It isn’t two people, of course, but two orders of value colliding against each other like tectonic plates. On the one hand, politicians have eyes and ears, know what they like, and know other people do too. Talking about culture isn’t rocket science. Even children grasp the concepts of work and play and appreciate the difference between them. On the other hand, a language of functional provision has conditioned government pronouncements since the Northcote–Trevelyan civil service reforms of 1854. This is abstract and abstracting, and lacks the subjective component required for culture to be meaningfully processed. Standing in front of a canvas by J.M.W. Turner or listening to a song by Nick Cave, we feel moved/unmoved/disappointed/elated/something. The policy process, dead as lead, ‘track[s] outcomes to allow for more specific targeting of programs’ (CA, 25). Unlike education and health, cognate areas with a deal of homogeneity, culture is diverse in its aims, forms, and impacts. The language of functional provision copes with this up to a point. Beyond it, it just feels barking mad.

The federal government’s recently released Creative Australia, progeny of Paul Keating’s Creative Nation (circa 1994), does pretty well on the language score, however, with waffle mostly kept to a minimum. Since Whitlam established the Australia Council as a statutory authority in the mid-1970s and doubled its operating budget, there have been four major reports in the cultural area. Each was an improvement on the last, in tone and scope, and Creative Australia follows the trend. Government subsidisation of culture is comparatively recent, and so a learning curve is to be expected. But it needs to get a wriggle on. The sector – 3.6 per cent of GDP and responsible for some 500,000-plus jobs – is growing fast in size and complexity. Creative Australia talks about ‘convergence’, meaning ease of user interface across multiple media platforms (ahem). But the notion can be understood in a broader way. As the new technologies entering our lives are bedded down, the focus shifts from the bling of novelty to their long-term contribution. Increasingly, they bind with existing mediums – the printed word, live performance, the gallery system – igniting a process whereby points of difference, obsolescence, and commonality are sorted out. The first impact of the digital revolution is over. The crunching sounds now coming from the cultural sector bespeak consolidation, and the appearance of a national policy underscores this fact.

Perhaps the most important thing to appreciate about Creative Australia is that it is shaped by a range of related reports handed down in the past few years. These include the James and Trainor Review of the Australia Council, the Review of Private Sector Support for the Arts, the National Arts and Disability Strategy, the Industry and Innovation Statement, the Review of the Australian Independent Screen Production Sector, and, of course, the Australia in the Asian Century White Paper (the forthcoming Australian Curriculum: The Arts gets a mention in a speculative way). The impact of these reports on the policy varies, both because of their differing content and because they were generated at different times. It is, therefore, a mistake to see Creative Australia as a unified document. It is more like a sock into which a number of lumpy objects have been stuffed, an assemblage of convenience.

Not only is the language of functional provision limited, it is as dull as a wet Wednesday in Wandsworth. Creative Australia mixes up its game by including a few things not seen in its predecessors. There is a useful overview of all cultural expenditure that shows: (i) the ABC is the largest recipient of government support, at $1 billion annually; (ii) most subsidy comes from state and local, not federal, agencies; and (iii) their largesse is scattered like confetti across a teeming range of initiatives and institutions, which each receive, proportionally, a tiny amount of it. This makes the sector resistant to standardisation and general rule. What do a web design company, a rock band, and a slow-food festival have in common aside from the fact that the ABS labels them ‘cultural industries’? Not much, from an official point of view. Perhaps because of this, the policy also includes what it calls ‘case studies’, one-page descriptions of events and enterprises the government likes to support. These are helpful, and show that it is starting to get serious about grappling with the diversity of the sector, not just globally superimposing its own regulatory norms.

At a hundred and fifty pages, Creative Australia is a typically voluminous example of the cultural policy genre (no thinking thin here). The Executive Summary, which is all most people will read, gives the bones of the proposed changes. On the whole, it is an honest condensation of the remainder of the document – but not entirely. For example, the James and Trainor Review, undertaken last year, proposed a radical division of labour between the Australia Council and the Office of the Arts, with the Council now concerned exclusively with art-form ‘excellence’ and the OTA with cultural ‘access’. In the Summary, the OTA is mentioned in passing as focusing on ‘cultural policy and programs supporting national priorities’ (CA, 11). In the relevant section, this becomes a fuller ‘coordinating access to the arts and use of cultural capacity to deliver programs of national priority’ (CA, 55). Only in the Appendix are the words spat out: ‘The Review recommends that the Council and the Office for the Arts undertake a joint program audit. This audit would take account of the Council’s new purpose and apply the excellence versus access filter to current programs’ (CA, 133).

