Society
A National Cultural Commozssariat
Chris Berg wrote a comment piece in a recent Sunday Age about whether Australia needs a government-linked national policy on the arts and culture, an article which seems relevant to worries in Tasmanian Times a week later about Bass MP O’Byrne’s appointments to taxpayer-funded arts jobs here.
Links –
Berg’s remark linking ‘national culture policy’, fish and bicycles covers most of the operational and administrative risks in such a stupid idea, but needs to be complemented by answering this question –
Which sorts of countries have ‘national culture policies’?
Answer: totalitarian regimes – think of the ‘national culture policies’ espoused by Nazi Germany’s Reichs Ministry of Public Enlightenment & Propaganda, or of the ‘national culture policies’ pushed in Warsaw’s Stalinist Palace of Culture & Science.
Or consider Islamist theocracies deciding the cultural dangers of women’s trousers or the arts issues in the length of men’s beards, and whether the continued existence of non- and pre-Islamic cultural artefacts, such as Egypt’s Pyramids, Afghanistan’s Buddhist statuary, or the Bekaa Valley’s Graeco-Roman ruins, contravene ‘Islamic culture policies’.^
No country like ours needs such a beast, despite there being a case for some loose administrative and clear spending guidelines, subject to the normal push and pull of debate in a representative democracy.
Nor do we need a UK-style ‘Culture Secretary’, a government pooh-bah foisted on Britain’s public by its sad, cynical, once-was-principled Labour Party, in lieu, it seems, of its being able to administer anything half-decently in today’s UK. (Australians in general, and Tasmanians in particular, worried about the incompetence and maladministration of our own governments and in want of some emotional balm, need only look at the current Brown government, and sigh ‘At least, we’re not as bad as that lot’.)
Anyway, to get back to our very own ‘national culture policy’, just imagine your Friday nights and your weekends in a regime where Federal Culture Commissar Garrett or Comrade Commissar O’Byrne has deemed what arts and culture, Green-approved and UN-mandated of course, are ‘appropriate’ for you.
^ Note: all the Abrahamic monotheisms have form here, with Old Testament Hebrews routinely destroying pagan ‘idols’ in Canaan, sixth century Christians destroying Graeco-Roman temples and shutting down the free-thinking academies in Athens, and seventh century Muslims suspected of destroying the famed Library of Alexandria (and its wondrous new 21st century re-incarnation is in the sights of today’s Islamists).