On Monday, I pointed to Neil Pigot's recent Age op-ed as part of a global sweep of items of interest, making a couple of brief comments. Neil wanted to expand his points, and asked me to post his response. So here it is, with a brief reply from me below.

It is difficult in this age of the blog to actually construct a sensible article for one of our daily newspapers. The Age has over the years stripped back the number of words available to the likes of me from 1,000 then 900, then 850 and now 750 words per piece. The problem becomes making a cogent argument about major issues in a format that doesn't really permit you to unpack anything. But a cogent and robust argument it must be.

The article that you have commented on in your Monday rave has I believe been misunderstood by you and I will assume that if it has been misunderstood by you then it may have been misunderstood by many. Without wanting to unpack the entire article and my deeper thoughts about Australian theatre I'll simply address your two major sticking points.

Yes, the Fringe Festival is a great time to be in Melbourne. I too get a great fillup from the work that appears on the Melbourne fringe year round. The point of the article that you seem to miss is the one that you make. Yes we have a vibrant fringe and yes we have a stable mainstream but we have no middle ground. Most of the work that takes place in this town is made for free, or just about for free. What you forget is that ten years ago we had a healthy mid range in this city of four million people. Five or six professional companies that produced work that paid people a wage and provided a stepping stone to the main game if you can call it that. The problem that you fail to acknowledge is that after the theatrical revolution of the 60s we had a period when Australian theatre was vital, relevant and more importantly paid.

What we see now is a perverse regression to a model that was dominated by the Tait Brothers and J.C Williamsons. For all of the first half of the twentieth century virtually no Australian theatre appeared in the big houses of this country. The Taits imported work from Britain and The US at the expense of Australian Drama. Any endemic piece was performed in back rooms and "fringe" venues much in the same way that it is now. We're more sophisticated these days. We have Jo Murray Smith writing new work that travels but the work that I believe is culturally representative is being done in Melbourne predominantly on the fringe. For free. To small audiences in productions that are often compromised by their circumstance.

We live in a state that proclaims to be Australia's cultural capital and yet we have only two fulltime professional companies. 4 million people with two theatre companies! This state government is the most fiscally stingy per capita in terms of real arts funding of any in the country. What governments fail to recognise and from your response I can only assume you miss the point too is that if all the organs of a theatre community are not in place, if one or other area is dysfunctional, then nothing works. Your reviews of MTC shows have to me revealed a person expecting more from a company that has nothing more to give. What you seem to expect from the MTC, and this is just a sense on my part, is what you should be expecting from a mid range scene that doesn't exist. The result from my point of view is an historical return to the bad old days before The Doll.

And this is where I begin to get a little bit annoyed with you, more so with Cameron. Your blog is very influential and whilst it's great that you rave about your love of the fringe, your work is pure comment. There is little analysis in your reviewing or posting. You have the power to be an advocate for a more holistic approach to the understanding of the form and yet you choose to simply be a forum for comment about what you like, don't like and are looking forward to. Yes, I'm looking forward to the fringe too, but I look forward to it knowing that the work that will be presented is created independently, with little money, being written by talented writers that will see little return for their effort financially, actors, directors and designers the same and not only that, the work will have little chance of progressing beyond the fringe and I know that many of those artists will fade not through lack of talent but through lack of opportunity.

No, I don't want you to take out the clapometer at each show but I would like you to consider the broader impact of the work intellectually and culturally in an increasingly marginalised profession. I guess what I'm saying is think less about what you like and a little more about what people are trying to do and become a little more active in this debate. For me that is your role as much as it is mine.

Neil Pigot

To which I say: My comment about the Fringe was not about whether I like it or not (the Fringe Festival is always a bit of logistical nightmare for people like me). I was merely observing a fact: that audience capacities in the Melbourne Fringe compare favourably with every other fringe festival in the world, which mitigates your claim that theatre is dying and that audiences are dying with it. One could point to other examples, including the increased audiences at the MTC and the Malthouse last year.

Certainly the ecology here (as I have often commented) has changed out of sight, and it is no longer the polar situation you describe. Yes, mid-range companies, as I have often commented, were destroyed in the mid-90s in an act of cultural vandalism by the Australia Council. Yes, it took years for the culture to recover. And now things are different. No, we don't have Anthill and the Church: we have a different and much more flexible structure, where barriers between independent and mainstream, or local and international, are much more porous. Which means that what you say about the inability for independent theatre to move to other audiences is simply not true, however true it is that it remains - as it remains everywhere - a struggle to make theatre. Independent theatre - again like all art - depends on a gift economy, but a lot of people are paid, and a surprising number of indie companies are full-time structures.

The Malthouse, the Arts Centre's Full Tilt program - and, if it gets the funding, I hope the MTC - provide main stages for independent companies around town, and you must have missed that the Malthouse had a Broadway hit with Exit the King. The Malthouse in fact regularly tour their shows internationally. Local companies like Aphids (which recently traveled very successfully to Denmark with their beautiful show Care Instructions), Back to Back (international stars and festival stalwarts, most recently in Germany last month), Stuck Pigs (who won the best fringe show prize in New York) or Ranters (regular travelers in Europe) get out and find new audiences elsewhere. Those and others, like Red Stitch, or Theatre Works, which provides space and resources for an intelligently curated program, are the energies you're missing. Yes, there are problems; for example, I think we'll see the GFC hit the theatre scene in earnest next year, as sponsor contracts end, and that will have knock-on effects in all sorts of ways. But I just can't see the same clouds louring about our house as you do.

I don't really have anything to say about your comments about what I do here on the blog. But I do think that you must have missed a few things.

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Lifting my studious head from the bloody skirmishes of 5th century Denmark, I stumbled over a report which claimed that things appear scarcely less bloody in Melbourne. Today Nicholas Pickard passes on an unconfirmed tip from Crikey which claims that Arts Victoria is about to defund some important local arts bodies.

Names named include Chamber Made Opera, Ballet Lab, Elision and Astra. An alarmed Ms TN phoned Chamber Made - which this year lost its Australia Council Music Board funding, another story to warm the cockles of the heart - and was assured that Arts Victoria is still on board. "In fact," said general manager Geoffrey Williams, "the State Government has increased its funding this year. I can assure you, if our funding were cut, you would hear the screams from there."

So that's good news, and it seems we can put the kybosh on that story. Chamber Made is pushing on stubbornly, despite losing, along with a number of other local organisations, its triennial funding status with the Oz Council. This focuses the dilemmas that face arts organisations which cross artform boundaries - in this case, music and theatre. There's been a fair bit of a musical comedy going on in the Music Board recently, who are the body of choice for funding music theatre. Among other things, they wonder why music theatre companies need so much more money than companies that just put on concerts... It culminated, according to Williams, with their deciding this year to fund no music theatre companies at all.

