Economics.org.au

Presenting 12 Paddy McGuinness thunderbolts on Australian identity, cultural policy and arts funding:
1. Artists should be told to get themselves a real job (The Australian, November 25, 1989)
2. Television debate the theatre of the absurd (The Australian, February 13, 1990)
3. Taking suppression to heart, and patronage for granted (The Australian, April 24, 1991)
4. We’re safe from foreigners: Most talk of our cultural identity is a smokescreen (The Weekend Australian, October 12-13, 1991)
5. A confident nation has no problems with identity (The Weekend Australian, October 2-3, 1993)
6. To be an arts bureaucracy … or not to be: How far should the government go in sponsoring the arts and what role should the private sector play? (The Australian, March 29, 1994)
7. Art for power’s sake (The Sydney Morning Herald, October 15, 1994)
8. Cultural coercion (The Sydney Morning Herald, October 22, 1994)
9. Sorting wheat from the chaff (The Sydney Morning Herald, February 22, 1995)
10. Politicians should not try to define our national identity (The Sydney Morning Herald, December 16, 1995)
11. Time we all saw the bigger picture (The Sydney Morning Herald, June 24, 2000)
12. Actors’ protests all about losing their own welfare system (The Sydney Morning Herald, November 25, 2003)
Appendix: Bert Kelly and George Jean Nathan on the same (and several more Paddy McGuinness columns)

1.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Artists should be told to get themselves a real job,” The Australian, October 25, 1989, p. 2.

Whenever subsidies to artists or the arts are discussed it is inevitable that anyone who questions existing levels and methods of funding will be denounced as a Philistine. Yet it is necessary to examine the expenditure made from taxpayers funds on the arts, and to ask whether we are getting value for money.

It is not just a matter of “value” in terms of immediate return. The creation of a culture in which the arts are valued highly in social terms as distinct from what prices they attract may well be worthwhile; it is obviously important that the arts be measured by other than short-term commercial criteria.

It is nevertheless a strange thing that whenever the Australia Council tries to establish a case for subsidising the arts it is successful mainly in arousing grave doubts about its own functions and usefulness.

The latest illustration of this is the “economic study of Australian artists” produced for the Australia Council by Professor David Throsby and Devon Mills of Macquarie University.

Professor Throsby is, of course, an economist of considerable repute who has written quite a lot about the economics of the arts. In this report, titled When Are You Going To Get A Real Job?, the authors report on a survey of the financial position of artists and writers in Australia.

Their not at all astonishing conclusion is that such people find it hard to make a living in the arts. But their further conclusion, which is not surprising, but ridiculous, is that this is an issue which should be addressed by way of public subsidies.

The basic problem with most of the arts, whether visual art, plastic art, performing art, or writing is that there is an oversupply of would-be producers [that is, artists]. There is, at the same time, a limited market.

From this obvious imbalance, which inevitably means that there will always be low incomes for most people who wish to think of themselves as artists, the authors of the survey try to convey the conclusion that the appropriate policy on the part of government is to take corrective action.

But despite the fact that they establish that most artists live in relative penury, it does not follow that governments should do anything at all about it. Nor does the fact that most people in the arts have to depend on casual or other jobs in fields other than the arts constitute an argument for public subsidy of the arts.

It emerges from the survey, for example, that while something like half of those who consider themselves artists of various kinds in Australia are women, female artists have substantially lower incomes.

What if anything should government do about this? Apart from breaking down policies which deny equality of opportunity to women, the only sensible answer is: nothing.

The inequality of outcomes in terms of performance and esteem of women in certain of the arts, for example painting and sculpture, is well known. What should be done about this? The only sensible answer is: nothing at all.

Historically, women painters are not as successful as men; women writers often are. Why? Nobody knows. Therefore there is nothing that can sensibly be done about it.

The same general prescription is appropriate in all aspects of the arts.

The real problem with official patronage of the arts in all their forms is that bureaucrats, whether they be accountants or failed artists, are lousy critics — they are just no good at selecting the successful or those of real talent, sorting them out from the majority of the talentless and the mediocre who are attracted by the “artistic” life.

The truth is that the great majority of artists at any point of time are doomed to be failures.

Contrary to the message of the Australia Council study, that the poor economic position of most artists is an argument for more public support, it is evidence in favour of the proposition that most people who think that they might have the talent to be creative artists should seek a living from other pursuits — teaching, clerking, labouring, journalism, or whatever.

Such second jobs do not preclude distinction in the arts, nor success in more than one field. For example, one of Australia’s best poets is also a distinguished taxation lawyer.

The real tragedy of the arts, especially branches of the arts like painting, acting and writing, is that they are cluttered up by mediocrities who have no prospect of real achievement but are seduced by the legends of the “artistic life”, and who starve themselves in the process.

Bureaucratic patronage organisations, like the Australia Council, and various forms of public subsidy inevitably attract such mediocrities.

Accidents of birth and private patronage have allowed people of talent to emerge in the past; public patronage (especially in the performing arts and the visual arts) has in the past produced spectacular results by way of a few geniuses. But no one has ever found a better formula than the humble apprenticeship to lead into such occasional glories of the patronage system.

Nor is there any evidence, certainly not from the past fifteen years or so, that public patronage through arts bureaucracies produces good results.

In fact, in Australia, while there have been some distinguished exponents who have benefited from public funding, there is no evidence that the balance of public funding has been beneficial. The output of mediocrities with no chance of survival in any non-funded system has been prodigious.

The conclusion which should be drawn from the study by Professor Throsby and his colleague, therefore, is the contrary to that which they would wish. It is, simply, that penury is the lot of those people who wish to be full-time exponents of the arts, and there is no case for putting in place systems of public subsidies which might save them from it.

Rather, the artistically talented should be encouraged to develop their other talents, indeed, to get a “real” job, and cultivate their artistic talents in their own time and at their own expense.

The really talented among them may be able to increase the proportion of their time that they devote to their talent; and some will prefer to take the risk and live badly while they gamble on their talent being reality.

But why should the community have to gamble on the reality of a talent which, in the vast majority of cases, will turn out to be a fantasy of its supposed owner, or a small thing in itself.

The unhappy truth is that for every genius who has starved in a garret, there are a thousand mediocrities who have done so. The attractiveness of the arts to the untalented is as great as to the talented.

There is, simply, no way of sorting out from the beginning which is which. The message of the Throsby study (which in itself is interesting information) is that worthless or mediocre practitioners or the arts who do not live well think they have a claim on the public purse.

There is no justification for this. The conclusion that ought to be drawn from the evidence of struggling artists who depend on other kinds of employment, and whose relative success is measured purely by the contemporary estimation of their value by those who are prepared to act, privately, as patrons, is that this is exactly how it should be. Per ardus ad astra.

***
2.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Television debate the theatre of the absurd,” The Australian, February 13, 1990, p. 13.

The old media ownership arguments are being trotted out again in terms of proposals to increase the proportion of permitted foreign ownership of commercial television in Australia — it really is time that some of the self-serving arguments were dismissed.

Employees or activists in the television and related industries have for years been arguing, often successfully, for all kinds of protectionism and subsidies, hidden and open, for their own interests. Although it is a much abused phrase, it is impossible not to be reminded of the comment by Dr Johnson, in very similar circumstances, that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

In the present context, claims of the importance of national independence and Australian national culture are trotted out to deny any rational assessment of the structure of the Australian film and television industries. After the hundreds of millions of dollars expended by way of subsidies, tax concessions, expensive educational and training facilities and redistribution through monopoly and licensing over the past 20 years, we are entitled to ask whether we are getting value for our money.

Undoubtedly, there have been substantial returns — I would be the last to deny the great achievements of the Australian film industry. Yet even here it is clear that the industry has, despite the huge expenditures (counting indirect diversion of funds, the sum must be well over $1 billion), been unable to grow into economic independence and viability.

