(Above: the snap used to launch the ALP's arts policy online. Could anyone have chosen with any more rigour a snap so resolutely devoid of creativity, meaning, and usefulness and relevance?)
So there we were in a large auditorium feeling a little queasy, until we worked out we were trapped with perhaps the worst Federal Arts Minister in living memory.
And that memory includes Charles Roderick 'the Rod' Kemp, who boasted of a very small bar fridge in his office, the smallest cellar in the land, utterly incapable of handling a Brendan Behan should he have done a tour of the antipodes.
And now we have the Labor party's arts policy, and what a grandly titled thing it is, Investing in a creative Australia.
Yep, ten million smackeroos for up to one hundred and fifty new artistic works, presentations and fellowships. I got so excited I immediately began working on my concept for an idea about a rock musician who decided that the only way forward in life was to become a dull grey tedious enigma who imitates either a rock or Chauncey Gardiner, and is completely incapable of actually doing anything.
Meanwhile skulking at the fringes of the event was Bob Carr, who in Oliver Sacks style, mistook the Olympics for a hat, and thought building an Olympics was building infrastructure, and why was I surprised to hear this very morning that NSW managed to spend seventeen bucks per person on the y'arts, while South Australia tripled that and Victoria did handsomely and in terms of streetscapes Melbourne is always an amusing place to visit while courtesy of the state government we point to ... the harbour ... oh and look at the Opera House sitting so majestically on the harbour, and we must get around to fixing it one day ...
Just another way the NSW state government couldn't get its act together and punch its way out of a wet paper bag, artistic happening though that might be.
Dare we wonder why the punters are muted about the y'arts?
It got us wondering if we should do a Mark Latham, since a vote for Peter Garrett seems like a vote for infinite grey bland vistas of torpor. Until we remembered that even at this moment our valiant troops are fighting to give the people of Afghanistan the right to vote, and once the WMD disappeared from Iraq, the only reason to be there was to topple a brutal dictator and give everyone the right to vote.
Ah yes, the precious right to vote. Worth killing for and getting dirty deeds done dear, and sending the boat people travelling in search of a mythical land where the right to vote is held dear, and the right to process people in the guano fields even dearer ...
Oh dear, off track again. Not that there's any joy in checking out a Liberal arts policy, courtesy of Steven Ciobo. That's Steven Who from Surfers. All he's done is muttered about the flaws in the Producer Offset scheme and the resale royalty scheme, fair enough points but hardly a policy (And the Liberal Arts Policy is ...?)
Punters might groan (Email to the Coalition Shadow Arts Minister, Steven Ciobo MP in pdf form), but of course if you're running a campaign on excessive government waste and the ruination of the economy and excessive government spending and the need to hack and lay waste to bureaucrats to prevent the country turning into Bangladesh, you're not likely to want to dwell on poncy elites indulging in the y'arts.
Yet curiously when over 10,000 people voted in The Drum in a poll, question 573, they came up with this result:
What policy area would you like to hear more about during this election campaign?
Arts 29%
Communications 3%
Economy 8%
Education 5%
Environment 18%
Health 9%
Immigration 5%
Indigenous Affairs 5%
Industrial Relations 2%
Infrastructure 10%
National security 2%
Population 4%
Not in the land of the invisible grey men thank you very much, and what else can you expect of the cardigan wearers at the ABC, when the likes of Tim Blair campaigns regularly for the right of punters to drive V8s very fast in very predictable circles for a very long, boring time.
There have been a few attempts to whip up interest, such as My analysis of the ALP's arts policy (with an accompanying Crikey piece that lurks behind the paywall).
Meanwhile there are interesting structural questions - will anyone tackle the moribund Australia Council, will someone do anything about the mess that's resulted from merging various screen bodies into one monolith while the feature film sector keeps sliding down the rabbit hole to complete irrelevance, and can anyone explain what SBS is doing displacing a private group to run an arts channel behind the Foxtel paywall while its own multi-channels and its core channel are a complete mess, and the board's best solution is to extend the term of the man who created the mess?
Of course if you have to get your teeth fixed, or you're struggling to get by, or you're gay and want to get married, the arts are hardly front and centre. But then it's a matter of people with the vision thingie, who might just be able to explain why the street art in Melbourne gives it a vastly better feel than the dismal profile Sydney presents to the world, and who might be able to convey why government and Australians should be engaged with and active in the y'arts. And even excited by them, and why there's more to life than tabloids and V8s.
Vision thingie? Do grey invisible men have vision thingies?
In the rush to the bottom, in the very notion that government expenditure is bad and invariably wasted, things get lost, and one of them is a decent set of arts policies, on both sides of the political fence.
Worse, when matters of art have occasionally risen to the top of the news cycle, as in the Bill Henson affair, Garrett has shamefully gone missing.
Is it possible to move Australia forward while dog paddling on the spot?
Will things get better under either an Abbott or a Gillard government?
Ever heard a politician expound at length on the ongoing usefulness of libraries?
Ever heard a politician expound on Mahler? Well as Paul Keating found out, stick your head above that parapet, and people of the luddite philistine cretinous anti-education Janet Albrechsten kind will take cheap shots at you for the rest of your French clock loving life.
Was that the point of this bit of street sculpture in Melbourne?
Ah Melbourne, we loves youse, even when uncertain as to meaning, though at a pinch we could always wheel in Freud or oysters ...
UPDATE: just caught up with this bit of blather by Garrett Labor's efforts a hard act to follow, which turned out to be a dirge of a read which was a had set of facts to swallow.
The OZ is promising a follow up tomorrow from Steven Who from Surfers, which no doubt will start by explaining how they're about to launch an actual arts policy some time soon.
As for Garrett? Who wrote this blather for him?
Amid this burgeoning activity Labor has eschewed the faux culture debates and arguments around false dichotomies, such as art v sport, that characterised the Coalition's approach to the arts in government. Rather than viewing the arts as an ideological battleground, we have concentrated on better program delivery, providing a stronger foundation for the creative sector in the future. In less than three years Labor has achieved a great deal for artists and arts organisations, delivering real reform and new investments.
No you haven't you goose, Screen Australia is a mess and so is the Australia Council. Look under your nose.
As for dynamic ways forward?
We will, as a priority, finalise the development of a national cultural policy and undertake public forums in each state, with a new policy to be concluded within the next 12 months.
And it seems that the NBN will solve everything with digital creative enterprises.
Stop prodding me with that broomstick, I just want to go to sleep ...
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