Instead, they've set aside $350,000 next year - "our money", as Williams said - which anyone interested in mounting music theatre can apply for. This rather broad category includes Broadway musicals and classical operas as well as the more difficult area of contemporary music theatre. Despite the difficulties, Williams says that they're optimistic that they'll mount at least one production, and possibly two, next year. So rumours of their death are definitely premature.

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Robert Musil (1880-1942), the great German novelist and intellectual, observed once that if there was to be real social change of any kind, what was required more than anything else was not idealists nor intellectuals, but managers: those who knew the nuts and bolts of creating and maintaining organisations, and understood how to change organisational structures.

It's a view that is not exactly popular among artists, and sometimes for good reason: a dismaying large proportion of the hard-won arts dollar goes, not into making art, but into paying administrators. But nevertheless, there is a great deal of sane wisdom in Musil's observation. One example close to hand is the Malthouse Theatre, the fortunes of which were turned around by a radical corporate restructure. The artistic shift was simply not possible without the remaking of the relationships within the organisation, from the Board down to the bar staff.

One of the most useful weapons in an artist's survival arsenal is a practical understanding of how cultural policy and funding work, not from the narrow view of a practitioner applying cap-in-hand for the advantage of his or her project or organisation, but from the wider perspective of the place of culture in political and financial economies. This understanding is often rare among artists, not least because practitioners are too busy practising to have the time to read government reports. I find all this stuff fascinating, but I quite understand why it might make the eyes of others glaze over. But one simple way to glean some understanding is to subscribe to Currency House's Platform Papers, which regularly publishes overviews of public arts policy.

Getting Heard: Achieving an effective arts advocacy, released yesterday, is a stimulating and pragmatic analysis by Chris Puplick of the way Australian arts funding works. In particular, he examines, from his various experience as a politician, Australia Council Board member and Chair of various arts organisations, how Australian culture depends crucially upon the "kindness of strangers": that is, how policy has been driven by the interest of influential individuals, rather than by any broad-based policy.

As Ms TN gloomily noted in the Guardian after the election, arts patronage is not an exclusive policy of the Left. In fact, the arts have often done better under Liberal Governments than under Labor, and there's no reason to believe that the election of a Labor Government means better times for the arts. And one of Puplick's major points is that good arts advocacy ought to be non-partisan.

He also notes the lack of a peak body for the arts, a major problem in this country, since it means that instead we have a bunch of rival bodies squabbling for their share of the pie, rather than looking at the bigger picture and arguing for a better pie. I thought that the 2020 Summit might herald a change in this - the single most valuable part of the exercise was how a lot of people from differing disciplines were brought together and discovered that they had a lot of concerns in common, both within the arts community and outside it.

Puplick makes some valid (and not so valid) critiques about the 2020 Creative Stream. He discusses the way facilitating directed the conversation, and how this caused a mass rebellion, but doesn't take into account how this same facilitation distorted what was reported. For instance, he says one of the Summit's most disappointing aspects was its "deafening silence" on the topic of "soft diplomacy", or using the arts as other countries do as a key part of international diplomacy. This was in fact a topic to which I was assigned with people like David Throsby and Rupert Myer, and our group came up with at least half a dozen recommendations, including the reinstatement of the DFAT touring fund that the Rudd Government axed and the beefing up of the presently inadequate cultural arms at our embassies, several of them "cost-neutral" (as instructed). * But there we go.

Aside from the Bill Henson fracas and the much publicised 2020 letter - the subject, incidentally, of a new book by David Marr, The Henson Case, which is due for imminent release - the possibility of a group which speaks for all cultural interests has not materialised. For which I, for one, am sorry. Puplick could have acknowledged too, in criticising Cate Blanchett for being "partisan", that she was the single international movie star who signed the letter, ensuring that it hit the headlines and letting herself in for a lot of wingnut abuse. It's an act which perhaps makes her partisanship slightly more principled and complex. But enough of 2020.

As Puplick points out, one problem with the lack of a peak body is how culture gets hived off as separate from the rest of society, apparently blind to the needs of, say, hospitals or schools, which contributes to the perceptions of the arts community as an out-of-touch elite. This is a strong, if erroneous, perception which artists are very slack about addressing. (Not that media coverage like this helps; let's face it, there's not a lot of interest in the non-arts media in cultural affairs, unless they involve naked girls, scandals or controversial curmudgeons). And he suggests that we are still stuck in the old ways of arguing, instead of embracing the model of the "creative economy". (I'm not sure that's entirely true - the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr, is certainly driving that rhetoric).

In any case, Puplick's view of how arts funding works here, even if it makes Australia sound dismayingly like a local parish, is a very clear and useful document. It's full of need-to-know information, including a list of the major public inquiries into the arts that have mostly shaped Australian cultural policy. It's well worth a read.

Watch out too for news of an upcoming forum at the Malthouse on November 10, when Chris Puplick will be here to discuss his paper.

* I checked the Final Report of the 2020 Summit (available since May) and found the relevant bit on "Soft Power and Cultural Diplomacy", which follows for anyone interested:

The group discussing soft power and cultural diplomacy was asked to identify strategies whereby Australia could project ‘soft power’ internationally through cultural and other creative endeavours. The concept of ‘soft power’, as enunciated by Joe Nye, was discussed and its elements enumerated—such as arts and cultural exchange, promotion of Australian ideas, and media and other people-to-people contacts. Better projection of Australia’s creativity and cultural strength should augment Australia’s international credibility and influence. There would be domestic benefits within Australia because such a strategy would send to Australians a strong message about the nation’s values, achievements and confidence.

Indigenous culture was acknowledged as especially relevant—indeed, ‘central’ to international promotion of Australian culture given its distinctiveness, quality, high impact, international appeal, and importance to Australian identity. It was emphasised that it was ‘hard to curate a national vision’ or to choose the themes for promotion internationally. Australia’s international image and engagement was a composite picture, influenced by many factors. There was some criticism of the government’s decision to cut the funding provided to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for its international touring and other cultural programs, and there was a call for more cultural attaches to be placed in Australian diplomatic missions and consolidation of resources allocated across various departments and agencies. (Italics mine).

The group endorsed the value of cultural exchanges and residencies such as those arranged by Asialink, noting the importance of casting the net widely to include relevant institutions such as universities in these programs. There was discussion of the role of arts festivals in Australia and overseas in developing productive international links between Australia’s creative community and international counterparts.

