Republished from yesterday’s Crikey with permission.
The Australia Council, an organisation in almost constant flux, has again spun the bingo barrel and pulled out a new round of surprises in its funding announcements — this time in the theatre sector. Eleven new companies have been granted triennial funding by the Council’s Theatre Board, while the same number have had their funding axed.
The announcement continues a recent history of wrenching change in the Commonwealth’s arts funding agency. In 2005, then-CEO Jeniffer Bott pushed through an organisation-wide restructure (labelled a “refocussing”) that led to two of the Australia Council’s funding boards being abolished. Out went specific Boards to support new media and digital arts, and community arts. In came some impressive-sounding “community partnerships” and a special department called the “Inter-Arts Agency”.
As respected ANU academic Jennifer Craik has argued in her book Re-Visioning Arts and Cultural Policy the Bott restructure was not really about addressing the major issues facing the Australia Council and its client organisations. Instead, “the restructure was more about bureau politics than policy reform.”
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
I’m thinking of heading to the Powerhouse this afternoon to see Rachael Brady play @ Live Spark, where she’s launching her new album, somewhere sunshine:
….drawing on the best of folk, roots, blues & jazz influences: billie holiday meets jack johnson meets joni mitchell meets rickie lee jones - soul buoying, intelligent, acoustic quasi pop with equal parts grunt and delicacy…..
I saw her live a few years ago @ the Troubadour - always neat to support a Brisbane muso who combines a bit of a political theme with excellent tunes. Will post some photos later if I take any good ones! Now that I’ve got the heavy lifting on the phd thesis out of the way, and semester’s wrapping up, I’m really looking forward to getting out to some more gigs, so today might be a good time to start!
I kinda wish Kevin Rudd had never put his thoughts on Friedrich Von Hayek on paper, because had he not we’d have been saved some appallingly ill-informed “debates”. Although, if expert psephologist Janet Albrechtsen is right, Rudd’s articles on Howard’s Hayekian “brutopia” won Labor the election, so perhaps I should take back that wish.
My contention throughout the global financial crisis has been that blinkered ideological thinking has been worse than useless in explaining it or proscribing remedies, and that indeed the pressure of events has exposed yawning chasms in the coherence of ideology, and what we might call its fit with reality.
That’s never been more evident than in a truly absurd column today from Alan Wood, which argues that Hayek has a lesson for Rudd in the story of the bank deposit guarantee.
Well it’s been a fortnight so it must be time again to condemn. Here’s a 28th open condemnation thread. What’s getting up your goat this week so far? Which evil political, cultural, social, musical, religious and other phenomena need condemnation? (Or loud denunciation?)
You can condemn anything you like except Kaki King. Though you can condemn me for not knowing about her til I saw Spicks & Specks this week.
When talk of a sporting merger with our trans-Tasman cousins comes up, it usually relates to putting together a decent rugby team. But, at the moment, the Oceania cricket team looks like it’d be a hell of a lot more competitive than the Australian one, who just got completely thumped by India in front of tiny crowds in Mohali.
Specifically, we could do with New Zealand’s captain, Daniel Vettori. While Bangladesh aren’t exactly of the same class as India, how’d you like a bloke who took nine wickets bowling off-spin in subcontinental conditions, and topped it off with two half-centuries to take his team to victory? Given the uninspiring performance of Shane Watson, and the continued absence of Andrew Symonds, Jacob Oram might be a better bet as an all-rounder as well.
Failing that, you do have to wonder about the Australian selectors’ decision to leave out left-arm spinner Beau Casson, who bowled reasonably well in Australia’s tour of the West Indies, particularly after Bryce McGain got injured. Was Cameron White - excellent one-day slogger (not to mention, a Victorian) that he is - really going to be a better option?
When I first discovered FiveThirtyEight.Com (courtesy of Down and Out of Sài Gòn on one of the American election threads here at LP, if I recall correctly), I thought of Nate Silver as America’s Possum. Coincidentally, there’s a profile of Silver published in New York magazine which makes some very similar points about the emergence of a statistician doing psephological wonkery as an avocation into a major source of expertise and information on elections as an article sounding that theme from Monash University Journalism Professor Chris Nash in the new edition of the Pacific Journalism Review.
