The 2020 experience

Yesterday, I felt like Wil E. Coyote after he's been thumped by a giant hammer. That little flattened concertina shape was Ms TN, just back from the 2020 Summit. On Friday afternoon, I registered as an official 2020 Summiteer, put on the blue-ribboned lanyard of the Creative Australia stream (for "best in show", as poet Peter Goldsworthy remarked), and entered a surreal parallel universe.

It was a world of corridors and party rooms and the Lego gigantism of Parliament House. It was instant media feedback via huge screens in the Great Hall, in which events I had witnessed live that morning were rendered in the afternoon as image and symbol, already swollen into myth. It was a thousand conversations. It was an exhilarating, bruisingly exhausting experience, and I wouldn't have missed it for anything.

The 2020 Summit was at once exciting, frustrating and disappointing. It was, above all, a startling expression of collective goodwill, a fascinating and – for all its faults – inspiring experiment in open government. The weekend ran the whole gamut, from the genuinely moving opening event to the bizarre disconnection of Sky Channel vox pop interviews which seemed to have nothing to do with anything under discussion.

I spent most of the weekend on a steep learning curve, attempting to understand some new and strange vocabularies. The first was the language of “facilitation”. This process, run by volunteers from private corporations, involves industrial quantities of butcher paper, textas and white boards, and is supposedly designed to permit the rapid transmission and synthesis of ideas.

The second was the language of politics, the massaging of message into digestible chunks. Or, as many Creative Australia delegates complained on Sunday after they heard the presentation of the interim 2020 report, into pap. Nobody felt that what was presented on Sunday was a fair representation of what had emerged from our collective labour. (A rather less hurriedly put together report has since emerged).

There were 102 Creative Australia delegates (or Creatives, as we were inevitably tagged). The mix was diverse and by no means predictable. It included, as has been dutifully noted by the press, a fair proportion of glamour, and this rather obscured the collective intellectual weight, which included economists, commentators, producers, curators of museums and galleries, broadcasters, artists, bureaucrats and philantropists.

This weight was evident in the discussions that ensued, and equally in Cate Blanchett's accomplished handling of proceedings. Her co-chairs were media academic Julianne Schultz and Arts Minister Peter Garrett. They, and the increasingly grey-faced facilitator Andy Schollum, always faced a difficult task: it was, as Blanchett remarked, a question of "herding cats".

Creative Australia represented a dizzying range of interests, and it was always going to be a challenge to shape all these voices into coherent policy suggestions. But it happened. It's just going to be a few weeks before the full breadth of the thought that happened that weekend is clear. What will be even more interesting will be the continuing conversation that has been invited by the government.

Evident from the beginning was a palpable pragmatism. Contrary to popular belief, arts workers tend to be very practical. And they’re also used to collaborating and negotiating difference, so the individual discussions were notably free of conflict or grandstanding.

Everyone expected the Creatives to ask for more money. The Creatives were more concerned that the rest of Australia understood what they had to give. Among the benefits discussed were social and individual health, cultural intelligence, economic stimulus and international status.

And, for all the multiple interests, there were clear areas of common concern.

As it was across many streams, education was a big issue. It was seen as a means of ensuring cultural literacy and fostering a community open to new ideas, and of demonstrating in the only way that counts - in the fabric of people’s day-to-day lives – what the arts and creativity have to offer.

Education was connected with the need to strongly address the issue of inclusion. There was a broad awareness that too many Australians feel disenfranchised from culture, either because of social issues (ticket prices are too high, or it’s only for perceived “elites”) or geographical isolation.

Another area of major concern was that, while the creative economy supports many jobs, from arts managers to ushers, the artists whose work underpins this economy still find it difficult to scrape a living. Yet another was to place Indigenous identity at the centre of Australian identity, as is the case in New Zealand. Probably the major understanding underpinning discussion was the need to seek resources outside governmental support.

Even in the few hours allotted on Saturday, the stream came up with a wide range of ideas, though on Saturday night many people felt dissatisfied. More than a few felt they had been hijacked by a pre-set agenda, and that they hadn’t been able to speak to their areas of expertise.

On Sunday morning, when they presented the document that supposedly summed up the previous day’s work, the co-chairs and facilitators faced a minor revolt. Overnight, the plethora of ideas that the delegates had produced had been presented to the Prime Minister and then boiled down by the facilitators into “Priority Themes” and “Top Ideas”. And it seemed to many delegates that some major concerns had been lost in translation.

It was here that we hit the central conflict in the notion of the 2020 Summit. On the one hand, we were being encouraged to boldly imagine a new Australia. On the other, the message was clear: whatever we came up with had to meld with ALP policy if it had to have a chance of being implemented. And a key phrase was “cost neutral”.

Politics, remarked Otto von Bismarck, is the art of the possible. Grasping that nettle, the delegates hijacked the agenda back to their own concerns, and got down to some serious work outlining specific policy ideas. However, that work was barely visible in the plenary session report, which left a number of Creatives stunned and disappointed. (“There were,” said one delegate dryly, “issues of collation”.)

Some points seemed disappear completely in the process: among them, a strong call for rethinking public broadcasting and the issue of responsibility towards climate change. Others surprisingly appeared: when Mr Rudd mentioned summer schools, the entire Creative stream went blank ("summer schools? who said summer schools?") More generally, some concerns never quite made it to the whiteboards: a major oversight in the general debate was the digital gaming design industry, supposedly an area slated for discussion.

It was clear from the beginning that the issue of the income of individual artists was a hot potato. Even a low-cost, low administration and effective scheme like the creation income tax exemption, which has been a successful arm of Irish arts policy for 36 years, was too much like giving money to artists. Which demonstrates how much public discourse is still conditioned by the culture wars of the past decade. Not to mention upcoming economic gloom.

For all the criticisms, the general mood was upbeat, excited and hopeful. Nobody present felt the 2020 Summit was a cynical exercise in public relations. Far from it: it was an inspiring invitation to a participatory democracy, and it resulted in some valuable and stimulating discussions and ideas. If even a few ideas are adopted, it will change things. And the placing of the arts and creativity so prominently in the centre of a new identity for Australia signals a radical shift.

Delegates were continually assured that the missing issues will be noted in the full 2020 report, which will be available in a few weeks, and will each be considered by the government. And Mr Rudd – and the Creative Co-Chairs – have been at pains to emphasise that this is the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it.

They can be sure that delegates will take them at their word. Perhaps the most interesting part of this Summit will be watching what happens now.

A shorter version of this report appears in today's Australian. Picture: the "best in show" lanyards.

Links
Summiteer Julian Meyrick's report in today's Age
Summit observations from music lawyer Adam Simpson