The economic dimensions of international cultural promotion were canvassed. One speaker highlighted the export potential of Australian culture, arguing that other economic activity often followed cultural connections overseas. Another participant raised the challenges faced by Australian writers given the continuing British dominance of the international book-publishing market by virtue of its possession of British and Commonwealth rights from US publishers. Globalisation was seen as raising other challenges, such as displacement of Australian cultural activity by international products and other influences. Others saw new opportunities for outward looking engagement in a global domain. The key was to strike the right balance between national and local on one hand and international on the other.

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This year's winner of the VCA's George Fairfax Memorial Award is Simon Stone, actor-about-town and founder of The Hayloft Project, one of the most interesting young companies in Melbourne. Aside from something impressive to put on his CV, Stone wins $20,000 to assist his artistic development.

He plans to develop his first original text, which will be devised, workshopped and performed by The Hayloft Project. He's the latest name on a pretty interesting list. Previous Fairfax winners include Chris Kohn (Stuck Pigs Squealing and now artistic director of Arena), actor Luke Mullins (presently a member of the STC Actors Company) and Chris Bendall (artistic director of Deckchair in Perth).

Meanwhile, David Williams has some good news for NSW artists - the State Government has at last released its guidelines for funding submissions in 2009, after a year of uncertainty, during which artists have been frankly advised by arts bureaucrats to try their luck interstate. David also gives a useful summary of main points of the NSW arts policy review. Let's hope this ushers in some better times for Sydney independent theatre.

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It's often hard to run down the arts angle on Federal Budgets. But in today's Australian, Corrie Perkin chases up arts reaction to Treasurer Wayne Swann's first Budget, handed down on Tuesday night. It's pretty much as expected: business as usual, with some small winners - Indigenous arts, young artists - and few big losers aside from regional Australia, where funding was - shortsightedly, in my opinion - cut. I think it's pretty much wait and see: I'd agree with those who think that next year's Budget will be the one to watch as far as the arts are concerned. (Update: The Pickard Pen has been scratching out more commentary, and more detail, at Arts Journalist).

I haven't spotted any coverage in the Age, though there might have been a par or two in the print edition. But I did stumble across Robin Usher's shameless regurgitation of a press release I received this week from the MTC, which I note for the record. (Update a day later: a budget report by Jo Roberts is in today's edition).

Meanwhile, long-time readers of this blog might recall the controversy when the New York Theatre Workshop permanently postponed a Royal Court production of My Name is Rachel Corrie, a play by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner drawn from the diaries of a young American activist who was killed in Palestine by an Israeli bulldozer. While I personally wished the controversy was around a better artistic object, it did highlight some bitter running sores in public debate around the Middle East. And some interesting issues in relation to theatre itself.

Two years later, it's premiering in Sydney, courtesy of young director Shannon Murphy, and as Nick Pickard reports, is causing some pre-emptively emotive reactions, which were republished in the Australian on the day the show was to open. The audience is, says Cynthia Ozick of the Zionist ezine Israel News, "at a show trial. And there are Jews in the dock". Picket lines in Sydney? I wonder. To be honest, I would be surprised: but one never knows.

And don't forget the Next Wave Festival, which opens today to showcase the talents of Melbourne's young artists. The program boasts some fascinating-looking performance, and I'm kind of wincing, because I'm going to miss all of it. But that doesn't mean that you should: I'd be checking out North Melbourne Arts House 180 Seconds in Heaven or Hell, for instance, or Eddie Sharp's The Tent or, actually, any of those intriguing-looking shows. Tell me how it went.

Which leads me to the personal. After two weeks battling mediaeval levels of pain - nothing serious, just problems with teeth - Ms TN is taking it easy theatre-wise for a couple of weeks. I've had it, guys. I'll be here and there, but mostly at home threatening the kids. My apologies to those I've mucked around recently, but a woman's got to know her limitations, and at the moment my face is shoved into mine. I'll surge back when I get a new head.

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Currency House has published another must-have Platform Paper: a lucid and fascinating examination of the vexed question of arts funding. A Sustainable Arts Sector: What Will It Take? is written by Cathy Hunt and Phyllida Shaw, and is compulsory reading for anybody interested in the nuts and bolts of culture-making.

(It's particularly interesting in the light of the current funding row taking place in the UK, where the Arts Council of England has mystifyingly transformed an injection of 50 million pounds into a high octane public crisis.)

Hunt and Shaw begin with the proposition that a "sustainable" arts sector means much more than a measure of the fiscal health of individual companies. They convincingly make the point that, like education or public health, the arts sector is, in the old-fashioned term, a "public service". Not that they use that phrase.

It's well worth threading through the complexities of the argument: it may sometimes be a little dry, but it's packed with useful background, and is an illuminating survey of government arts policy, both here and in the UK. At base, this is a passionate advocacy of the place of the arts in contemporary society, and an intelligent argument for a more holistic and multi-dimensional approach to arts funding. (We're talking private as well as public investment). In particular, arguing that we should attempt to think more long-term about our arts ecology, Hunt and Shaw propose that the Federal Government consider setting up a Future Fund for the Arts.

Most importantly, it's an example of what we need badly in this country, and especially now under the new Labor Government: intelligent and pragmatic arts advocacy. A Sustainable Arts Sector deserves a close read and serious discussion: it's a significant contribution to a crucial public debate. Hunt and Shaw will be speaking in February at public forums called Rethinking Arts Policy: Putting the Artist First, in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, so watch out for those dates. And let's hope that Peter Garrett picks up a copy.

As a bonus, this Platform Paper also includes responses from Nicholas Pickard, Julian Meyrick and Neil Armfield to Lee Lewis's controversial paper on Cross-Racial Casting, which, as some of you might remember, caused some blogospherical fireworks last year.

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...as they used to say in the UK Sun when the temperature nudged over 25 degrees: a cue for white English people to throw off their shirts and dance maniacally on pebble beaches with handkerchiefs on their heads, while puzzled Australians still wandered around in their woollies. My English compadres are often puzzled by my fondness for damp mists and pale blue winter skies, but they have never experienced the brutal heat of a Melbourne summer. The recent temperatures of over 40C (almost 110F) really did me in, I fear. Anyway, this by way of apology for the lateness of my meditations on the MTC's first production of the year, Patrick Marber's Don Juan in Soho. On the way folks, though it's already in the Oz.

While I'm looking towards the northern hemisphere, allow me to alert you to the increasingly loud hoohah over the British Arts Council, which has taken advantage of a injection of 50 million pounds to cut funding to around 20 per cent of its clients, in its biggest shakeup in recent years. The fuss began with the cutting of funds to the National Student Drama Festival just before Christmas, and since then the conflagration has been slowly spreading, up to a rowdy public meeting this week which passed an unprecedented vote of no confidence in the Arts Council. A round-up of the row and blogger responses here.