Why the fudge? Partly because the change seriously affects community artists, who will now find the corridors of the Council chillier than ever. But also because other recommendations go in the opposite direction: ‘$39 million [will be transferred] to the Australia Council for the Regional Touring Programs and $22.8 million for the Visual Arts and Crafts Strategy’ (CA, 11). Playing Australia and Festivals Australia, the main programs in question here, are access-focused. While under the jurisdiction of the OTA, they were pork-barrelled by federal MPs in marginal seats, who had direct say over grant allocations – thus the desire to move the programs to the Council. So there is a contradiction between the Review and Creative Australia, but no one likes to wash dirty linen in public, hence the fudge.

Details like these take time to out themselves, both in their impact on declared goals and as what analysts call, with a straight face, ‘unintended consequences’. But cultural policies aren’t in a hurry. As the recent leadership shenanigans in Canberra demonstrate, they are capable of withstanding a change in minister, and often a change in government as well. Because they take so long to generate, once they arrive they stay put, influencing all decisions made in their name thereafter. Creative Australia is just beginning its half-life. As new money is absorbed into old problems, and each sub-segment of the cultural sector (of which there are many) finds its place in the changed policy cosmos, it will be months before a decisive opinion of it can be formed.

‘What do a web design company, a rock band, and a slow-food festival have in common? ... Not much, from an official point of view’

 Two things are evident right now, however. First, the Australia Council will continue its slow trudge towards direct federal oversight. The swag of changes Creative Australia rings through at board, staff, and legislative levels do everything but turn the agency into a satellite of Canberra bureaucracy. In one way, this hardly matters. It was Michael Lynch, general manager of the Council during the 1990s, who began the process whereby its art-form boards – independent, quasi-dysfunctional fiefdoms – became more responsive to top-down directives. Why shouldn’t the Council be cognisant of government? We elect the government to run the country, after all. And the Council’s annual allocation, even at an increased $195 million, is less than ten per cent of federal cultural expenditure. But the Council’s ‘arm’s length’ status is politically symbolic, a public avowal that government regulation will be confined to basic principles and fundamental aspirations – that it isn’t trying to control art. Hence the pride of place the Council occupies in Creative Australia and the lengths taken to show that peer review of grant applications will be retained. True enough. But, in the long term, the Council will lose a further degree of its precious statutory independence.

More positively, the fact that Australia has a national cultural policy is an indication that a whole-of-government approach to the sector is now conceivable. For those who don’t work in the area, this might seem like an esoteric point. But in her recent essay ‘It’s Culture, Stupid’, Leigh Tabrett, a former director of Arts Queensland, vividly describes the waste, conflict, and confusion arising when multiple agencies with divergent agendas attempt to execute cultural projects. These agendas stem from the nature of the sector. It is spread over the economy like butter over bread, affecting a public building here, a precinct there, a time of year, a regional town, an age cohort, etc. In the epoch of liquid modernity, culture is extruded through a thousand different activities and sites, and it is vital that government departments stop messing around and work in a spirit of genuine cooperation. The woolly bits of Creative Australia are thus potentially the most important. ‘A National Arts and Cultural accord … will describe how each level of government will support arts and culture and set out principles for ongoing cooperation … provid[ing] the framework for addressing … complex cross-jurisdictional issues.’ As the cultural sector gets more complicated, support mechanisms for it, like a counterweight, need to get simpler (CA, 65).

How will we know whether these changes do our culture any good? How to evaluate Creative Australia’s progress? A number of statements in the policy make it clear that the government intends to enlist both its own agencies and university researchers to ‘measure … aggregated economic, social and regional impacts … including the broader benefits to the Australian community’ (‘Tracking and Targeting’, CA, 120). Another fudge. While some aspects of culture can be unitised, the notion of ‘broader benefit’ is a harder nut to crack. One person’s drunken daub is another’s Jackson Pollock masterpiece. Or take the plays of Patrick White: at what point do we measure their ‘cultural value’ – when they were violently repudiated in the 1960s, or when they were vociferously lauded in the 1970s? In fact, the whole idea of measuring cultural value is nonsense. Some cultural outcomes are a matter of critical discernment. They must be judged. You can count the number of adjectives in a novel. You have to judge the concatenation of their artistic effect.

If the government is serious about evaluating culture, what is needed is a new marriage between quantitative and qualitative research methodologies; a new insistence that the numbers flung around in support or detraction of the sector are disciplined by empirical description, critical awareness, and practical understanding. It will require state-of-the-art economic modelling to ensure that baseline data is accurate and meaningful. But it will also require an accessible language by which the results can be publicly mediated. Here Creative Australia stands at the foot of an immense but not unscalable mountain. It means talking Canberra officials out of foot-binding KPIs, and looking at the whole experience art and culture offers at a human level. But that’s culture – an experience sufficient unto itself. It doesn’t have a purpose, it is a purpose. Policy-makers only have to look at their own lives to remind themselves of it.