too, have applied for and managed grants when it has been my duty to do so for others. I have done so against my personal ethics, but that is sometimes the nature of duty.

We don't have to agree on everything, only on the value of the dialogue. And on that, we are not at odds.  

Noël Christian

homestead:Theatre of Words

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Naomi

Government is about power. That is all it is about. It is not about being nice or being creative or being Godly or finding the truth, it is about having power. This has never been clearer in our country than the present, given our current PM's maiden speech. When such an agenda is given the weapons to make power absolute, it will use them.

Science in the hands of Government has only one purpose - to increase Government power. Science actually has another purpose altogether, which is to refine one of the very many ways available to us of understanding our world. Art in the hands of Government is not about beauty or spectacle or truth or devotion or any of the things we might prefer it to be about - it is about increasing Government power. The same goes for everything. This is why a firm line was drawn between religion and the state - because when the state gets hold of religion, it has a very effective weapon indeed. (I note that you did not argue for a reunification of Church and State, for all your liberal views re: art, science &c.)

You and I are not doing science, we are exploiting technology, which is an entirely different thing. When my Grandmother made a doily, she did art; when my Uncle carved a gatepost, he did art; when my Great-great-great Grandfather traveled through Wales telling stories from the Gospels at Sunday Schools, he did art. Not one of them ever did science.

My paternal Grandfather was instrumental in the development of radio, television and radar. He did science. He continued to do it as a hobby in his retirement. I know the difference between doing the one and doing the other.

Science is, in fact, one of the most irrelevant of all human activities - very few people do it, and very many ages have gone by without it being done.

Whether science and art can be the same thing is not the point, and is in any case highly improbable. 

In our Government funded (Government poisoned) arts world, the elite is the system. That's the problem with it.  The elite, in order to remain elite, must foster the power of the Government. They know their role and they fill it. Those that can't, get out. They either become independents like us, or they get another profession.

The challenge that we should have given the pathetic Walter was this: strip all funds from the theatres, and then let's see how professional your professionals really are. 

Ultimately, perhaps that's the proposition we should present to Peter Garrett - who did very well throughout his own artistic career without funding.

(Your point about Government oversight re: medical practice and science is a good one, but I am not convinced that it should be given to the Federal or even the State Governments to exercise.) 

Noël Christian

homestead:Theatre of Words

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Naomi

In almost every point we actually agree, it is only in the nuances we vary, but on the issue of science I am not making myself understood. Science is not unimportant, nor is it undesirable. It is, however, not a common activity and of all the things we do as humans, it is the one we will lose with the least schock to our system.

Technology is not science. Science is a discipline of thinking. It is important, useful, desirable, interesting, wonderful and exciting - but it is not essential. Justice is essential, love is essential, art, parenting, religion, architecture and agriculture are all essential, but science (as a pure discipline) is not. That is not to denigrate science. It is to acknowledge its actual role in the world.

I don't think that art can only come from hardship - I think that the funding from art should primarily come from the business of art. That is, from selling the product. Entrepreneurship, in short. I know that patronage is important and I applaud those private companies and individuals that give it, but I utterly derogate Government contributions.

And yes, I do have a better system up my sleeve: either produce work that your customers want to buy, or pay for it yourself.

Not far from where I live there is a little Community Theatre that gets no funding, is not part of this site (does not even know that such a thing exists), and that pioneers local work as well as producing popular genre work. They are loved by their community. They survive because they do their job right. I dare La Mama to do the same.

Finally - the arts does not need more money. The arts need people.    

Finally, finally - resale royalties have always seemed sane and good to me, but I am beginning to have second thoughts. As they are not yet sensible or coherent thoughts, I haven't raised them, but you deserve a response and so, yes, I am happy to join with you in applauding the Government's legislative success. But then, Governments are supposed to make law. They are not supposed to fund art. 

Finally, finally, finally - are we getting silly now? I keep feeling the heavy eyes of all the other members glowering at us from behind our backs. I know that I am in a minority position - but in my defence I can assure all the good taxpayers out there that I have never spent any of your taxes on any of my work. And I made my living not doing it.

Pax?   

Noël Christian

homestead:Theatre of Words

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The most frustrating irony is that before all this State and Federal Government interference in the arts began, it was normal and expected for local Councils to build halls and theatres throughout all the communities they served. SA and WA were particularly rich in playing spaces, some still standing and in the most extra-ordinary of places. I spent some time in Cunderdin in WA during one tour with little to do but stare at the photos from the past hanging in an old pumping station, and I was staggered at the variety of music and theatre that the town could once support financially. There were several venues, some equipped as theatres, some as dance halls, and some able to be either and also suited to showing films. All that was gone. Now, that town has a franchise tavern, a town hall that no one ever uses, and gets all its music from a jukebox and its acted-entertainment from a DVD library. In the old days, the Council served the town because it was a community; now it seeks for photo opportunities with the Premier and the town is no more than a society.

You got the peer review system nailed. Right down to the board members awarding themselves the money. I was once nominated for a position on The Australia Council. I would have taken it, too, if I had been accepted - but then they realised who I was and you never saw anything dropped so fast in all your life. 

I, too, used to call myself an Anarchist. Then I tried Left Liberal. Then I had a go at Homeric Conservative. Now, I'm just a pest.      

Dance on, Logos, the music has barely started.

Noël Christian

homestead:Theatre of Words

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Be not so hard, Logos, on poor, pathetic Walter. I see from your photograph that you have a brain, a beard and a bird, all noble and hearty accoutrements. Weak little Walter has nothing but a tiny plop. It is Christmastide. Show compassion. 

Or not. It's all the same to me.

Noël Christian

homestead:Theatre of Words

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These figures are absurd. I have had worse - I once dealt with a local hall that charged royalties on the software it had written to manage ticket sales. The situation is indecent. I no longer use theatres at all for this reason (the one exception, if it is still going, is The Bakehouse on Angas St; I don't know about other people, but I was always treated with incredible respect and given considerable assistance by the management there). 

An entire forum could be taken up with horror stories regarding halls and other venues that were initially meant for the community, but that now carry such costs that they are out of the reach of all. 

Are there still venues standing - albeit empty and unused - on the Wakefield Plains and the Eyre and Yorke Peninsulas? It seemed to me that it was so there last time I was there, although i have never tried to hire one. Owen has a lovely little space, and produces great local theatre - in fact, Owen is a national treasure and their local productions should be studied by all.

The Burra, I believe, has a theatre so pricey that even the rats moved out.

Noël Christian

homestead:Theatre of Words

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You originally made a post designed to denigrate, patronise and hurt.

Unfortunately, to reach my level, Naomi's level, Logos's level, or the level of any of the other professionals and dedicated amateurs on this site you must climb, not stoop.

Can you?

Noël Christian

homestead:Theatre of Words

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I  agree repunzel!

As we are regarded as Rogues, Vagabonds & Sturdy Beggers [London Corporation Ordance of 1947] I regard politicians as being Pimps, Prostitues & privet Parsons.