There may well be a reason for continuing to expend public funds to support a full range of film and television production, but it is not an argument for totally distorting the structure of our television industry.

Moreover, the patriotic proponents of “national independence” are too often those who are indeed scoundrels in that this is really a thin disguise for their own programs of censorship, seizure of control of media outlets and diversion of taxpayers’ funds to their own purposes.

The Prime Minister stated very clearly, in a television interview on Channel Nine at the weekend, the dilemma facing the Federal Government.

If it maintains the existing permitted level of foreign ownership, it will be accused of acting to help the bid to regain control cheaply being mounted by Kerry Packer. If it lifts the level, it will be accused of acting to help Alan Bond out of his financial problems. Both accusations would be true, whatever its intentions, simply because of the existing system of licencing, controls and regulation.

There are really three questions at issue:

Should increased foreign ownership of television broadcasters be allowed under the existing system?

Should the existing system be changed?

Should more foreign ownership be permitted under any alternative system?

It is, indeed, desirable that the existing licence-holders should be allowed to suffer the penalties of having made bad commercial decisions. First of all, they borrowed heavily in a climate of rising interest rates to acquire the licences and the facilities that went with them; second, they continued to spend wastefully on the acquisition of programs, domestic and foreign, as well as continuing the absurd levels of overmanning and overpayment typical of the industry.

The results of such a policy would be interesting to say the least. Large losses would be incurred by the shareholders and creditors of those interests.

Channel Ten is in rather a different position, since much of the loss has already been accepted in the process of transfer of ownership to the Lowy interests. But the end result would be that each of the owners of the three channels would have to spend the next couple of years reducing costs.

This must mean a reduction in the excessively high rates of pay and manning typical of the industry, and a reduction in the prices paid for local and imported product. This in itself in undoubtedly desirable.

At the same time, the industry will have to contend with the Broadcasting Tribunal as it demands more and more local content meeting its own tastes and prejudices, regardless of the tastes and interests of the viewing public.

In this, it will be vociferously cheered on by the local patriots who see the film and television industry as a milch cow intended to provide them with good incomes and jobs, again regardless of the tastes of the viewing public.

Simultaneously through bans on advertising of tobacco and alcohol, as well as proposed bans on political advertising and future demands for restrictions of various kinds, the revenue base of the industry will be further reduced.

Ultimately, the political biases and the cupidity of the advocates of such an approach will conflict, but they will probably not be able to realise the connection between a drive for government monopoly and censorship and a dwindling economic base for their employment. The conflict will lead to more and more demands for subsidy.

What would happen if one or more of the commercial television channels were to be sold outright to a single foreign corporation, or larger, even majority, foreign shareholdings were permitted? At this stage it is, of course, impossible to tell.

But the assertion yesterday by Phillip Adams, the chairman of the not-very-successful Australian Film Commission, that “foreign owners were less likely to commit themselves to developing Australian creative talent or to take risks with new Australian material” is unfounded and unprovable.

Foreign owners might indeed by less willing to spend money on mediocre and unwatchable Australian material as the AFC and the ABC have done, but that is not the same as developing Australian creative talent.

Nor is it at all clear why they should not wish to buy or develop Australian material that Australian audiences would want to watch. The critics of foreign investment are only repeating the tired old rhetoric of the past 20 years. There simply is no evidence in that time that, in other countries, foreign ownership of media has acted to suppress domestic talent.

Foreign ownership is, however, really a red herring. What is much more important is to come to terms with the need to abolish the present regulatory structure of the broadcasting industry in this country, and to open it up to a much greater degree of competition and diversity than at present.

This would mean many more television licences, literally as many as the technical limitations on the use of broadcasting frequencies, satellite transmission and cable would allow. If a few of the resulting multiplicity of channels were then foreign-owned, would it matter in the least?

Of course, this would greatly diminish the power of the regulators, and the political censors, as well as reduce the ability of interested parties in the film and television industry to divert government money, advertisers’ money and commercial investment funds into their own pockets. That, in itself, is a very good argument for opening up the industry.

There are clear benefits to the community in having a much freer and more competitive industry. The claim that oligopoly is necessary for quality is pure nonsense.

***
3.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Taking suppression to heart, and patronage for granted,” The Australian, April 24, 1991, p. 11.

We have a lot to learn from the countries of Eastern Europe. Not just that central planning is disastrous, or that “market socialism” is a snare and a delusion. One of the things we have to learn is how artists and writers function in such societies.

I was reading a book by a Hungarian writer, Miklos Haraszti, The Velvet Prison (Penguin), about the way in which writers and artists under the socialist regimes became subservient to them, when I was struck by the latest development of the legal action between Sasha Soldatow and the Australia Council.

This is really a very funny story. Mr Soldatow, a writer, has been engaged in litigation against the Australia Council because its Literature Board did not give him a grant in 1989. He wanted to know why. The Australia Council did give him a grant last year — perhaps in the hope that he would drop the litigation. But, ungratefully, he has refused to do so. He wants reasons for the original refusal. Justice Davies of the Federal Court has ruled that he is entitled to a proper explanation in clear, intelligible terms of why he missed out, instead of the vague statements so far offered to the court. The council is now seeking statements from the 16 members of the Writers Assessment Committee involved.

Of course, they are in real difficulty. For while Mr Soldatow is not the most talented writer around in Australia at present, he is certainly no worse than some of the successful applicants for grants in 1989. Unless, of course, the council is prepared to argue that he was — in which case, they are going to have to expose the criteria by which they make their grants. And it is quite clear that merit, in any objective sense, is only one (and often enough a secondary) criterion.

Either Mr Soldatow is a lousy writer, in which case he should not have received a grant in 1990, or he is worth a grant, in which case the Australia Council is going to have to give good reasons as to why all the recipients of grants in 1990 were preferred above him. How and in what way were they more worthy? This goes to the very heart of grantsmanship and the criteria of official patronage.

And if we want to know how this works, the best people to ask are those who have most experience of it, that is the writers and artists of Eastern Europe. For while our system operates in a free and democratic society, government patronage of the arts has tendencies which corrupt the recipients of it. The main theme of Haraszti’s book is the way in which the artist was incorporated into the official mechanism of oppression in the socialist countries. It is a very pessimistic book, having originally been written in Hungary at the beginning of the ’80s. (It was first published in French translation in 1983 under the title L’Artiste d’Etat.)

The author could not anticipate the liberation which would follow withdrawal by the Soviet Army of Occupation of the underpinning without which socialism could not survive. But what he wrote explains a lot about the dissatisfaction which many of the old intelligentsia of the communist regimes are experiencing with the arrival of democracy.

What Haraszti does is provide an explanation of why artists prefer systems of government funding, why they prefer such systems to be centralised, and why they so willingly serve authoritarian regimes which give them the kind of recognition and respect they covet. Have you ever wondered why so many writers and artists are, or have been, sympathetic to the grubbiest socialist regimes in the world, from the Soviet Union through China and Cuba right down to the contemptible Sandinista regime in Nicaragua? Why are most writers and artists automatically against free market economies?

Partly it is because communism offers them the respect which they think they deserve — as Stalin said, “writers are the engineers of souls”. The Czech writer Joseph Skvorecky turned this into the title of one of his books. Another of that country’s writers, Vaclav Havel (now of course the President of Czechoslovakia), ought to be required reading for all those people on the bourgeois Left who think that they sympathise with the dissident writers who have now emerged into prominence — one of his essays (in the collection Living in Truth) is a scathing critique of the western “peace” movement.

