Interesting article –long but worth the read
Think the Voicewas bad? Labor’s National Cultural Policy lays the foundations for another raidon Australia’s colonial history
Undeterred by the failure ofthe Indigenous Voice proposal, Labor is pushing ahead with the implementationof another policy thatreads like a manifesto for far-left identity politics, writes Alexander Voltz.
8 min read
July 28, 2024 - 6:00AM
AlexanderVoltz is a composer. As well as contributing to SkyNews.com.au, he is thefounding Music Editor of Quadrant, and writes also for The Spectator and TheEpoch Times. In 2022, he directed The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Concert,Australia’s largest musical tribute during the Platinum Jubilee of ElizabethII. His music has been performed across the country and abroad.
You may have heard thatJim Chalmers’ budget earlier this year offers something of a win for artists,with funding handed out to, among others, the National Institute of DramaticArt, the Australian Ballet School and the Canberra Symphony Orchestra.This fiscalsupport is part of Labor’s five-year national cultural policy, which it,somewhat erroneously, calls Revive: A Place for Every Story, a Story for EveryPlace.
I have beeninvestigating Revive since its inception, particularly since the middle of 2023,when I became the founding Music Editor at Quadrant.
AsSkyNews.com.au readers may not be so familiar with the policy’s measures, myintention in this article is to shed just some light on Revive – and its manyproblems. To do this, I draw on those submissions from industry andcreative practitioners made to the Australian Senate’s ongoing inquiry into thepolicy, the concluding report of which was supposed to be published in June.
That report commenced in February 2023 and is now,for whatever reason, not expected to conclude until March 2025 – that is,potentially not until after the next federal election.
At thispoint, I am left wondering if the Albanese Government is, in fact, attemptingto filibuster the inquiry.
Itsmotivations for doing so may quickly become clear.
Beforebeginning in earnest, I thought it amusing to include this prelude: would youhave guessed that some submissions to the Senate have, in fact, condemned Revive for not doingenough to address, of all things, climate change?
Indeed, Monash University has just wrapped up acomposition competition, “Sonic Vocabularies: Climate, Weather and Music”,which awarded $12,000 to the applicant composer whose proposed piece of musicbest addresses the “climate crisis.”
Or, for theenterprising Sydney Conservatorium of Music pupil, there exists an undergraduate course called“Music, Environmentand Climate Change”, which teaches that “climate change…is destined to have a major influence onthe lives of subsequent generations” and that music “may help in solvingenvironmental problems of the future”.
And acourse of this calibre, naturally, would not be complete unless a portion of it was taught through“lectures and a workshop” by “Indigenous Australian cultural custodians”.
Sadly, thisis the sorry state that some Australian arts quarters find themselves in.
Revive isbroken into five key policy pillars: (1) “First Nations First”, (2) “A Place for Every Story”, (3) “Centrality of the Artist”, (4) “Strong Cultural Infrastructure”, and (5) “Engaging the Audience”.
The first pillar, “First Nations First”, isexactly what it sounds like: the disproportionate prioritisation of AboriginalAustralian artists and their works.
Remember,Revive predates the Albanese Government’s defunct Voice to Parliament; it was a policy that was, likemany others, positioned to aid the referendum’s passage.
In fact,when it comes to race-based policies, readers should still be concerned.
One of Revive’s first actionableobjectives remains the implementation, in full, of the Uluru Statement from theHeart.
Moreover, the policy wants to introduce“stand-alone legislation to protect First Nations knowledge and culturalexpressions, including to address the harm caused by fake art”.
If thislegislation is ever introduced into parliament, it must be carefully scrutinised;what, exactly, are examples of “First Nations knowledge and culturalexpressions”, and how would additional protections (because, as readers know, copyright laws are already ineffect) be applied to these?
Potentially,there exists a risk that the legislation could be used to clamp down onartworks that cause “harm” – or, in other words, artworks cause offence – toAboriginal Australians, as well as those activist stakeholders attached to theAboriginal industry.
Such artworks might include, for example, criticalhistories of Australia’s settlement which do not subscribe to the untruthfulclaims that the British attempted genocide against the Aboriginal race.
Attemptingto get to the bottom of this, I sought the generous assistance of SenatorGerard Rennick, whose office submitted, among others, the following question onnotice to the Office of the Arts in March:
“If acritical tract concerning Aboriginal history were written—perhaps by GeoffreyBlainey or Keith Windschuttle—and it was received poorly by Aboriginal interestgroups then, under any new ‘stand-alone legislation’, could those interestgroups take legal action?” Needless to say, the office’s belated responsedid not provide a concrete answer.
Revive has already poured $53.8 million over fouryears into establishing two new “First Nations language centres,” striving to“increase the number of First Nations language speakers,” and is on track tofund an $80 million National Aboriginal Art Gallery in Alice Springs.
Major arts and communications institutions have,frustratingly, fawned over Revive’s race-based approaches.
Forinstance, the Australian Society of Authors told the Senate it was “encouraged”by the policy’s stand-alone legislation and has called for Australia’s inaugural Poet Laureate – yes, thepolicy introduces such a post – to be an Aboriginal Australian.
Additionally, the Australian BroadcastingCorporation (ABC) thinks Revive, through its new Music Australia body, canplace even greater emphasis on Aboriginal music by funding even more AboriginalAustralian musicians.
All in all, I am not sure that a cultural policywhich puts Aboriginal Australian art “first” – effectively, abovenon-Aboriginal Australian art – is the direction we should want to go in.
