Joining the dots?

Cultural policy in Australia has had its glory days. The 1994 report Creative Nation has been described as the most comprehensive cultural policy statement produced by any sitting government anywhere.

Its effect was to redraw expansively the field of cultural policy. It shifted from a Eurocentric perspective to a more diverse view of Australia’s cultures as they had developed from indigenous origins through successive waves of immigration to produce an ‘exotic hybrid’. It recognised culture not just as an expressive field but as an economic activity capable of generating wealth. And it coined the now familiar term ‘cultural industries‘.

Creative Nation was influential outside Australia. The concept of cultural industries inspired Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’ and initiated a vigorous new policy approach which ultimately elevated Arts Minister Chris Smith to the House of Lords. Within Australia, however, Creative Nation remained a landmark rather than a working document.

This was partly a product of circumstance. The Keating government, which authored Creative Nation was voted out of office shortly after its publication. So while it defined a new cultural vision, the parallel work of formulating the policies and creating the structures for its implementation was never completed.

While the wider policy settings of Creative Nation endured, the subsequent Howard government initiated little policy work in its early years. In the resulting policy vacuum, the lobbyists got to work. Drawing on suggestions in Creative Nation, the performing arts were first off the rank. The 1999 Nugent report, Major Performing Arts Inquiry: Securing the Future advocated guaranteed funding from federal and state sources for opera, ballet, theatre, music and dance as a matter priority. The visual arts followed next: the 2002 Myer report Inquiry into Contemporary Visual Arts and Craft proposed similar treatment for selected visual arts institutions and programs. The Australia Council’s positive response to these reports effectively locked in continuing funding for what they refer to as the ‘major art forms’.

As a result of this and other decisions (abolishing the Community Cultural Development and New Media Arts Boards for example), the Australia Council is now widely perceived not as a broadly-based cultural development agency but as what Professor Jennifer Craik refers to as an ‘elite nurturer’.

It is therefore not surprising that, even before his cultural policy review has been completed, Arts Minister Simon Crean has moved to reform the Australia Council. He needs structures capable of implementing his new strategy. He needs ‘responsive, timely and expert agencies ‘ which can address ‘new audiences and opportunities including those opening up with emerging art forms and technologies’ . This is a prerequisite of realising the National Cultural Policy objectives: ‘to increase the social and economic dividend from the arts, culture and the creative industries’.

Commentators have remarked on the extent to which such language and themes recall Creative Nation. For me, they have other resonances. Some seven years before Creative Nation, the Industries Assistance Commission was asked by Gough Whitlam to review the professional performing arts and assess their economic potential as an industry. The Commission concluded that positive economic results would not be achieved by continuing the open-ended subsidy of performing arts organisations. Instead they proposed that public funding should be targeted directly to secure outcomes involving innovation, education and dissemination. This would involve directing support away from the ‘elite cultural bodies’ over a five year period.

Compare Crean in 2012. His government’s agenda involves ‘harnessing the arts to innovation, education and delivery platforms such as the National Broadband Network’ (dissemination). And while he has stopped short of proposing to divert current funding allocations, Crean does insist that arts organisations should be able to ‘demonstrate [their] relevance to the broader agendas’.

Crean hopes to facilitate this through his ‘all-of-government approach which, using his persistent slogan, will ‘join the dots between arts and other parts of government’. As Steve Jobs has pointed out, there is a problem with this concept. ‘You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future’.

But trust is not an adequate foundation for public policy; nor, in times of financial constraint, can the goodwill of non-arts Ministers be assumed. To secure arts support from outside his own Vote, Crean will need new investment and brokerage capabilities.

Perhaps this structural gap could be filled by an agency such as the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA). It operates at no cost to the taxpayer and acts as a broker between public and private agencies to promote innovation. Its Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture, for example, supported 373 projects in its first year, spanning projects involving resource development, distribution systems, user-generated content , social media, mobile, location and games applications, data and archives, education and learning.

This is just one example of many, but it indicates how a dedicated investment stream and a specialist agency can deliver the innovation Crean champions rather than relying on trust, goodwill and dubious slogans.