“All alienated artists,” Haraszti writes, “dream of living in a world where noble values rule, directly or with the least possible mediation. This dream is shared by the diverse currents of intellectual opposition to commercialism. But it is the artist who is most desperate. He finds it more painful than most that, in the eyes of society, he is not valuable except to the extent that he is marketable … He cannot help but detest a society in which art is taken to market instead of being respected and preserved, as in a church.

“The entrepreneurial society gives the artist the most total, dynamic freedom art has ever known. But its commercial indifference to genuine values makes this freedom hypocritical in the eyes of artists. It conceals their constant humiliation. The most vulgar principles rule over the most elevated motives. Everything is unjust!”

So protest art becomes the art of socialism, which promises to replace the market and elevate the artist into something more than a mere participant in commerce: “He is not only a member of this public but also its intellectual guide. Artists, as a group, have become a part of the political elite. They are loath to give up the attendant privileges.”

And of course privilege, outside the market, is what bodies like the Australia Council confer, imitating the totalitarian countries: “The manor houses of the exiled aristocracy have been renovated — the nobility couldn’t afford them anyway — staff hired, the heating turned on, and invitations sent out. This is the moment of historic justice: authors fill the opulent rooms. Important assignments, urgent deadlines or famous names may influence the order in which invitations are sent, but each of us — the registered artists of the nation — will eventually have his turn. Although the number of private villas belonging to once-destitute artists is on the rise, the popularity of the State-owned artists’ retreat has not declined.

The irony is that all this is achieved in the name of independent art, of aesthetic standards which do not and cannot serve the market. Instead, of course, and this is the real treason of the government-supported artist, they serve the State. Not necessarily, in our system, a totalitarian government — but a monolithic body which tries to monopolise grant giving.

This can be quite a sophisticated and apparently tolerant system, suppressing dissent, by absorbing it: “According to one Hungarian saying, if Solzhenitsyn had lived in Hungary, he would have been appointed president of the Writers Union … given time. And then no one would have written The Gulag Archipelago; and if someone had, Solzhenitsyn would have voted for his expulsion.”

We have our own example of this kind of thing before us today. Rodney Hall, the very talented writer who is the new Chairman of the Australia Council, has written a long and unreadable futuristic fantasy, full of bile directed against Australian politics. Kisses of the Enemy — almost a paradigm of political paranoia. So, of course, the political-literary establishment has taken him to its heart. He must have cut deep. From now on, in the service of the progressive artists who cannot live in a market-based society, will he be president of the Writers Union?

***
4.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “We’re safe from foreigners: Most talk of our cultural identity is a smokescreen,” The Weekend Australian, October 12-13, 1991, p. 2.

Is there an Australian identity? What is cultural identity? Are we victims of American cultural imperialism?

These are the sort of questions which get a periodic rerun in various forms in Australia and always comes to prominence when there is any debate about ownership of Australian industry, especially the media industry, or the exhibition of American-made films, television programs or advertising material on Australian cinema or television screens.

Now that we have a parliamentary inquiry into the newspaper industry, the old cultural identity question is getting another airing. But the argument never gets any more sophisticated. This is because it is nonsense.

Of course there is such a thing as an Australian identity. You only have to live a few years outside Australia for this to become clear — and no foreigner has the least difficulty in perceiving the Australian to be a distinct national identity.

As an Australian in the middle of Australia you see mainly our differences and diversity: you cannot see the wood for the trees. Spend a couple of years in a foreign country and the differences recede into the larger picture. The wonderfully mixed origins of Australians have produced a unique culture — not a hodge-podge of multiculture, but a complex single culture with many strands.

It is a peculiarly middle-class intellectual concern to worry about what the Australian identity is — possibly because it is a good excuse for demanding more and more subsidies, protection and tax concessions to foster and define the fragile flower of national identity.

Thus every fear about changing managements in newspapers, every third-rate practitioner in film-making and the arts, is justified in terms of the need to serve the great task of defining the Australian national identity.

So too the fear of foreign ownership of newspapers or broadcasters is based on the belief that somehow if free access is allowed we will become a cultural appendage of the United States.

There could be worse fates — but it is in any case an unfounded fear. For many years our cinema and newspapers were dominated by British product and to some extent still are — we get reporting on the British royals ad nauseam, and most of the overseas-posted journalists believe that only news written in England is worth repeating to us. But this in no way makes Australia a victim of British cultural imperialism.

Similarly, we have been deluged by American films, soaps and sit-coms for many years, without any real assimilation of the Australian character and culture to America.

In fact, the only real victims of US cultural imperialism are those lefties who enthusiastically imitate every silly left-wing fad invented in America. (Thus the only remaining people in the world to take seriously the political views of the American linguistic theorist Noam Chomsky are to be found on ABC radio — the ABC is the only real victim of US cultural imperialism.)

The really successful people in our film industry go to Hollywood to work, since that is the centre of the world film industry, just as silicon valley in California is the centre of the world computer industry. But thriving industries exist elsewhere.

It would be nice to think that all the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the Australian film and television production industries during the past 20 years had produced a viable industry here — the truth is that it has largely been wasted on better wages and the conditions for the unionists in the industry.

(This has been irrefutably established in a little book entitled Cut: Protection of Australia’s Film and Television Industries, by Ross Jones, published by the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney.)

In fact, most of the talk of cultural identity is an elaborate smokescreen for demands for protection against foreign competition and for subsidy to the actors, journalists, writers, camera operators, directors, producers and myriad technicians and hangers-on who live off the industry.

Australian product that is well made has little difficulty in achieving visibility and is welcomed by Australian audiences. But they are not stupid enough to prefer bad Australian product to good and entertaining American or other product.

The same goes for writing. There is a large and growing audience for good Australian writing. The academics sneer at the popular authors, but the readers do not. However, we are still denied much of the best writing in the world simply because the British publishers have a stranglehold on the Australian market and are not interested in republishing much of the best of modern American writing and translation (that means the huge literature of Latin America, one of the most dynamic literary producers in the world). The good Australian writers do not need such protection, the rest do not deserve it.

When it comes to the issue of foreign ownership of newspapers, it is clear that the real fear of politicians and the chattering classes is that they will lose control of the political and social debate. It is easy to lean on an Australian-domiciled newspaper owner. It is much harder to influence a foreign owner. (Of course, not all foreign owners are in fact foreign — to classify Rupert Murdoch as a foreigner because he does not hold an Australian passport would be to deny Australian-ness to that large proportion of Australians who also do not hold Australian passports.)

But it is clear that foreign ownership of newspapers has not led to a destruction or undermining of the British national and cultural identity. A large proportion of the UK press this century has been held by foreigners, from Canada or Australia. Unfortunately, it has not altered the Brits for the better.

Similarly, the ownership of newspaper, film and television interests in America by Mr Murdoch has not turned that country into a little Australia. Nor is the South China Morning Post successfully Australianising Hong Kong. And no one believes that the Sony Corporation is going to devote its Hollywood studio to the production of Japanese propaganda.

The content and circulation of newspapers is of course determined by the preferences of local audiences. That is true whether they are owned by foreign or domestic private interests. However, there is one very important difference in that foreigners are likely to be much less subservient to domestic political pressures than Australian owners. Thus it is worth remembering that in 1951 the only important newspaper to oppose the repressive Anti-Communist Bill of the Menzies government was the Melbourne Argus — then the only foreign-owned metropolitan daily. The local owners (and editors) all toed the McCarthyist line.

But as the subsequent history of many of its journalists showed, The Argus was quite as Australian in its identity and orientation as any other important Australian paper. Foreign owners, unless they are fools who do not want to protect their investments against loss, do not try to thrust ideas and interpretations foreign to Australia onto their readers.

To limit foreign voting equity in Australian newspapers (meaning of course the Fairfax newspapers) to 20 per cent can only have one purpose — to weaken them and make them more vulnerable to the pressures of Australian governments and those people who wish to impose their own political agenda upon the newspapers.