(UPDATE: The row has now spread to the British Council, the government's international arts arm, with a bunch of the UK's most distinguished visual artists protesting a "radical shake-up" in the council's structure. What is going on over there? The one thing that is clear is that nobody really seems to know...)

What is most striking to an antipodean observer is that artists are demanding a system very similar to what we already have here with the Australia Council - a transparent and accountable process with peer review. Let's count our blessings while we have them. Speaking of which, I'll point to a sobering SMH article on NSW arts funding which suggests why the Sydney Festival has gone so populist this year, and why this might be something that should concern anyone who cares for the arts.

Match this with Federal Arts Minister Peter Garrett's apparent indifference to ideas and the heart sinks lower. Garrett has passed on attending the Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art, a major international shindig held for the first time in Melbourne this year, with a new brief of political edginess. In a small but cutting comment, convenor Jaynie Anderson says she is "slightly disappointed" she could not convince Garrett to come. "The previous incumbent, George Brandis, had been keen, but then, Anderson says, he is an intellectual." Ouch.

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News just in: after some nervous waiting, La Mama Theatre tonight announced that it has had its funding confirmed for 2008. Not only that, the company has been granted an extension of its previous funding levels, with 2.7 per cent indexation. And, along with all other Key Organizations, an additional one-off payment of "$50K+".

In what must be the understatement of the year, the company simply reports: "We are relieved and delighted."

And so are we. That a vital and unique cultural institution like La Mama was put on notice by the Australia Council (background here) exposed just how parlous the situation is for small to medium theatre companies.

So roll on the celebrations for La Mama's 40th Birthday, which I for one am looking forward to. They do good bashes. I remember reciting a poem at - was it the 21st? - holding a very small baby. And now Josh will soon be turning 20. Tempis fugit indeed...

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David Williams over at Compromise Is Our Business passes on the news that the Australia Council is inviting responses to its latest planning proposal on the future of theatre funding, Make It New. As David says: "Just so everyone is clear on the stakes of this, the first installment of 'Make it New' was preceded with the placing 'on notice' of all of the organisations triennially funded by the Theatre Board, including Melbourne's La Mama". The discussion papers are available online here and an online forum for public discussion is here.

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More on the Federal Budget in today's Age. The arts did unusually well this year, but there's some justice in Opposition spokesman Peter Garrett's claim that it's "nothing more than repair and rescue" after years of neglect. Though, frankly, whether Labor would do any better is up for grabs. And, to keep some perspective, it's very small bikkies when you think of the $3.5 billion that's been strategically handed out as sweeteners to various interest groups, or the $5 billion extra that is heading towards universities (albeit with steel strings attached), which represents some serious pork-barrelling.

As well as the $19.5 million towards the small-to-medium performing arts sector, $24 million extra is to go to the major performing companies, which in Melbourne theatre means the major beneficiaries are the MTC and the Malthouse. Again, this sum addresses the fiscal slippage which means that budgets have not met the rising costs of making theatre. Late last year, several companies - including the STC, Company B, Belvoir and Circus Oz as well as the MTC - made an unprecedented plea for a 25 per cent increase in funding, after announcing they faced collective losses of $1.5m, and a survey by the Australian Major Performing Arts Group found that funding in real terms had declined drastically, with major effects on programming.

There's been some intense lobbying behind this decision, which reportedly was very last-minute. A jubilant insider told me last night that, to their astonishment, they got everything they asked for - an unusual feeling for arts persons. For audiences, the most important implication is that the MTC might throw off its straitjacket and climb out of the theatrical doldrums. As Artistic Director Simon Phillips says in the Age today, "It means the belt that we have been tightening for the past few years now can be eased back a couple of notches so we can do those big-picture plays and classics that enrich the theatrical diet." That sounds very cool to me: and I'm putting in my bid for Ibsen and Strindberg now.

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Anyone would think there was an election coming up. But hey, if Costello is distributing big carrots in his 2007 Budget, us arts rabbits are grateful for any crumbs that come our way.

Nicholas Pickard has the lowdown on the Arts Budget at his blog. Of immediate interest to us is the increase of $19.5 million over four years ($4.8m per annum) heading to the troubled small-to-medium theatre sector. This adds up to $5.5m more than the $14m Oz Council chair James Strong requested in December last year. It could even represent a small actual increase (as opposed to bringing non-indexed arts funding up to par after its severe inflatory erosion over the past few years - almost 25 per cent in the small-to-medium sector since 2000 - which that $14m was needed to off-set). But I wouldn't get the champagne out yet - if it is an actual increase, it might bring us back to where we were ten years ago.

It would be very surprising if La Mama got the chop after this - especially as distinguished arts figures (most recently Sue Nattrass) have been lining up to publicly express their dudgeon at the thought of its undeserved "on notice" status. And that's unambiguously good news.

PS: A commenter (thanks anon) points out that this funding is going to the entire small-to-medium performing arts sector, not just to theatre, as was incorrectly reported in the Age. So although any increase is good news, it's not as good as it first appeared. Actual Arts Ministry guff here.

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Signs of hope? James Strong, the new(ish) chair of the Australia Council, has put his weight behind yet another inquiry into the "troubled" (read: financially strapped) theatre sector. More significantly, as the SMH reports, he has requested an extra $14 million for the small-to-medium company sector. And that, as anyone following the shenanigans earlier this year will know, is the locus of the real crisis.

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The Liberals have announced their arts policy and, by gum, I'm off to tell those demonstraters outside Bracksie's office (just down the road here) just who to picket.

Andrea Coote, the Liberals' shadow arts minister, gave a taste of what a State Liberal government would do to the arts. She's obviously been reading Andrew Bolt's column assiduously: the State Government, she says, has been funding "elitist Melbourne-centric festivals that attract a limited audience". She also wants to get rid of the tax-guzzling Australian Centre for the Moving Image, slashing its money and maybe even moving it away from Federation Square. It's all those elitist children's films, I guess. And Arts Victoria would get an overhaul and be made "more accountable".

One of the things that irritates me most about the ideologues claiming that artists are growing fat on the public teat is that they have no idea how accountable the process is. I am not sure that any other public money is subjected to as intense scrutiny as arts funding, and I have often thought that it might be a good idea if it was.

It is not easy to get a grant: they are not, as the impression seems to be, handed out like lollies at Christmas time. The competition is intense. If you are fortunate enough to get one, every grant must be totally accounted for, by the artists and then by the bureaucracies that administer them. Arts Victoria is, as it happens, particularly demanding on this front.

