Arts Policy: A Change in Direction?
For more than twenty years it has seemed that the arts and the Labor Party have had something of a special relationship. Certainly, the Whitlam years did see a significant bloom in the arts, but perhaps it should be recognised that some of the seeds had already been sown. While it is true that the Australia Council that we have today was brought into being via legislation passed during Gough Whitlam's Prime Ministership, the organisation was built upon the existing Australia Council for the Arts, a body first proposed in 1967, by the then Liberal Prime Minister Harold Holt. In the statement announcing the new Arts Council, Holt also announced the establishment of the Australian National Gallery. After Holt's untimely death, John Gorton continued with the establishment of the Council, and supported other arts developments, notably the Australian Film School. As Justin Macdonald's useful account of Federal arts activities from the late sixties to the late eighties, Arts, Minister?, regularly shows, both sides of politics have had their good and bad points when it comes to supporting the arts. After all, it was Malcolm Fraser, that champion of "the user pays principle", who said "art is not some-thing that can be judged by harsh economic criteria"-but of course, at that time, hardly anyone would have argued that the arts were an industry.
Although Labor's relationship with the arts com-munity has generally been given a positive gloss, it has had its share of rough patches. Back in 1986 the arts community was less than enthusiastic about both the tone and some of the proposals put forward in the House of Representatives Standing Committee's Report, Patronage, Power and the Muse... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline