Photo by Alejandro Alvarez on Unsplash.
There are many lessons to be drawn from the sad meandering tale that represents the progress, if it can be called that, of Australian cultural policy over the last ten years. Some of these lessons are encouraging—for example, as Australians we have shown that we can indeed countenance a coherent national cultural policy if the mood so takes us. Some of the lessons are profoundly discouraging, such as the sense that good policy is fragile, it can be replaced by bad policy, and in the end does anyone really care? I want to pull together some of these lessons into an assessment of where we can go from here, but before doing so I shall discuss in this section some of the important issues and areas for concern that are of continuing relevance to any discussion of cultural policy in Australia today. The list of issues that I draw attention to below is selective rather than comprehensive, and is presented in no particular order of priority.