Where would the Liberals' money go? An extra $5.2 million to Eisteddfods, to keep the proles happy (anyone else got visions of those novel machines in the Ministry of Truth?) And the opera, of course, will be ok. Politicians like going to the opera.

UPDATE: Of course Bracksie, having occupied all the possible middle ground, swept back into power. Now the Liberals are faithfully observing the obligatory post-election chicken slaughter. Personally, I'm sure it's the arts policy that lost them the election...

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Some notes arising out of the present discussion:

1. The question of funding the arts is a no-brainer for artists. Not, as alleged by populist rightwing critics like Andrew Bolt, because of self interest, but because of the manifest benefits that accrue both generally to society and personally to the individual when the arts are valued.

Artists have personally experienced what the arts can give: as a means of self awareness; as a profound and continuous pleasure; as one of the human activities that give meaning and dignity to human existence; as a means of creating a sense of community and relationship; as a way of establishing and questioning a national identity; as a way of understanding our place in the world and ourselves as human beings beyond the materialist valuations of the marketplace.

Anyone who has ever loved another human being, who has had a child, who has felt - by looking at a painting, or listening to music, or by walking through a virgin forest or a humble laneway transfigured by moonlight or, like Wordsworth, by standing on a city bridge - in fact, anyone who has been touched by beauty in one of its myriad manifestations - knows that there are many things in life that are too complex and too profound to be valued simply in terms of money. Art is one of those things.

How much the arts ought to be funded, and in what ways, is a subject that needs to be seriously debated. There is no doubt that Australian arts funding, for all its significant achievements in its almost 40 year history, is far from perfect. Some of this is due to insufficient government funding; some of it can be levelled at the bureaucratisation of the arts through the 80s and 90s; some of it can be put at the feet of those who unthinkingly swallowed the model of the "arts industry" as a sufficient justification for the arts.

We need, as artists, as members of this society, to face the problems, to talk about possible solutions. We need to think more widely and more imaginatively, and to consider carefully - even if it is to lay them aside - the criticisms made of the arts community. Is it our fault that some small but vocal sections of the community hold such negative opinions of the arts? How do we educate the community at large about what the arts mean?

There is little doubt that in Australia we have not always been well served by our arts advocacy, although there have been noble exceptions like Donald Horne. Arts advocacy over the past two decades has concentrated on the economic benefits - understandably, and I do not personally believe that the arts should not be economically responsible. But this has been at the expense of the real value of the arts aside from their value as commodities in the marketplace, which has not been articulated well at all.

As Europe shows, appreciation of the arts goes hand-in-hand with access to and education about the arts. Both access and education are aspects to which state funding is crucial: subsidies make ticket prices or book prices cheaper, permit the decentralisation of the arts so they answer to their local communities and permit the arts to be unchained from market values. Since universal literacy was deemed a desirable part of society, education has been largely the business of the state. Lack of funding means that access to and understanding of the arts is limited only to those who can afford them. It is lack of funding that makes the arts truly "elitist".

Worth noting here is the particular conditions in Australia that exacerbate the difficulties for local artists: a small population spread over a huge continent, making things like distribution and touring expensive and difficult; the necessity to compete, like the local film industry, with the vastly better resourced international corporations which result in a less than level playing field. To get rid of arts funding here would be inevitably to make Australia - even more than it is now - a cultural colony of more powerful economies, most notably the US.

2. State funding of the arts recognises that art is a labour-intensive activity which might not necessarily justify itself by economic return but which offers its own unique benefits to society. In this way, arts funding is exactly the same as Research and Development in the sciences, which doesn't necessarily generate economic return, and sometimes not at all, but which is essential to the further development of the science. It is a bad sign that R&D is not served well in this country either, and that the cultural braindrain is mirrored by a braindrain in the sciences.

3. A market-driven policy for the arts - such as is dominant in America - is unambiguously inhibiting to the diversity and ultimately the quality of the arts. (George Hunka at Superfluities has further thoughts on the American perspective, where this battle has been largely lost). It encourages artists to conform to the necessities of the marketplace, and devalues immeasurably the non-economic aspects of the arts. Those aspects, in fact, that make the arts most valuable.

Worth reading in full, in connection with this question, is William Osborne's illuminating comparison between US and European arts funding models. Australia at present is somewhere in between these two extremes, with state funding still functionally present but being continuously eroded by the "free" market ideologues in power, who would prefer us to follow the US model. As Osborne comments:

The dangers of artists being forced into conformity are apparent. Given the volatility of mass markets, Wall Street has a very particular ethos. This was clearly summarized by Ray Kroc, one of the founders of McDonald's, who was angered by some of his franchises: “We have found out ... that we cannot trust some people who are nonconformists. We will make conformists out of them in a hurry. ... The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization.” The very nature of a mass market is conformity in both product and customer. ...

In the spirit of their mixed economies, Europeans would argue that many forms of artistic expression cannot be positioned or relativised within the mass market or its fringes. For them, culture must be communal and autonomous. They often see American culture as hegemonistic -- a totalizing and destructive assault on the humanistic, cultural and social structures they have worked so long and hard to create.

A general sense of the different perspectives concerning communal identity can be illustrated with an example now widely discussed in the States. Many Americans have seen how corporate-owned strip malls and Wal-Marts have deeply affected their cities and towns. The old downtown areas are abandoned as customers move to corporate businesses on the edge of town. Communal identity and autonomy, which are an important part of cultural expression, are replaced with a relatively isomorphic corporatism.

Osborne links America's urban desolation with the policies that insist on the commodification of the arts, and contrasts it with European planning that values the historical, social and cultural identities of cities. "It is not enough that people have freedom of speech," he concludes. "They must also have mechanisms for meaningfully expressing and debating it. Public arts funding is deeply valuable because it encourages societies to be diverse, intellectually alive, inquisitive and realistic. It furthers the discourse societies need to fully express their communal and national identity and place it in the rest of the world. It furthers our ability to heal and help. It furthers our well-being, freedom of expression, and pursuit of happiness. Public arts funding represents the deepest American ideals."

4. In connection with the above notes, we must keep in mind how free speech has been eroded Australia since 2001 by neo-conservative ideologues. Examples are too numerous to list here: books banned in university libraries; publishers raided and the hard drives on their computers erased; academics fearful that their legitimate research might break the law. And so on. The neo-conservative campaign against the arts does not exist in a vacuum, but is part of a much larger program of legal and social repression, the radical dimensions of which Australian society as a whole is yet to comprehend.

Much mockery has been made of my comparison of the Howard Government's slow erosion of arts funding with Ceaucescau’s funding cuts to the Bulandra Company theatre, which highlights the role of funding cuts as a means of censorship. If the present threat to La Mama was the only symptom, of course the comparison would be ludicrous. But it is by no means the only symptom. The fact that a culturally invaluable - and cost effective - arts institution like La Mama is under threat only highlights how bad things have already become.