While there is nothing wrong with any of the three major bidders for Fairfax, the financial strength of the group at the end of the day is going to depend on strong ownership and management, not the pusillanimous policies of conservative Australian banks and financial institutions. Thus the wholly Australian group would be the weakest owners. Is this all our national identity means — timidity, fear and conformity?

***
5.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “A confident nation has no problems with identity,” The Weekend Australian, October 2-3, 1993, p. 2.

Is there such a thing as “cultural cringe”? Was there ever? And what relationship does such a notion have to the talk about independence, national identity, and so on that is part of the campaign for an Australian republic?

A confident nation does not need to talk continually about its identity, or dwell compulsively on its nature as a nation. Nor does it have to talk about symbols of identity and independence. These things when they exist are mostly taken for granted. Thus all the talk about Australia’s national identity disappears when one is outside Australia — we know without having to think about it that we are Australians, and we feel an affinity with other Australians, even if they are people we would not normally meet at home.

It can be complex, it is true. Thus a few years ago I was having dinner with my family one summer evening in a Greek restaurant in Paris’s Quarter Latin, when a man who was having dinner at the next table with a boy of about 10 came over and asked if we were Australians, as he thought from my accent. Then he explained that he was French, had been married to a Melbourne woman, his son was Australian, and they were eating in a Greek restaurant because they were homesick for Australia!

However the talk about national identity which we hear so much now is really a cloak for another agenda. So is the talk about the “cultural cringe” which is supposed to have been and still be common in Australia, except of course amongst the little band of academic intellectuals who so proudly assert national identity and independence while they espouse the hand-me-down intellectual fashions of Europe and America.

The only true cultural cringe is to be found in the universities and amongst the pensioners of the Australia Council and the ABC — whose main function might be said to be to wallow in the cultural cringe — while most people simply get on with their lives and do not worry in the least about the fact that Australian culture is part of world culture.

The myth of the cultural cringe has been assiduously cultivated by those who would like to control the intellectual and cultural life of Australia but are unsuccessful in doing so except with the handout of taxpayers’ money. There has been over the past century a thriving Australian literature, with a great popular base. But popular writers are sneered at by the cringe fringe, who believe any writer who appeals to a mass audience is thereby inferior. (Dickens and Shakespeare don’t count.)

Thus they sneer today at Australian writers who are household names (even Tom Keneally is only accepted grudgingly on account of his politics), and do not accept into their pantheon of culture Australian writers who have been immensely popular in the past, like Frank Clune, Ion Idriess, E.V. Timms or F.J. Thwaites. While it is true that in the period between World War II and the beginning of the 70s Australian cinema was in the doldrums, it flourished in the 20s and 30s.

The Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney (ph: 02 4384377) has recently published a pamphlet by the late Len Hume of the Australian National University, Another Look at the Cultural Cringe, in which he looks at the whole issue of the so-called cringe and shows conclusively that it is a total fiction, except amongst those who talk most about its supposed universality. He says:

The conclusion we are left with is that the late 1960s and the 1970s were not a period of new optimism or assurance but a period in which those qualities had been undermined. When (the academics) wrote of self-confidence, optimism and the like, what they were really referring to were the rising expectations of Left intellectuals that they would be much better treated and then supported by an imminent and then actual Labor government than by its predecessors over the previous 20 years. These expectations are understandable, but they are not, and do not even slightly resemble, self-confidence or independence or self-respect.

Other evidence of the existence of these qualities is altogether lacking. Their absence emerges as precisely the most striking feature of the period on which talk about the cultural cringe has flourished, and it is an aspect of our recent history that deserves close study. Its existence is perhaps the most important thing revealed by an examination of the campaign against the cringe and the previous generation of cringers.

The best way to sum up the whole campaign may be to paraphrase Voltaire’s famous aphorism about the existence of God. The cultural cringe — that pervasive, unthinking admiration for British and foreign things — did not exist, but it was needed, so it was invented.

The effect of this has been an Orwellian rewriting of Australian history so as to pretend the self-confidence and pride of past generations did not exist. This is what Geoffrey Blainey has called the “black armband” school of history, as if our history was something to be ashamed of and as if it was an unrelenting chronicle of failure and of dependency on Britain and America.

This is all nonsense of course. But just as it is being exposed as such, we find our Prime Minister embracing it in all its worst aspects.

There are always amusing twists to be found in history. Thus Hume quotes economic historian Edward Shann, much vilified by the cringe fringe for having been an early and powerful critic of tariff protection in the 20s and 30s, as having also strongly advocated the severing dependency on Britain and turning to the countries of Asia for trade and investment ties: “Deference to London and New York and a desire to promote the interests that they were promoting were evidently neither universal nor requisite in economic life at that time.”

Another of the slogans of the cringe fringe has been that Australia has treated its indigenous people especially badly. There is much to be ashamed of in the history of the treatment of the blacks, but our record is a far better one than that of most countries and eras. The idea that mass movements of peoples, occupations and settlements, could have been without violence is a gentle fantasy of the 20th century.

But the notion of the cultural cringe, and of cultural dependency, is along with the mendacious doctrine of attempted genocide, being taught in the schools and universities as if it were true, and as if it could withstand any serious examination. At the same time the true history of Australia, the struggle to build what is one of the most democratic and genuinely independent countries of the world, is being suppressed because it does not serve the ambitions for cultural hegemony of the cringe fringe.

Australian history was genuinely and widely studied in our schools and universities all this century, as Hume shows. Australian literature, cinema and the performing arts also thrived. They did so largely without the support of official institutions and without the creation of a class of professional culture mongers who cannot even sell their products without support from the taxpayer. (It is significant that the media outlets of the cultural Left have almost totally collapsed due to lack of interest with the exception of those supported by the taxpayer, like the publications of the Commission for the Future or the ABC.)

By all means let us have a republic and a new flag — but only if they are chosen freely and genuinely by the Australian people, not imposed as a result of lying fictions about our history.

***
6.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “To be an arts bureaucracy … or not to be: How far should the government go in sponsoring the arts and what role should the private sector play?,” The Australian, March 29, 1994, p. 13.

Is culture a concern of government? Do we believe that there is an Australian cultural identity which can and should be protected by government, and should government be concerned with fostering culture in the other sense, that is, encouraging and financially sponsoring the arts and literature?

To some extent the latter has, of course, always been a concern of government, since there is a cultural component of education. The increasing role of government as a Maecenas, or financial sponsor, of the arts is a relatively recent development (largely since World War II), and although no one [Economics.org.au does, but maybe we’re not a person] seriously proposes now that government should withdraw entirely from this role, there are many questions as to how it should sponsor and participate in the arts.

Since the early 70s, the principal official sponsor of the arts has been the Australia Council, though there are other subventions made by the Commonwealth. All State governments participate in arts sponsorship to some extent, and local government and educational institutions also get into the act. In addition, there are many aspects of private sponsorship which have policy implications, most important of all in terms of tax treatment.

There is a strong ideological element in cultural policy, both in the sense of national culture and of literature and the arts. This is clearest of all in the cinema which, at its best, combines many of the arts but which is quintessentially the art form of 20th-century dictatorships: the way in which both fascism and communism used the cinema, and the way in which the cinema enthusiastically served dictatorships, is well-known.

Under communism the manipulation of the arts and of artists to serve the State and the system reached a high point of development, with organisations like writers’ and artists’ unions becoming an arm of government and with complaisant cultural “workers” becoming in effect civil servants. Patronage became the essence of cultural policy. Much the same has happened in a less malign form in Australia, with the Australia Council effectively conscripting an army of mediocre artists, writers, musicians, practitioners of various crafts, actors, directors and playwrights into the service of cultural policy.

