Australian cultural policy

Monday is the 35th birthday of Sydney’s iconic opera house, dating it from its official opening at least -- but as the building shows its age, a debate has sprung up over how it ought to be renovated. The building’s dramatic looks, and the compromises made in construction, come at a cost in acoustics and cramped backstage spaces – according to a report by the Sydney Morning Herald, ballerinas leaping offstage in the Opera Theatre need to be caught by stagehands for fear of slamming into the walls. Nor is renovation easy: current proposals are to dig under the structure to create more underground rooms, at a price similar to the construction of an entirely new opera house such as Oslo recently opted to build. The paper suggests the latter option might be preferable, noting that “Sydney has the Eighth Wonder; it's about time it also had a first-class opera house.”

In spite of its democratic self-image and international reputation as a marketer of soap operas, the nation has long pursued a high cultural agenda at state and federal level, though not always coherently. The nation’s first recorded arts grant was in 1818, a gift of two cows to the poet laureate, and Australia claims to have produced the world’s first feature film. In the postwar period the government invested significantly in creating a specifically ‘Australian’ culture, trading off its multicultural and multiethnic background, and its location as a fulcrum between Asia and the Anglo-Saxon world. Film and classical music blossomed under the subsidy regime, and the country won its first Nobel Prize for Liteature in 1973. Funding levels have since declined, as the government developed a more commerical approach to the arts, raising questions about appropriate subsidies ever since. As the birthplace (though no longer the home) of Rupert Murdoch’s News International media group, Australia has often been at the forefront of debates over media ownership and ‘dumbing down’.

At the beginning of the year the new government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd cut spending on foreign affairs as part of its drive to cut 1.8 billion Australian dollars (1.2 billion US dollars) from the budget. The “Australia on the World Stage” initiative was a casualty -- designed to use the arts as an instrument of public diplomacy. This month Rudd ran into trouble with the arts community, as his instructions to the Australia Council to establish ‘protocols’ for the depiction of children in art (prompted by concern about paedophilia) were criticised as incoherent and tantamount to censorship.

Rudd has sought to make positive efforts with regards to the arts, but with mixed success: culture was one of ten areas Rudd sought to tackle in his Australia 2020 summit earlier in the year, though the ‘Creative Australia’ panel’s findings on issues such as arts education was somewhat overshadowed by the recent birth of a baby to the co-chair, actor Cate Blanchett. If commodity price falls dent Australia’s fiscal position, the panel’s recommendations -- including a rather ambitious proposal to allocate 1% of all ministries’ budgets to the arts -- will remain on the drawing board.

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