The comparison with Ceaucescau was made in the context of a multiple squeezing of the space for the arts: on the ABC, in the Sedition laws, in conservative attacks on contemporary work. This goes, as even a cursory glance at rightwing websites and articles or Howard's "soft" Hansonism will show, with xenophobia and racism, a good dose of homophobia (except in the case of Alan Jones), and a general denigration and fear of anyone designated "other". It seems, for example, that we have already forgotten that under Howard Government policy we imprisoned literally thousands of children in immigrant detention centres, in direct contravention of both international law and common human compassion.

And this is in a larger context where basic common law concepts such as Habeas Corpus - the right that protects a citizen from abitrary detention by the State - are being set aside in many major Western democracies, including, under the new anti-Terror legislation, ours. Habeas Corpus has been for centuries the hallmark of a society that determines that the State cannot abuse its power over the individual: it is what has traditionally made civil democratic society different from tyrannical or totalitarian regimes.

If the Howard Government does not wish to be compared with repressive regimes, it should not employ the same policies as they do.

As Primo Levi said in the preface to his devastating book, If This Is A Man: "Many people - many nations - can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that 'every stranger is an enemy'. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager [concentration camp].... Here is the product of a conception of the world carried rigorously to its logical conclusion; so long as the conception subsists, the conclusion remains to threaten us."

5. The question of arts funding is inextricably linked to the question of what kind of society we wish to live in.

UPDATE: George Hunka provides a thoughtful response at Superfluities, in the context of US mid-term elections, reminding us that we are not talking utopias. In part: "this is not to say that a culture or nation that provides continuing, significant support to minority and antagonistic artistic expression would have kept us militarily out of the Middle East, prevented the abuses at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, or built guarantees of privacy into the Patriot Act. But it would have provided an environment that contextualizes these issues in a broader vision of humanity."

Which reminds me of Oscar Wilde's comment in De Profundis: "The only crime is lack of imagination".

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I just did something unprecedented, and closed off the comment thread to my post on the threat to La Mama's funding. TN had swum into the purview of the right-thinking wingnuts, and suddenly they were swarming in like Darth Vader's TIE fighters to do a bit of arts bashing.

The comments included the recommended dose of abuse, personal smear and innuendo (a couple of which I removed) laced with the proud sentiment that they don't know anything about art, but they know what they hate. The argument, which is sufficiently outlined in the comments and elsewhere on the net, is that those pinko / commie / poofter / parasite artists (or is it rich, possibly French, aristocrats?) are stealing money from honest hardworking joes to finance their nefarious, leftoid and morally dubious activities. If only it were not all so predictable and boring. Thanks to those who weighed in or emailed me, and heartening also to see a guest appearance from Joe Orton's alter ego, Edna Welthorpe.

I do wonder why these tender-hearted anti-arts activists are not more exercised by straight-out corporate theft than by the tiny amounts of state money which are given to generate the well-documented benefits - employment, tourism, urban revitalisation, creative thinking, pleasure, even health - that the arts give to the community. Though perhaps the real problem is an uneasy suspicion that someone, somewhere, might be having a good time.

Being a parasitical and lazy arts wanker, and consequently having a 500 page novel to write, I don't have time to deal with politico trolls with irony bypasses. Frankly, my feeling is that if you think that artists aren't worth 0.02 per cent of the GDP - what the Australia Council actually costs - you can go jump. Any more trolling comments will be deleted forthwith. This is a blog for debate about theatre (see above). If any of those commentators are actually interested in theatre (say, if they go to see an actual play) they are welcome to contribute. Those who think that theatre ought not to exist at all can vent their spleen elsewhere.

However, as Lao Tsu recommends, perhaps we should embrace our enemies. A couple of local bloggers, alarmed by the argument here, express concern about the reluctance of the arts community to defend itself. Supernaut has some stern words for artists remaining quiet out of the fear that speaking up may affect their funding:

So this in a country where largely the very people and organisations being lined up for the abattoir are too afraid to speak out because they may lose funding, Dance Works gone, Sydney Dance Company, La Mama on notice, and I've lost track of the number of remaining companies also with that noose around their necks. It seems like all of them.

The last thing the arts in Australia needs when Australia Council is busy trying to work out how to not fund anyone, and Neil Jillett, Andrew Bolt and assorted other colonial trash are basking in the right-wing anti-arts thuggery of Australia today is for the artists themselves to be too pathetic to even respond. It's in no small way ironic the voice for survival of performing arts so often comes from journalists who aren't concerned with self-protection so that we artists can have our freedom of speech.

And at Minktails, young artist Ming-Zhu Hii talks about the necessity of speaking up for what we believe in:

I do not in any way shape or form advocate silence, and I believe that there are many of these such arguments out there that we are showing only our silent backs towards. As artists and supporters of a rich and diverse culture, it is time that we spoke a little more loudly. In general. Perhaps we would not have to waste our breath on defending our totally justified exasperation towards issues such as the threat to La Mama's funding. Perhaps, just perhaps, then, we wouldn't be exasperated in the first place, because the livelihood of the theatre would not be in jeopardy.

UPDATE: A wonderful post from Ben at Parachute of a Playwright speculating on why these attacks on the arts are so vitriolic:

As I type, the thought occurs to me that perhaps the reason that the thug-wits go after people who write like Alison, who point out that the arts is not a luxury add-on to a lifestyle but an essential element of coming to understand and to navigate our lives... well they go after such ideas because the ideas remain powerful. The facts are powerful. And there is something so unsettling about the idea that human beings MUST express or we will be walking dead that provokes the zombie attacks.

And Ben also points out the absolute necessity now for all of us who value the arts and what they stand for to speak up against the libels and the smears and the lies, to negotiate our own differences and to create spaces where difference and debate is actually possible:

It's too easy to listen to abusage of the arts and roll my eyes and think that the person doing the abusing won't change, so what point is there? Sometime I wonder whether I've been simply rolling my eyes at concepts I find uncomfortable and don't want to do the work of engaging with. But we have to engage. Of course, we have to pull the plug on anonymous threats and smears, but we mustn't expect them. We have to talk. If there's one thing that characterises the Howard era it's that, under attack, we've become silent even amongst ourselves. Say something. Every voice adds nuance and richness. Let's stop believing, too, that disagreement within our circles implies that we want those who disagree with us destroyed or humiliated. Let's take it as a starting point for finding out more about one another. Enough of the silent simmering - it has only let the scum rise in the public sphere.