Just think what elections would be like without Possums and Silvers! If all we had to rely on for psephological goodness was the dead tree media…
There’s been a fair bit of discussion around here from time to time about the Rudd government’s proposals for ensuring merit based appointments to the boards of ABC and SBS, a matter of quite a deal of interest because of John Howard’s habit of appointing the most ludicrously provocative culture warriors possible. Even from the point of view of the right’s own pseudo-Gramscian (counter) march through the institutions thing, these appointments were completely counterproductive - the lack of any broadcasting experience on the part of the appointees negated their ability to scrutinise or shape management proposals. Howard, I suspect, was playing something of a double game, appointing chairs such as Donald McDonald and Maurice Newman on one hand and keeping up the “balance” pressure with appointments such as those of Ron Brunton, Janet Albrechtsen and Keith Windschuttle. The resulting ire also helped maintain Howard’s cred with the culture wars commentariat.
Labor promised last year to eschew political appointments, and introduce a selection panel at arms length from the Communications Minister. The final appointment would still be ministerial, but any appointment not recommended by the panel would have to be justified and the justification tabled in parliament. The procedure is outlined here. Ex pollies and senior political advisors are banned from appointment.
There are now two vacancies on the boards of both ABC and SBS, and the panel has been announced (note that it hasn’t been appointed by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy but by PMC Secretary Terry Moran). By the way, you’re reading about this first on LP - it hasn’t been picked up in the media yet. The panel is: Continue reading ‘ABC and SBS boards selection panel announced’
It appears that no matter what the ABC does it just can’t find enough sympathetic Coalition voters to balance a Q&A studio audience and keep Senator Abetz happy.
Mr Scott said the ABC pursued “a number of different strategies” to bring together a more diverse audience, including contacting law and accounting firms, the Australian Retailers Association, the Sydney Chamber of Commerce, the Australian Christian Lobby, the Australian Family Association, Young Liberal groups and every state Liberal MP within one hour’s drive of the ABC’s Sydney studios.
“We have tried a number of different things to try and ensure that we have all the viewpoints represented in the audience and I think we have,” he said.
“I understand that Liberal MPs were approached asking whether in fact they were aware of people who might like to come and join our audience.”
Of course he forgot to memo the ABC board and I’m surprised the Young Liberals couldn’t find a bus load of guys like this charming young chap within an hours drive of the ABC studios?
Or maybe it’s just that they are all too busy charting the complicated metrics of bias in our cultural institutions and wasting everyone’s time making Senate submissions to attend.
Gary Sauer-Thompson has a really good point to make about the way that Colin Powell has justified his decision to endorse Barack Obama:
Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama on Meet the Press was based on a form of public political reasoning reasoning that addresses issues not personalities, and engages in analysis not demonization. It is a thoroughgoing critique of McCain’s issue-free, fear-mongering campaign and a rejection of the politics of scapegoating and bullying that have defined the Bush years.
As Sauer-Thompson observes, Powell’s response to the constant invocation of Obama’s “Muslim” middle name is also equally as significant (and there can just be no doubt that the McCain campaign’s linking of Obama to “terrorists” is meant to reinforce such suspicions - which have been put about all year by the noise machine). Powell has joined an increasing number of prominent moderate Republicans - such as Susan Eisenhower and Lincoln Chaffee, to name only a few, who have rejected the political tactics of division and emnity which have characterised recent GOP campaigns. While the wingnuts would no doubt live to shriek another day under an Obama presidency, a popular rejection of the poisonous culture wars would be a very significant event indeed.
Bruce Moore’s new book, Speaking Our Language: The Story of Australian Language got a fair bit more press coverage - in the news pages as opposed to the reviews sections - than is usual for a tome authored by an academic. And why not? It’s a lively read, and one that is likely to inspire a lot of curiosity and interest above and beyond the questions of whether Ned Kelly spoke with an Irish or an Australian accent and whether talking like Alexander Downer and Crocodile Dundee at opposite ends of the accent pole is on the way out.
