Creating Culture

"Culture" is many things to many people. To some it's about the way we live. To some it's the way other people live. For others, it's about what's most suitable to go into an art gallery or concert hall. As far as the film and television industries are concerned, it's programming, content and, now, "software", grist to the distribution and broadcast mills feeding hungry audiences around the world.

But most of all, culture is something that affects us and our imaginations, either directly or indirectly, in setting out, examining and getting us thinking about what our lives and our lifestyles mean. And because it can affect us, in both subtle and powerful ways, our politicians are determined to have a say in what culture is. Politicians have their say through the yearly funding of over one billion dollars for cultural activities including operating arts organisations, museums, art galleries, libraries and performing groups.

Because broadcasting and the moving image are considered by government to be so "persuasive and pervasive" they attract a large piece of the funding pie, with over 500 million dollars for the ABC, nearly 80 million for SBS, and over 200 million for other supporting organisations like the Australian Film Commission (AFC), the Film Finance Corporation (FFC), government regulators and others. Recent additions add still more to this figure.

In October last year, two cultural policy statements, one Liberal, one Labour, were released to demonstrate each side's commitment to culture, the arts and the Australian way of life. Opposition Arts Spokesperson, Richard Alston, delivered his unreported statement, The Cultural Frontier, just before Prime Minister Paul Keating blew it out of the water and off the news pages with his glossy 100 page missive, Creative Nation.

Commentators, like the ex-head of the Australia Council, academic Donald Horne, have expressed concern that this statement largely bypassed the already established organisations that are skilled in distributing funding to the arts, like the Austral ia Council, moving the centre of funding decision-making closer to government and politicians. For example, the new board of the Australia Multimedia Enterprise (AME), created to oversee the fostering of new media production, ignored the Film Commission and instituted a hand-picked group of corporate talent, including merchant banker, Mark Burrows, and the local head of Microsoft, Daniel Petre (now with ninemsn).

These business-oriented structures reflect the government's new thinking that creative pursuits "create wealth" for Australia and can be best described as "cultural industries" that employ nearly 400,00 people and "generate 13 billion dollars annually". Sadly, the statement also almost entirely overlooked the vital role that individuals, smaller groups and radically different ideas play in creating culture and in building an enthusiastic audience for our many and varied cultural ideas and images.

Governments obviously do have a role to play in Australia's culture, but let's be sure it's not at the expense of a lively and diverse creative community and its audiences.