Of course, well-known arts connoisseur Andrew Bolt dishes the dirt as well. It seems I am married to the playwright Daniel Keene!!! Deep investigative journalism there - he just has to read the sidebar on this blog. And clearly, my poor pathetic husband needs my support to ensure his future staging at La Mama! Why else would I think the damn place mattered?

And obviously my huge influence as a poet and freelance journalist swings him those stages at Theatre de la Ville, Theatre de la Commune, the Theatre du Rond-Pont, the National Theatres of Bordeaux and Toulouse, the central stage at the Avignon Festival (some of the most prestigious theatres in France, btw) and all those other productions since 2000... which, little does Andrew know, add up to thousands and thousands of tickets sold. (A little googling might have enlightened him, but we all know that Andrew never lets the facts get into the way of a good smear.)

Like they say on Dragonball Z: I'm more powerful than I ever imagined...

And another PS: while we're at it, let's not forget the Sedition laws, which are a crucial part of the mix that is targeting free speech and impacting on artists. The whole Anti-Terror Act, which contains these laws, can be downloaded here. The Australia Law Reform Commission's reports and recommendations on the Sedition laws, rejected by the Attorney General, are available here.

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Good things come to those who wait. The Age finally ran my opinion piece on La Mama Theatre being put "on notice" by the Australia Council, almost two weeks after I sent it in, and only after Robin Usher caught up with the same story. After I submitted it, which ruffled my feathers slightly. An old journalist never loses those scoopish instincts.

A couple of things to note about the subbing: in the original, I said La Mama was picking up where the Community Cultural Development Board left off. Grammatical expediency now includes the New Media Board as well, which in the lo-tech environs of La Mama is patently absurd. And a couple of pars about the Sedition Laws were chopped, which is a pity. For the record, they ran:

Some aspects of this war on freedom of speech, such as the new editorial policies at the ABC, are much discussed. Others are more insidious, such as Attorney-General Phillip Ruddock’s refusal to amend the Sedition provisions in the new anti-Terror Laws, despite recommendations from the Australian Law Reform Commission and a Senate Committee. These laws, according to a range of legal opinion, particularly threaten artists.

Artistic organisations protesting the Sedition laws say they will have a “chilling” effect on artistic expression. “Freedom of expression and public debate is not only the foundation of a free and flourishing literature,” says Angela Bowne, President of Sydney PEN. “It is one of the critical underpinnings of our democracy.”

UPDATE: The cerebral heavyweights over at Tim Blair's blog get stuck into La Mama (and Croggon). Heady, edifying, deeply informed stuff, as you might expect.

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So, David Williamson has announced he's retiring: it's time, he tells us, that he made way for new blood. And naturally, the tributes are dutifully rolling in. I have been reading so many nice words about David Williamson that I feel a bit misanthropic. It's not that I have any personal animus against the man; I wish him only the best in his new, stress-free life in Noosa. Neither do I believe that Williamson's plays shouldn't be done: he has an audience, and they have every right to see his plays. What gives me a pain in the cerebellum is the broad implication that Williamson is Australia's most important playwright, and if only those nasty critics would leave him alone, why, he might even be Chekhov.

Williamson is not, by a long shot, Australia's most important playwright. He isn't a patch, for example, on Patrick White, and he has never matched the craft of Peter Kenna's or Richard Beynon's plays, nor the imagination of Dorothy Hewett's. Every time I pick up one of his scripts, I am amazed afresh at how badly written it is. Since Travelling North, his last decent play, Williamson has churned out a series of formulaic duds: he picks a topic out of the newspaper headlines, and then fashions a drama around it which includes the usual set of vaguely glamorous middle class characters - journalists, footballers, socialites - who look at paintings and say things like "That's an Arthur Boyd, isn't it?", in between cracking an endless series of one-liners. Any subtext is usually worn on the outside, like Superman's underpants. When I watch stuff like this, I get a numb patch in the middle of my brain, about where the third eye is supposed to be. I think it's called boredom.

None of this would matter if people came clean and didn't try to pretend Williamson was writing great theatre. Williamson writes commercial plays, pure and simple, and his barometer of success is their popularity. This is not in itself a problem, or it wouldn't be if Australia had a healthy commercial theatre sector and a subsidised theatre which was funded sufficiently to pursue a truly artistic agenda. It is a problem when Williamson is placed in the same category as Chekhov and Shakespeare and when, to survive at all, our subsidised theatres are forced to program commercial plays.

Aubrey Mellor, artistic director of Playbox Theatre, compares Williamson to Chekhov; as indeed, Williamson does himself. Mellor says this is because Williamson has "a kind of humanism and genuine curiosity about people". I can walk down to the local supermarket and meet any number of humane, curious people, but this doesn't make them Anton Chekhov. Chekhov is a great playwright because (as reading his exquisite short stories confirms) he is, in the first place, a great writer: formally curious, subtle, perceptive, with a kind of lyrical wit which can blaze suddenly into moments of extraordinary passion. And crucially, behind all Chekhov's comedy is the consciousness of a tragedian.

David Williamson, on the other hand, is a journalist of the theatre, and his oeuvre is by no means tragic. He writes popular plays which aim to chronicle "relevant" issues and to present a middle class audience with reflections of themselves. When you compare Williamson's theatre to the equivalent writers elsewhere (the English playwright Alan Ayckbourne, for example, or Stephen Sondheim) the poverties of his writing become absolutely clear. Ayckbourne is a popular playwright with sufficient skill to sometimes write a genuinely interesting play. Williamson has never matched Ayckbourne's technical wit in, for example, the intricate structure of The Norman Conquests, nor the adventurous formality of A Woman in Mind, a dark theatrical exploration of mental illness. This is because, for at least the past decade, Williamson's theatrical world has taken its values almost wholly from the mass media: the factual issues-based universe of current affairs and the aesthetic of television naturalism.

This is one reason his plays are so popular: the conventions are as familiar to us as our own lounge rooms. Williamson's plays fulfil perfectly Peter Brook's famous definition of "the deadly theatre". They are examples of extremely conservative, even reactionary, theatre which challenges nothing; despite its claims to grapple with contemporary issues, its outcome is merely to confirm all the middle class values it represents.

The fact that our major theatres are funded so poorly explains why Williamson is a fixture on our subsidised stages. The MTC receives only 15 per cent of its funding from government sources, which leaves 85 per cent of its budget to be raised by box office and sponsorship. In 1996, the most recent figures I could find, the comparable flagship companies in France, the National Theatres, received 73 per cent of their funding from the State, 21 per cent through the box office and the remaining six per cent from other sales. (This doesn't count other indirect forms of funding, like the unemployment benefits for itinerant workers. The Chirac Government's decision to cut back these benefits, which take into account the seasonal nature of their work and is a major resource for French performing arts, has caused rolling strikes by arts workers across France over the past year, that among other things forced the cancellation of last year's Avignon Festival. Such activism is as impossible to imagine here as the existence of such funding in the first place.)