As under communism, there has been a proliferation not just of grants but of an arts bureaucracy which acts as collective censor as well as patron, while even the provision of collective facilities (writers’ centres, apartments in New York, Paris, etc) have begun to follow the classic pattern of State control of the arts.

There also has been a not very subtle shift from sponsorship of the arts to sponsorship of artists, with quality, always difficult to judge, giving way to earnestness, dedication and politicking as criteria for awards. This is often unconscious, and fiercely denied, but unmistakable.

So the question must be asked in regard to this aspect of cultural policy whether bodies like the Australia Council might have long outlived whatever usefulness they might once have had, and become the cultural instruments of the dominant mediocrities of the arts. In this respect, cultural policy is really being made by the amorphous groups who have successfully set themselves up as the arbiters of culture. As with all eras, it will eventually prove in the next century that the real talents of today have been those largely neglected, despised or disparaged by the cultural establishment.

While there always will be a place for some direct subsidy of the arts, it might be worthwhile to get rid of the bureaucratic Leviathan of the Australia Council and encourage diversity of funding by diverting most of its funding, and more, to the arts by way of an increased role for tax deductibility — for purchases, donations, foundations, privately sponsored prizes and awards and so on. Most of the very rich support structure for the arts in the United States has grown up in this way.

Similarly, it may well be appropriate to alter the structure of government broadcasting by returning some degree of control to the owners, that is the people, rather than allowing the internal bureaucracies and employees to treat the organisations as their own property. The example of SBS shows that even separation can bring about an improvement, so a separation of the various elements of the ABC, by type and function (that is, separating genuinely educational functions from mass entertainment and charging for the latter), and establishing separate identities and managements could contribute to genuine diversity and quality.

So at some point there will have to be a rethinking of the present system of support for the arts and literature, modelled as it is on the example of the totalitarian dictatorships, and of broadcasting, which is similar.

What of cultural policy in the wider sense? Is there a unique Australian culture, or should there be, and if so how can it be sponsored? Should it be nurtured and protected against the incursion of “foreign” culture, and should our entertainment industry be protected against competition from abroad (meaning, of course, mainly the US) in order to provide employment and opportunity for all kinds of participants in cultural pursuits here?

How do we select the icons, the symbols, the ideas, which might define a uniquely Australian cultural identity? Part of the answer is to be found by inspecting the kinds of people who talk most about such things. They are, broadly, either direct beneficiaries of such a process (actors, film-makers, writers, and so on) or those who have an agenda for Australian society and its future, and want to impose their own stamp and beliefs upon it, or perhaps out of sheer nostalgia want to preserve those aspects of the past which they now see as uniquely Australian.

(One of the paradoxes of this is that the era of Australian history most productive of national icons, the Menzies era, is that detested most by the would-be icon-makers and icon-preservers.)

At the same time, many of the characteristics of Australian culture in the sense of national identity which can be identified are actively deplored and discouraged (beer, meat pies, gambling, xenophobia, sexism, etc). It is clear that the desired national identity is not necessarily a definition of what exists, but an ideal identity.

The protectionist element of cultural policy in fact serves to debase our general culture. Thus access to much modern American literature of high quality is denied us since the British publishers (the main beneficiaries of our still ridiculous laws on copyright) cannot be bothered reprinting it at great expense to us. Clearly the impact upon us of American films and television is immense — but does the absorption of external influencers in fact make us Americans, or simply more internationally minded Australians?

What we will have to face up to in the 21st century is the creation not only of a global economy and polity, but a global metropolitan culture, which will interact with but not necessarily destroy that contribution which Australians as a whole, not necessarily the self-appointed cultural arbiters, have to make.

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7.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Art for power’s sake,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, October 15, 1994, p. 38.

“The Ministry of Culture and the Australia Council are ultimately responsible for the centralised direction of the artistic life of the nation. Individual artistic disciplines fall within the ministry’s sphere of activity. Its main tasks are: to guarantee the material, objective and personal conditions of artistic creative work; to strengthen the relationship between the arts and their audiences; to guide the general artistic life of the public; and to utilise material incentives in the execution of artistic objectives … the government also acts as patron of the arts. Artists are assisted by the government and the Australia Council with the help of government commissions and competitions, which also encourage artists to create uniquely Australian works of art. The government pays special attention to young artists at the beginning of their careers, who are assisted in finding accommodations and studios and are supported by the various scholarships.”

Is this an extract from an early draft of the Government’s cultural policy statement, dropped off the back of a Canberra bus? No, it is a slightly adapted quotation from a parody of a party bureaucrat’s speech in the most penetrating analysis of the management of cultural policy in communist countries, The Velvet Prison (Penguin, 1987), by the Hungarian writer Miklos Haraszti. It is impossible to read this book without being reminded of the way in which cultural policy operates under the present Australian Government and its instrument of cultural policy, the Australia Council.

There is a distinct political agenda in the Government’s cultural policy, as revealed so far, which seems to be dominated by a great deal of claptrap about national and cultural identity, and which sits rather awkwardly with an equal amount of vague and lofty talk about multiculturalism and looking towards Asia. There is little doubt that all these themes will get a run in the Prime Minister’s statement on cultural policy next Tuesday, along with a lot of stuff about republicanism, independence and the technological and communications revolution. There is also a fair amount of boasting about Australia’s cultural achievements under the wise guidance of the Australia Council.

What will not be mentioned is the growing discontent with the way in which our cultural institutions, and especially the two public flagships of artistic patronage and guidance, are working. The Australia Council is coming under increasing criticism from artists, such as the poet Les Murray, who have the courage to attack the stifling spirit of conformity it is imposing on artistic endeavour in Australia — a conformity which is disguised by the now familiar cant of avant-gardism.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has become a snakepit within which battle the various elements of empire-building and self-aggrandisement typical of a bureaucracy answerable to no-one. The ABC is by now hopelessly corrupted. Just one aspect of this is the abuse of co-production sponsorship, in itself a trivial matter. Far more important is the surreptitious commercialisation of the ABC as it grants untold millions of dollars worth of advertising air-time to the writings and other endeavours of its own staff, takes money from favoured sporting organisations while it presents their sports as if they were pure programming decisions, and progressively debases the high standards which it claims to espouse.

The Government looks upon culture as an industry — which it estimates to be worth some $3 billion a year — and as a constituency. It buys the constituency by offering protection to the industry, and its current and aspiring employees. While it likes to condemn “elitism” in the arts — although this has to be done rather more discreetly these days since Paul Keating likes to boast about his own cultural pretensions — and talks about encouraging popular arts, and participation by the community, it supports the favoured constituency by surreptitiously taxing the public. This is done by operating import and copyright policies which protect local mediocrities against competition from, especially, the writers and musicians of the rest of the world.

It seems now that the Government is set to abandon one of the few genuine cultural reforms it had begin to implement, the opening up of the book and recorded music markets. The latter in particular is a surrender to the sectional pressures of the local recording companies and the “artists” of the pop music scene. While there has been some relaxation on the restrictions on the importation of books from America, there are still insurmountable obstacles to anyone wanting to establish a bookselling or distributing business based on US publications. The ostensible reason for this is to protect the market for Australian writers; in fact it is mainly a matter of protecting the minds of Australian readers from superior product elsewhere. In both cases hiding behind the mantra of cultural identity is the protection of the comfort and the incomes of the local beneficiaries of the industry.

In the performing arts, it is clear that the thrust of Government cultural policy is not towards the laudable objective of fostering the growth of genuine high standards in Australia but, in collaboration with the unions operating in the industry, it is directed at crude job protection and creation regardless of quality. While there have been genuine successes in the performing arts, and in the film industry in particular, these have not been the product of union policies.

