(Image: Zennie/Private Media)

Federal Labor has broken up with progressives, as I may have noted once or twice. But there’s one area where the government may still keep the grand alliance together: arts and culture.

Several days into the new government, Tony Burke, employment and arts minister (employment and unemployment minister), announced he was interested in the idea of a living wage for creatives, and invited submissions for a national cultural policy. It was a rare moment of the old Whitlam frisson — amid all the other very anti-progressive things Labor was racking up daily.

Doubtless Labor is sincere about wanting to revive Australian arts and culture after years of wilful neglect by the Coalition. Doubtless it also wants the economic potential. And finally there’s a political strategy there. With money funnelled to artists, some or many can be detached from political causes — refugees, race, etc — to which many have a default inclination but no great commitment. The Greens have a very generous arts and culture policy, but Labor has the actual money to dish out.

With that in mind, Labor has assembled a panel of 14 creatives to create a national cultural policy. This whole process promises to be a slog of massive proportions. The panel will come out with a detailed policy, probably giving equal weight to the autonomy of art (good), and then to a purported inherent social justice function (hmm). The government will then take that over and plug it into national branding, global Australia, etc. The policy will be one that attaches every conceivable good to culture — or to non-market artistic activity — and then reduces it to the party of capital’s narrower purpose.

The best way to avoid that would be to have as close to no cultural policy at all.

Here’s my suggestion for the entirety of a cultural policy:

#1: It is widely agreed that it is good that there be cultural activities and works that the private market will not bring into being. The government of a nation should provide funds to culture-makers of that nation for this purpose, set compulsory commissioning targets by private culture distributors, and manage publicly owned institutions devoted to them.

#2: The funding and commissioning of such activities and works should actively seek to equally represent the Australian population by class, gender, culture, ethnicity, LGBTIQA+ identity, disability, First Nations status, region, and other social divisions not specified. In some cases, such funding should aim for progressive super-representation (ie proportional overrepresentation) of demographic minorities or historically excluded groups.

Looking for point three? No, that’s it. That’s all you need as policy. Everything else — how people apply, how it’s assessed, how it’s awarded, what sub-priorities there should be — is all operational. Politically, yes, there are choices to be made. But those debates and choices have no ultimate principle to pin them down. Should we spend the whole budget on all artists equally? Give out full-time wages and nothing else? Somewhere in between?

The problem is not that the government will abduct whatever draft policy arises and conform it to the demands of national capitalism. That’s a given, and some of the culture panel will be eager to help. The problem is that others will want to define a higher purpose for the sort of stuff covered by a cultural policy.

What’s being proposed is not a culture policy. Culture is Cleverman, Matthew Reilly novels, Batavia, the opera, sure, but it’s also egg and pineapple on a hamburger, leaving the definite article off “country”, babycinos, and the rules of French cricket. It’s social action with shared meaning guaranteed by arbitrary rules. Texts and art objects become part of it — if you don’t think that, you’re dreamin’ — but they are as produced by social process as they produce it.

Pretty much the most significant thing the government does in culture management is the raw local content quota it demands of commercial broadcasters and streamers. For example, the Morrison government’s destruction of Australian content quotas for broadcast children’s TV — and the consequent flooding of channels with cheap US shows — will, if maintained by Labor for another five years, change our idiom, vocabulary and accent.

Occupying most of a national culture policy will be the question of grants for non-market text and cultural objects, to break it down somewhat. This is implicitly thought of as a “high culture”, though much of it is simply middle/upper-middlebrow variations on mass culture genres, preferred by the knowledge class and a layer of the bourgeoisie, Michelle de Kretser instead of Liane Moriarty. The strong temptation will be to assign values to non-market funded texts — other than it is simply “better to have them than not have them”. The temptation to find more specific values for high culture should be avoided.

Because as soon as you try to justify the existence of a high culture according to a set of specific values, the activity reveals itself as having a circular logic, before unravelling altogether. High culture doesn’t make you morally better: the Nazis loved Goethe and Wagner and believed they were fighting to extend, then preserve, the only culture that could produce such unique genius.

High culture practices — reflective criticism, philosophy — may allow you to question given prejudices, but if you don’t question the arrogance within that, Stalinism or nihilist libertarian capitalism may be the result.

What about a quality argument? High culture is deep, or transgressive, or original, or disruptive. But why is depth better than surface, if depth is turgidity and surface is dazzling lightness? And so on through all those values. Why is transgression better than genre virtuosity? Originality better than evocative familiarity? Any “strong-concept” high culture argument is another Escher picture. It comes apart if you look at it too closely.

Furthermore, there’s a class power move bound up in it. Yes, it’s our old friends, the culture production elite section of the knowledge class! The claims to the self-evident importance of high culture come from the tight network of creators, producers, publishers, review bodies and festivals whose class power and identity are bound up with the high status of such production.

This is not an accusation of cynicism. Most such people hold a naïve aestheticist view of high culture’s improving function. Often it is bound up with their own passage to identity, and to a modicum of cultural power. People willing to excoriate colonialism in its every manifestation are unable to see the final move: that culture itself, as something separate from everyday life — the transgressive novel versus the egg and pineapple on a burger — may be, then and now, a more efficient agent of Western supremacy than guns and land theft.

But of course, one could equally argue the other side. A work of art is a unique entity whose multi-levelled challenge to earlier forms or rigid genres opens the possibility of freedom! Local culture is critical to a grounded sense of self and to rich shared meaning! And then undo those. And on it goes. Which is why it is better to stick to the simplest possible formula to have a plurality of forms. Leave specific questions of the value of culture to endless, irresolvable debate. Leave specific questions regarding which artists and what they produce to a day-to-day struggle.

From this “minimal conception” of cultural policy would flow the possibility of practical reforms. Changing the composition of Australia Council application assessment boards; possibly modifying blind submissions; shifting the overall grant ratio towards artists’ direct income and away from arts administrators’; simplifying grant applications so they reward artists — who, in all genres and forms, often have trouble with the abstract language of (ugh) the “mid-career” application, precisely because they are artists and not grant application superstars; moving the “diversity” focus to the neglected inequality of social class; and recognising that, come on, LGBTQIA+ people are not a marginalised group in the arts; and so on.

The plain fact is that who’s doing the selecting and awarding is more important than policy generalities. So long as you have an acted-on commitment to genuine social diversity of those receiving funding, and fight to keep and extend it, then whatever they produce will be what our culture (or that small part of it) is.

The worst result would be if elements of the apolitical unreflective knowledge class command group delivered a pompous elitism that can then be easily co-opted into the discourse of capital and nation. Which will almost certainly happen. Dish up the culture, DJ Albo gonna spin those platters, this forms part of my grant application.