But even conservative governments in France acknowledge the central importance of culture, and French artists, true to their revolutionary tradition, are prepared to go to the barricades to defend it. In Australia, the very assumption that culture matters beyond its economic value has to be fought for, and for the past decade the arts have been losing badly. Hence the dilemmas faced by our major companies. Williamson brings in crowds, and the big theatres need hits; they can't afford to operate without them. Williamson is a commodity, and he has been - in Australia, if not elsewhere - an extremely successful commodity. But what is important about art is precisely what can't be commodified, and under the dominance of the Williamson aesthetic it has become much harder to argue for that non-commodifiable, indefinable, essential factor.

Because the big state companies which mount Williamson's plays are subsidised, they have to maintain the fiction that somehow his works contribute to Australia's cultural richness. My view is that for many years his work has done precisely the reverse, that Wiliamson has contributed to the creation of an orthodoxy of Australian theatre which is stiflingly narrow, to conventions which owe more to television naturalism than any theatrical tradition or innovation, to an ersatz convention of social critique which in fact challenges nothing. The terms in which theatre is discussed are those which fit Williamson's aesthetic; the diverse, unruly universe of theatrical form is divided neatly into two - "naturalism" and "non-naturalism" - and plays are judged by their "relevance" and "topicality". Words like "beauty" or "imagination" are off the agenda. You get the idea that they might even be considered embarrassing.

Once upon a time, Williamson's plays would have been, rightly, the province of commercial stages. When our subsidised theatres began to produce commercial plays that were previously put on by companies like Hocking and Woods, it signalled the beginning of a new era of conservatism in Australian theatre. For one thing, independent play producers could not compete with the funding of subsidised theatres, and disappeared: now commercial theatre is almost solely the province of musicals. And more crucially, the space for innovative theatre on our subsidised stages has grown more and more restricted. In New York, the ontological theatre of the bizarre Richard Foreman, or the Wooster Group, are so famous to be practically regarded as mainstream; in Paris, Ariane Mnouchkine and Peter Brook work on main stages; in English theatre, which has lost the lustre it possessed in the '60s and '70s, you can still point to Sarah Kane. The only Melbourne director with anything like that stature of innovation, Barrie Kosky, is now working in Vienna. When a mildly experimental play by a writer like Harold Pinter is dismissed by a major company as a "fringe play", as happened a few years ago, you know you're in trouble - if even Pinter's recent work hasn't a chance of being performed on a big stage with major resources, what chance is there for any of our young, innovative theatre artists?

To be fair, this is hardly Williamson's fault; his dominance is not a cause, but a symptom of a much deeper malaise in the Australian arts. A large part of this problem is simply financial. I am all for the arts having economic recognition (ie, artists being paid). I agree that arts companies ought to be fiscally savvy and that, if they are to be given public money, they need to be accountable. But while they are important, those pragmatic considerations, it seems to me, should serve the arts. Most often, it seems to work the other way around. The arts are considered to have utility value, as educational aids, as employers, as tourism promoters, as generators of economic exchange. But the idea of the value of the arts as an expression of human imagination and intellect, as a vital arena of human activity which challenges and questions received realities, seems to have disappeared almost entirely.

Part of the problem resides in the issues of what form public accountability ought to take, and what arts advocacy might be; and these are genuinely vexed questions. I can remember when people started talking about the "arts industry", back in the early '90s. I thought at the time it was a harbinger of doom. The argument used to lobby for arts funding was almost exclusively economic: the arts created employment, generated tourism, and so on. (There was, I think, a little discussion about social capital.) This focus seems to have modelled almost all subsequent advocacy for the arts. And what we have created is a monster, to which all the arts must now pay tribute: the arts industry is here to stay, and arts companies are expected to function like other economic entities, and to justify their existences by making a profit for their "stakeholders". As the former Arts Minister Richard Alston breezily said in connection with yet another review of cultural funding aimed at cutting it back yet again, "You've got to look at results." Alston makes clear that he means financial results. It is more than a tired truism that in these terms, much of the most significant art of the past three centuries - from Paradise Lost to Madame Butterfly to Ulysses - failed dismally on its first appearance. This is not to say that great art and commercial success are mutually exclusive; Shakespeare is a case in point. But more often than not, artistic triumph does not translate to instant commercial success; that's why we have arts funding in the first place.

Cutting arts funding is most often censorship by stealth; it was one of the policies, for example, of Ceaucesu's totalitarian regime in Romania. Ceaucesu whittled away the funding of the eminent Bulandra Company by 90 per cent, a more effective way of stifling its voice than even the extensive censorship to which it was subjected. Ceaucesu did not dare to ban Shakespeare, despite the fact that his plays were staged as expressions of revolutionary freedom, but he could easily deprive the company of the resources to stage him. The Howard Government's campaign against the arts is the same mechanism under less extreme circumstances and, as our rights are gradually cut back under the pressures of the "war on terror", these issues go to the heart of our democratic freedoms. It is worth remembering here that cultural rights are enshrined as basic human rights under Article 27 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that the UN notes the responsibility of the State to "respect the freedom indispensible for scientific and creative activity" and to promote "the conservation, the development and the diffusion of science and culture".

Given its devastating impact on these ideals, it is not surprising that the idea of the "arts industry" has been attacked recently by several eminent Australians, including Donald Horne. Horne says the "economisation of culture" is a fundamentalist creed. "It's not supported by public stonings or beheadings but its effect can be pretty ruthless," he said in a speech in 2002. "It's the kind of language that turns our society into 'the economy', our citizens into 'the consumers' and our public funds into 'taxpayers' money'." He described the phrase "the arts industry" and the adoption by arts advocates of the vogue-ish terminology of the markets as a Trojan horse. "How is it," he asks, "that people concerned with speaking up for 'the arts' and other cultural activities have been reduced to that kind of twaddle?"

Twaddle it is. But as long as theatres are forced into the kind of doublethink which requires them to talk up David Williamson as a major artist, as long as commercial values masquerade as tacit synonyms for artistic significance, there will be no change. What happens when "popular" is conflated with "good" is that you get the worst of both worlds: serious art loses its nerve before the exigencies of the "bottom line", and commercial art puffs itself up with pretensions to an artistic significance it does not possess. In this falsity, both lose their focus and vitality. Everyone is cheated - audiences, theatre companies and, perhaps most sadly, the artists themselves.

Links

Fund artists, not buildings - The Age
Funding in the spotlight - The Age

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