What I found most interesting about Moore’s work was the close attention he gives to the intimate links between language, place and culture. (Incidentally, there’s something of a moral here about how cultural studies first arose - a tale told neatly by Raymond Williams in Writing in Society - as a counterpart to the separation of supposedly timeless aesthetic qualities from their social contexts.) Moore tracks the creation of new words, shifts in meaning and the appropriation of Indigenous names to the distinctive geographical and social formations of a culture forged by the interplay between colonisation, landscape and dispossession. The ups and downs of the reputation of Australian English follow the ebb and flows of nationalism, particularly as related to Britain and the idea of Empire.
Moore is well placed to communicate the results of recent academic research on the origins of accents - dispelling misconceptions about the putative derivation of the Australian accent from “Cockney” (he demonstrates in passing that “Cockney” didn’t mean what we think it means in the Nineteenth Century) intermingled with Irish forms of speech. After all, as he argues, the population composition of all the British outposts in the Southern hemisphere was quite similar - yet very distinct accents developed in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Falklands. He draws on research done in New Zealand to establish that new accents form through a process of selection among children of the second generation. Continue reading ‘Australian accents: Speaking Our Language‘
I have to confess at the outset that I haven’t read the report - I am really busy with work at the moment and I simply don’t have time (or energy when I do have time), but I wanted to comment instead on the practice of not reading. I was struck by this when reading Mark’s post from last night about the reactions of Gerard Henderson and Kevin Donnelly to the report released by Stuart Macintyre’s history curriculum panel. Donnelly, when interviewed on Lateline (and why is it necessary to interview him - for balance? … so that the substance of the story can be obscured by inscription in a “history wars” frame - what happened to journos perhaps reading the report and reporting on its substance not a press release?) couldn’t actually point to anything in the report which would support the line he wanted to run about a “black armband view” and wanted to mutter something dark instead about Labor being tricky about pretending not to be as left wing as they are. Incidentally, that’s the cunning new strategy that Chrissy Pyne came up with the other day, if we believe his ghost writer Glenn Milne.
Similarly, Hendo appeared to be reacting to a press release. Now these characters are held up as “public intellectuals” and their assemblage of titles (thinktank director, educator/consultant, etc) supposedly represent authority and expertise. Obviously, they’re just going to push the political line they run with constantly, but what’s happened to the idea that you should actually inform yourself about what you comment on?
Something very similar is operating with the reaction of Warren Mundine to the NT Intervention Review. Andrew Bartlett asks some pointed questions:
Yet almost all the attacks seem to be ignoring the evidence about what has been happening on the ground, and the views of the people that live there, instead treating policies such as universal compulsory quarantining of welfare payments and scrapping the permit system as sacred totems which cannot be touched, regardless of the evidence.
Marcus Westbury’s excellent series Not Quite Art returns to ABC1 tonight - @ 10pm, with a replay on ABC2 on Sunday @ 7pm and streamable on iview. Stilgherrian has more.
Reporting of the initial proposals from the National Curriculum Board for directions for history teaching in schools is concentrating on the suggestion that Australian history be embedded within global contexts. Given that there has already been a predictable furore of confected indignation over the appointment of Professor Stuart Macintyre to chair the history panel, there’s no surprises in reading that Gerard Henderson fears such a focus will interfere with learning facts and Kevin Donnelly warns of a return to a “black armband” view of history. And Tony Abbott has written his own mini-curriculum:
History classes should start with the history of the Jews, then move on to the Greeks and Romans, then the history of Britain, Mr Abbott said.
None of this seems to me to be particularly informed comment, or worthy of the importance the history warriors themselves supposedly place on the issue. It’s clearly absurd to teach Australian history as if it doesn’t have a global context.
Stuart Macintyre’s views are outlined in this interview.
What surprises me, though, is that no one has picked up on the fact that Macintyre’s justification draws heavily on Anna Clark’s work in her book History’s Children: History Wars in the Classroom. Clark interviewed a large number of both Australian and Canadian school students on what they liked and disliked and would like to see in the teaching of national history. A world history context was a theme brought up by the students again and again. Some of Clark’s research is highlighted in this article in Overland.
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