The paradox of culture is that much of it is produced by people who are very different from the consumers. That is, to have the leisure and the inclination to be a significant consumer of most art forms (cinema and advertising-financed free-to-air television being the main exceptions) you have to be in a substantially higher income stratum than the vast majority of artists, creative or performing. Only a tiny minority of the latter ever reach high income levels as a result of their work. So they tend to look upon themselves, however cosseted, as some kind of exploited proletariat. And whenever they are offered patronage and protection by politicians who cater to their emotional rejection of commercial philistinism, they are easily seduced into acting as a cheer squad.

The present cultural policy establishment has learned, or instinctively aped, many of the techniques of the totalitarian control, or “recuperation” to use the terms of 1968, of the arts. It is a relatively easy operation provided you care little for high art or the waste of public funds. Thus we find “writers’ centres”, Paris and New York studious, and lurks and perks of all kinds as well as grants being handed out to favoured recipients. The writers’ centre is specifically an invention of the communist arts bureaucrats. These do not make writers or other artists rich, nor to they make them more successful — but they certainly make them feel pampered.

As Haraszti puts it: “Few can resist the high prestige of a State artist who has now become inseparable from his new public — the middle class — which helps to run the nationalised economy and its culture. He is not only a member of this public but also its intellectual guide. Artists, as a group, have become a part of the political elite. They are loath to give up the attendant privileges.”

***
8.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Cultural coercion,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, October 22, 1994, p. 38.

It has been a big week for cultural policy. On Tuesday, the Prime Minister made his big statement about how he will spend another quarter of a billion dollars of our money on his new friends, and came out with a lot of claptrap about new technology. On Thursday, Rupert Murdoch, a man who carries rather more weight in the world than Paul Keating, and who spends money produced only be his own efforts, not lifted off unwilling participants at the muzzle of the Income Tax Act, told us about the coming century of networking.

This will be the century in which the petty squabbles about national identity and hereditary versus appointed or elected monarchs will recede into the background of quaint particularities, and in which the world will continue to evolve a global culture that will subsume local differences in the way national cultures have absorbed, without abolishing them, regional differences. What is clear is that Rupert Murdoch will have a lot more to do with the creation of the global culture and the world political system than Paul Keating. And when Murdoch dies he will leave an empire; while when Keating dies he will leave only division.

Nevertheless, there was a good deal of complementarity in the two cultural policies. Perhaps this is not surprising since it seems there has been a good deal of collaboration along the way between Paul and Rupert. One aspect of this is the plan for a new 20th Century Fox film production facility in Australia — Hollywood on the Harbour. But this may yet, thanks to the entrepreneurial skills of Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett, prove to be Hollywood on the Yarra. While the NSW Government is humming and ha-ing about whether it will deign to allow Murdoch to set up in the Sydney Showground, wily Jeff already has slipped in a better offer — he has offered as a gift the near 100 hectares of prime land on the Yarra which used to be occupied by Australian Defence Industries, and which is worth about $12 million. All he has to do now is make the sun shine in Melbourne more often than in Sydney.

The complementarity in the Keating and Murdoch cultural policies goes beyond, however, their mutual taste for behind the scenes wheeling and dealing. Few in the “arts community” have yet really woken up to it — indeed, only the critics of the Australia Council — but what Keating has put up our quarter of a billion bucks to achieve is an effective corporatisation of the arts industry. This is what all the talk about information super highways, globalisation, turning the Australia Council into a kind of artistic version of Austrade, marketing our cultural efflorescences to the world and establishing more and more elephantine institutions for fostering mass artistic production are about. The “creative nation” statement was really all about the corporatisation of the arts world. Of course, creativity is not something which can be corporatised — all that will happen is that we will see the further completion of the corporatisation of mediocrity. (Phillip Adams, that aging auto-didact advertising man and self-proclaimed father of the Australian film industry, thinks that I think it is all a conspiracy. Not at all. Pick the cock-up every time.)

The Murdoch enterprise is also very much a corporate form of the arts, although the fact that it is oriented more towards popular entertainment and has to take account of commercial marketability obscures its similarities with the government-sponsored media and arts industry in Australia. However, now that the function of the Australia Council is to become much more even than as at present an instrument of government policy and a marketing arm for the arts and culture as export commodities, the resemblance will become more apparent. It is, incidentally, very significant that the chairmanship of the Australia Council is to be made a full-time executive job, making the organisation much more responsible and amenable to political influence.

What is remarkable about the “creative nation” statement is how little it is concerned with the arts and cultural policy and how much with the hardware and corporate structures. As the convener of the Australian Council Reform association has said, among the greatest beneficiaries of the new initiatives will be the building industry. In fact, very little of the new money (about 7 per cent, less the funds creamed off in administration) seems to be earmarked to go directly to writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, singers and other creators or performers, except to the extent that they will be involved in the existing and new institutions. The solitary creative artist will still have to go cap in hand to the Australia Council, and the same forces operating to produce conformity and obedience will continue to act, without even a generous addition of additional money. It is true that the statement did express some concern with the “peer review” process of making grants. With all its faults, this system, however, does tend to direct money to people who are actually creative — the danger of a more formal process is that it will increase the success rate of the mediocrities who are skilled at grantsmanship.

Ultimately, the only successful cultural policy is one that is decentralised and unco-ordinated — where there are many sponsors, using diverse criteria and dispensing patronage according to their own whims and tastes. The ultimate form of decentralised sponsorship is, of course, the market. If market outcomes do not reflect the cultural preferences of the advocates of cultural policy, that is perhaps because those preferences are not in fact formed by any genuine concern for culture but by an instrumental view of culture. Not culture for culture’s sake but culture as a political statement and achievement.

“This cultural policy,” the Prime Minister said, “will boost the quality of Australian life now and in the future. It will mean more work and opportunities for Australian artists, writers and other creative people. It will make us a more cohesive country.” We can pause for a horse laugh at the master of divisiveness and filthy abuse proposing to make us a “more cohesive” country. There is in any case an unfortunate ring to calls for “cohesiveness” when what we really need is more diversity and more dissent.

But the nub of the statement is about more jobs for the boys and girls — not art and culture. This, of course, is no different from what the expansion of Rupert Murdoch’s media and communications empire is also offering, and there is no reason why it should produce better, or worse, results. However, Murdoch has the great virtue that he does not run a government and welcomes competition rather than trying to eliminate it in the name of cohesiveness. Given the praise in the Keating statement for the idea of a “cosmopolitan Australia” as a “worthwhile aspiration”, one can only wonder why so many of the cultural commissars keep on carping about what passport the thoroughly Australian Murdoch carries. Perhaps the only permissible cosmopolitanism is in the coffee shops of Carlton and Fitzroy.

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9.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Sorting wheat from the chaff,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, February 22, 1995, p. 12.

The incomes of artists, writers, painters, actors, composers, dancers, instrumentalists and so on, are in decline, we learn from the latest survey and analysis by Professor David Throsby for the Australia Council.

At the same time, the numbers claiming to be artists and attempting to live by the arts are increasing rapidly — at 40,000 the number is 25 per cent up on the last such survey in 1988.

Naturally, the chairwoman of the Australia Council is shocked by this.

Clearly, the people are not responding to the enthusiasm of the artists, and in the circumstances the solution must be to dismiss the people and appoint another — or at least set about educating the people to pay higher taxes and higher prices more often for services which they ought to be enjoying.

But perhaps the problem is not so much one of the consumers but of the producers? It is always denounced as economic rationalism to suggest that base economic imperatives might be at work, but since the Australia Council has employed a very competent economist to conduct the analysis of the problem, it cannot complain if others follow this example.