It seems to me that, ultimately, Revive is farmore interested in contributing towards illiberal identity politics than it isin advancing Australian art and culture.
The policy’ssecond pillar, “A Place for Every Story”, makes much of “place” but very littleof “every story”. While the point of the pillar is to invest inprogrammes like regional touring and natural, historic and Aboriginal heritagesites – and, on this final score, we see that Revive’s support for theAboriginal industry goes even beyond its first pillar – it does prompt thequestion of whether there is, in fact, a place for every story in Australia.
Myexperience has been that, currently, there is not; over the last couple ofyears, my knowledge of Australian artists whose work has been affected byideological constraints has certainly increased.
Even more worryingly, the Australian NationalAudit Office has told the Senate that the National Library of Australia ispreparing to develop and implement a “deselection policy”. According toDeakin University, a deselection policy involves the disposal of librarymaterials, so as to ensure that the library’s collection is both “responsive tochange” and “relevant to teaching, learning and research activities.”
To me, the concept of a library throwing outportions of its records seems completely antithetical to that institutions’charter of cataloguing and preserving knowledge.
If theNational Library is embarking down this route, can we be so certain that thereis a place for every story in Australia?
Revive’sthird pillar, “Centrality of the Artist”, also seems to miss the mark,especially when it declares that all artists are “workers”.
InQuadrant, I have previously argued that there are certain kinds of artists thatare not really workers – at least, not in the now-dominant Marxist sense of theword. It is true that some artists, for commercial purposes, produce artas if it were a product, but there are others who, inspired beyond reason bythe human condition, pursue their craft as if it were a kind of spiritualvocation.
If Revivesought to support an enduring cultural legacy in Australia, it seems to me thatthe policy would have been better off pursuing the centrality of art and notthe centrality of the artist.
In anycase, the Centre for Arts and Entertainment Workplace, which Revive establishesand which seeks to develop “codes of conduct” to address “issues of pay, safetyand welfare”, threatens to further enforce ideological restrictions againstartists and strangle institutions with red and green tape.
SymphonyServices Australia (SSA), for example, told the Senate that it supports“industry-led education and training programs to improve workplace safetynationally and which complement the role and objectives of the Centre for Artsand Entertainment Workplaces.” But SSA also reported that it was “workingtowards reflecting diversity in [its] workforces and leadership” and that itbelieves “equity should be central to the arts and creative sectors.”
Needless to say, we should be most anxious ifdiversity and equity are at the heart of this Centre for Arts and EntertainmentWorkplaces.
Revive’sfourth pillar, “Strong Cultural Infrastructure”, is really what any nationalpolicy should predominantly concentrate on.
Governmentsshould always provide artists with a stage upon which to perform, not a scriptfrom which to read.
Oneworthwhile initiative of Revive is its implementation of a triennial surveythat seeks to gauge Australians’ “attitudes and experiences with arts andculture”, alleviating what Music ACT has described as a “dearth of data”.
However,the policy’s centralised approach towards cultural infrastructure has irkedsmaller, regional organisations. The Greater Cobar Museum, the PrinceHenry Hospital Nursing and Medical Museum, and the Willoughby DistrictHistorical Society have all told the Senate that, while Revive has allocated$11.8 million towards the National Gallery of Australia's Sharing the NationalCollective Initiative, an insurance fund to protect the local collections ofregional museums is sorely needed.
Interestingly, Museums and Galleries of NSW notedthat in 2022 the Australia Council for the Arts did not fund a single granttowards an identified heritage museum or a heritage related project.
It doesseem to be the case that Revive, and the broader Office of the Arts, is only eager to invest inAustralian heritage of a certain persuasion.
Further,the policy also makes little mention of how improvements can be made toAustralia’s collapsing arts education programs, both in schools anduniversities. Arts education programs have been in crisis since theDawkins Revolution, which oversaw the closure of independent specialist artscolleges and their amalgamation with the now-radicalised universities. Beforeinvestments in high-end arts institutions can deliver cultural dividends,Australians must have access to strong arts education programmes that arechiefly informed by craft practices, not ideologies or fashionable whims.
Revive’sfifth and final pillar, “Engaging the Audience”, bears little analysis; it is,more or less, a pillar that, for whatever reason, addresses issues that mightreasonably have been addressed earlier in the policy.
Underthis pillar, the policy seeks to deliver improvements to the National BroadbandNetwork, reinstate funding and indexation for the ABC, and, as odd as it sounds, “investin digital and media literacy to empower Australian children and young peopleto become critical, responsive and active citizens online.”
Ineffect, Revive is just one big wish list; as the Lithgow Small Arms Factory Museum wryly toldthe Senate, the policy is a “long list of actions which do not seem to have anylinkages or interdependencies.”
Revive is another shining example ofLabor Party policy: heavy on promises, light on detail.
It is a policy that has not aged wellin light of the defeated Voice to Parliament referendum, and one that reveals afundamental truth about the Albanese Government: that it regards art as a meansto aiding some overall ideological end.
As aperson who is extremely ambitious for Australian art, especially Australian artmusic, my view is that Revive serves as a distraction from, and not as avehicle for, any actual national cultural progress.
Both itand its architects should be closely watched, and if the Albanese Governmentdoes introduce legislation that so much as suggests Australian copyright lawshould adopt racial considerations, strong opposition must be voiced.