Let us straightaway dismiss the canard that economists are only interested in economic issues. As the example of John Maynard Keynes along with many others shows, it is possible to have as passionate a commitment to all or some of the arts as anybody else, and at the same time remain aware that there are constraints on employment in and spending on the arts.

Personally, I would be happy to see expenditures on the arts double or treble overnight. But it would still be necessary to consider how well spent the money would be, and whether the manner in which it is at present dispensed is the best possible. Indeed, it might be necessary to consider whether the Australia Council as the main official patron of the arts might in fact be debasing the quality of artistic output in this country, as well as producing a generation of practitioners who are conformist, grant-oriented and time-serving.

The fact that the number of people describing themselves as artists has increased by 25 per cent since the last survey is not reassuring. That only means that there is a larger number of people who have convinced themselves that they have the talent to be artists, and who would like to make a living out of what they think of as “creative activity”. Of these only a proportion would, in the best of circumstances, have sufficient talent to justify their full-time employment as artists. The spectrum extends from the tiny number of the highly talented through all the excellent, competent, mediocre and bad performers to those who simply are having themselves on.

The question in the title of Professor Throsby’s study (with Beverly Thompson) But What Do You Do For a Living? is very much to the point. For it must raise the central issue of just how many people could possible hope to live reasonably well on an earned income from the arts, and whether it might not be better for the greater proportion of those who want to be artists to be prepared to work at least part time in other occupations, for which they might be better fitted anyway, than to scrounge around on the fringes of literature, theatre, music or whatever.

By all means let us argue that it would be desirable for there to be a much greater paying public for the arts. Ever since the Industries Assistance Commission looked at this issue the direction to go is obvious — it is a matter of education and habituation of more and more of the public to take an interest, to develop reasonably sophisticated tastes in various art forms. However, the direction of much education has not been to train the “palates” of the population, but to persuade lots of kids that they can be and ought to be artists; and then when they enter the portals of tertiary training to destroy whatever natural artistic talent they might have. Every year this is demonstrated by the enormous flowering of talent in the visual and plastic arts manifested by the work of schoolkids, most of which is far more inspired, and inspirational, than that which the same young people will display after they have been subjected to the attentions of the tertiary educational/artistic system.

The chairwoman of the Australia Council has referred to the growth of the “cultural industries”. She might as well have referred to the growth of academic fashions like cultural studies, which have persuaded so many young people that the practice of the arts is merely a matter of political correctness and grantsmanship.

If the average incomes of artists of various kinds are declining, what might this indicate? It might be a product of a larger number of individuals trying to make a living from the arts at a time when the amount of their incomes which the rest of the community wants to spend on the arts is not increasing. This is not even a matter of the cost of books, theatre tickets, or other prices of artistic services. Even the medicos have found that the fact that Medicare makes a visit to the doctor cost free except in time, and the cost of medicines trivial, has not been sufficient to maintain their numbers of customers and hence their incomes. Why should creative artists, if they are produced in ever greater numbers, find themselves in a different situation?

It would be nice if the community were to see its way to supporting in reasonable conditions an artist who will turn out to be an asset to the community. But nobody knows how to pick such people, and the system of awards and grants has created an extensive public sector bureaucracy, within which the employees live a great deal better than do most of the artists. This is the equivalent of the private sector producers and impresarios, who live well by promoting and organising the work of the artists. But at least the private sector producers have to pay some attention to public taste. The arts bureaucracies, which proliferate like rabbits at State, educational institution and local government level as well as the Commonwealth level, are the fastest-growing element of the “cultural industries”.

But how do we decide how many artists should be employed at award wages (that is, as official, registered mediocrities), how this will be funded, and who they should be? Are we to turn the arts into a branch of the Public Service? How will we permit entry into the attractive pursuits of the artistic life? The probable result of increasing the level and security of artists’ incomes is a further influx of would-be artists, and even greater difficulty in the future for those knocking on the door.

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10.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Politicians should not try to define our national identity,” The Sydney Morning Herald, December 16, 1995, p. 24.

Politicians should keep their grubby fingers off our national identity. It is no business of governments, especially in the pursuit of divisive and partisan goals, to define or claim ownership of the Australian national identity, whatever that may be.

That was the essence of John Howard’s “headland” speech on the subject this week, and it is only surprising that it did not receive unanimous, if low-key, endorsement from those in the media who surely by now have realised the dangers of a government in time of peace purporting to tell us what we should believe and how we should behave. Even in time of war it is a dubious proposition that a democratic country should allow its public debate and perceptions of itself to be determined by politicians.

National identity is really a pretty unimportant issue, but it can be debated and discussed ad nauseam, as it is in the intellectually undemanding areas of the universities devoted to cultural studies, Australian studies, or whatever current excuse for knowing not very much about anything in particular obtains in an institution.

However, it is clear that most of what passes as debate on our national identity is really not that at all, but part of an attempt to seize control of the political agenda, like the assertion of self-evident “truths” such as the necessity of having an Australian head of state.

A concept of national identity which does not admit of diversity of views about national identity is not worth much. The national identity of Australians can, in fact, never be adequately defined, partly because the more one shares it the more clearly one sees the differences and divisions among us. But try spending some time overseas and you quickly realise that there are indefinable ties of affinity, regardless of religion, race or colour, even between Australians who do not know each other, or even thoroughly dislike each other.

The idea of national identity apart from such affinities has its roots in common with 20th-century fascism, having been developed most deeply by continental romantics who liked to write about Das Volk, and to dream about some kind of unconscious national will and character, not susceptible to rational analysis, which could serve to bypass any actual democratic forms and by which consensus could be claimed where none in fact existed. Its highest expression was the unification of the German nation behind Hitler in the onslaught of the Jewish people.

That is, national identity is a dangerous notion when it gets caught up in politics, and most especially when people start to put great store in it.

Despite the customary derision with which any utterance by John Howard is received, his speech was a thoughtful consideration of what our national identity might mean in a moderate, non-fascistic sense, in particular pointing out that no political party has ever had a monopoly on it, nor ever will. It is, incidentally, not even true that he neglected the issue of multiculturalism, as has been claimed by many who have not hesitated to talk about the speech without having heard or read it.

Beware politicians bearing visions. They have something to sell, and it is not anything of value to the recipients except in the form of a warm glow of emotional identification that can be used as a cloak for the worst kinds of policies.

Rather than being backward looking, Howard’s speech when it dealt with history did so explicitly in terms of Orwell’s remarks about the misuses of false or tendentious versions of history, and the revision of history for contemporary political purposes: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” This is a pretty fair summary of the endeavour to insist upon a concept of national identity which is under way at present. It is nicely illustrated, for example, by the “open learning” history programs broadcast early in the morning on Radio National, which are little more than political propaganda rewriting the past.

The misuse of history, and the attempt to foist a falsified and distorted version of our history and the nature of current policies on the people of Australia is the major target of the Howard speech. That is why it has been contemptuously dismissed by many of those who see their path to power and influence as tied up in the whole falsification exercise.

Perhaps Howard is right when he says, “What Australians want now, and what they have always chosen, given a chance, is a government with a capacity for humility as well as determination, the ability to acknowledge mistakes and to learn from them and, above all, a sense of proportion.” We certainly do not have such a government at present, and it is by no means certain that John Howard would be able to offer such a government even if he were elected.

But perhaps he is not right. There is as much reason to argue from our history and behaviour that one element of the Australian identity is a base and self-regarding submission to authority and above all figures of authority; far from democratic mateship or any of that stuff, the theme which runs throughout Australian history, and still is manifested frequently in public debate, is a combination of a whingeing narky view of government combined with a cowardly unwillingness ever to question the exercise, as distinct from the forms, of authority. Like the Germans of the ’30s, Australians follow their ideological leaders and lick the boots of the man of power.

That’s the trouble about national identity — its characteristics are not always ones to be proud of.

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11.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Time we all saw the bigger picture,” The Sydney Morning Herald, June 24, 2000, p. 36.

Whose fault is it that the arts in Australia are underfunded, neglected and fail to engage the interest of much of the population? The arts community itself is the main culprit. That is the essential message of an important new study of attitudes to the arts in Australia commissioned by the Australia Council.

Based on a carefully designed sample interviewed by telephone, the study, carried out by the advertising firm Saatchi and Saatchi, has found that while most Australians value creativity and artistic endeavour quite highly, even more highly than sport, they are repelled by the image of elitism and exclusivity of the arts.

Moreover, the so-called arts community (always suspect the use of the term “community” — it is an attempt to convey a conformity which does not exist, like the ridiculous term “the gender equity community”) is a matter of our old friends the chattering classes who treat the majority of the populace with dislike and contempt. The “yarts” are too good for the rednecks, who could not be expected to understand them but are expected to pay for them. The report says:

Many Australians do not feel welcome to enjoy the arts either by appreciating the creative and artistic output of others or by being creative or artistic themselves … Some people in the arts sector are operating on the basis of out-of-date and incorrect stereotypes of the “average Australian”. Consequently, there is significant need for the sector to understand better the needs and motivations of people outside the current catchments of arts consumers and supporters.

Whenever this criticism is raised, those in the arts often respond by expressing a fear of “dumbing down” — debasement of the highest standards of artistic endeavour. While this is always a real issue, it is possible to have high standards without snobbery, as is usually the case with the real “greats”, like Yehudi Menuhin. In fact snobbery is often a mask for poor quality, as in so much of the visual arts and literature today. The report gives the example of the success of the Australian wine industry, which has popularised wine drinking (and as many students can tell you, there is nothing wrong with the humble cask when you’re poor) while continually raising standards. If you don’t drink wine at all you’ll never be interested in good wine.

The “arts” include the traditional forms, like literature, painting, sculpture and music as well as performance in theatre, opera and ballet, but they also include modern forms like “fashion design; graphic design; shows or bands at the local pub or licensed club; performers like Kylie Minogue; TV drama like Blue Heelers; and painting and play-acting done by small children”. And if you think it is absurd to include Kylie Minogue in the arts, what about the last winner of the Archibald Prize? The difference is that real people like Kylie’s work. As the report says:

The source of the limiting definition of the arts seems to be the arts sector itself …

It adds:

The elitism and inaccessibility of the arts are mentioned spontaneously at a relatively low level as significant reasons for lack of engagement. However, when asked, about half the population associate the arts with elitist and pretentious people and practices. The “chardonnay set” is recognised by its behaviour particularly in relation to the “higher arts” which included the traditional performing arts and the visual arts. “Elitism” is felt even by those who place a high value on the arts.

Indeed. So when the report classifies people on a two-dimensional scale of smugness versus necessity of change on one axis, and importance/unimportance of the arts, I find myself in two camps. I am in the camp of those “highly devoted” or “devotees”, but at the same time I am in the camp of those who are “socially disinclined” to have much to do with them. A few years ago my wife, although like me an opera-lover, insisted that we stop going to the opening nights because she couldn’t stand the opera claque.

But the fundamental message of the report is one which ought to be taken very seriously. It is that if we want people to take the arts seriously we have to reject the claims on the arts as the property of elites which are overwhelmed by their own moral vanity. It is no accident that the lack of sympathy with popular feeling in matters like republicanism, reconciliation, mandatory sentencing and many other ordinary concerns is part of the self-image of “the arts” as a kind of political identity.

Unless the arts sector begins to think seriously about the messages it is giving to the rest of the community — in summary, “piss off, you brutes” — it will not succeed in putting the arts at the centre of our social life as they should be. Nor will it succeed in getting more funding by ensuring that there are no political benefits or votes in supporting the arts.

***
12.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Actors’ protests all about losing their own welfare system,” The Sydney Morning Herald, November 25, 2003, p. 11.

Is the Australian film industry worth saving? Does it produce films which say anything of significance about Australia and Australian culture? Or is it just another sheltered workshop which, established with the best of intentions and heavily subsidised, is of benefit to no one except those who work in it?

It is pretty clear what our local audiences think about it. With very few exceptions, our films bomb out badly at the local box office, and hardly raise a ripple overseas even among audiences desperate to find something good to say about films which are not American.

The truth is that most of our films are no bloody good.

Take for example the film which has just been given a poultice of awards by the usual local mutual back-scratching societies, like the so-called film critics, who have decided that Japanese Story is their best film of the year.

In fact it is a low-grade, pedestrian production distinguished only by the wonderful West Australian scenery which backgrounds it, and which could have been just as well photographed by any good cinematographer from anywhere.

The plot is pathetic. Girl meets boy; girl beds boy; girl’s stupidity gets boy killed. Sob. One or two of the critics will have known that the theme of Euro girl plus Japanese boy was done nearly half a century ago in Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). And much better.

The star of Japanese Story is Toni Collette, who manages to make even geologists look stupid. And after, she compounded the offence by making silly comments about the mining industry.

True, there are a number of intriguing aspects of the film. Most of all when she insists on getting off her gear and putting on his trousers before bestriding her Japanese lover — a strange perversion. If you don’t want to show a naked sex scene, why not just imply it?

But one dog does not make a failed industry. Over the 30 years in which the Australian film industry has been generously funded with subsidies and tax breaks there have been some notable successes.

Many of the films of this period have become minor classics (Newsfront, for example).

Some directors, actors and cinematographers are among the most esteemed in the world.

So clearly the industry as a whole has not been a failure, and there is a valid line of argument that such films have done an enormous amount to enhance Australia’s status in the world.

There is, however, a global phenomenon, and hence has little connection with the chorus of anti-globalisation slogans coming from the industry at present.

They are really arguing that their own livelihoods should be guaranteed regardless of the quality, competitiveness and exportability of the product, and, in the context of the rapidly changing technology and the free trade negotiations with America, that this guarantee should be open-ended and forever no matter how incapable they are at keeping up with change.

Somehow they seem to believe that shoving their own inferior product down Australian throats willy-nilly will be of benefit to all Australians.

There might be a case for withdrawing all subsidies and funding from the film industry unless it registers as the political movement which it increasingly resembles.

Film stars are notoriously ill-educated and ignorant — their opinions are worthless, regardless of their talents.

It is doubtful whether the Australian industry would die even then — there is clearly a great deal of genuine talent, as is evidenced by the fact that so many end up in Hollywood. This does not make them any the less Australian — no more than a scientist or a novelist who works overseas.

The notion that these people should be subordinated to the welfare of a majority of mediocrities who cannot make it in world markets is repugnant.

Perhaps it is time to reconsider the structure of the industry. There seem to be too many bureaucrats and too many ideologues. If one is going to run a financing scheme, it needs to be run by experts in finance, not in low-level film production.

Filmmaking is best learnt on the job, like many other artistic or literary forms. It is likely that the large amounts of money lavished on the Film, Radio and Television School are wasted, given the paucity, in quality and quantity, of its output.

Maybe it is time for another Productivity Commission inquiry.
___
Appendix: Also made available by Economics.org.au on government arts funding:
— A Modest Member of Parliament [Bert Kelly], “Fred puts his sole into new ‘Blue Poles’,” The Australian Financial Review, December 21, 1973, p. 3, at the end of which I added George Jean Nathan quotes against common justifications for government arts funding.
— A Modest Member of Parliament [Bert Kelly], “What if the whole country is swindled?,” The Australian Financial Review, October 10, 1975, p. 3.
— Lastly, here are 11 more Paddy McGuinness columns on arts funding, mostly from the 1970s, mostly not as good as the above compilation.