Ben Eltham, Australia Council Strategic Plan: where is the detail?, ArtsHub, 19 August 2014

There is precious little detail in the Australia Council’s new Strategic Plan, and big questions remain.

What are we to make of the Australia Council’s new ‘Strategic Plan’?

The presentation was certainly impressive. There was glitz, there was glamour … there was even Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, just off the plane from Kiev.

But delve into the glossy eight-page brochure handed down yesterday, and there is precious little substance. Only eight pages? It’s more of a pamphlet than a plan. Little detail is provided. Big questions remain.

Let’s start with the big picture. Does Australia still have a national cultural policy? Judging by this document, no.

Labor’s legacy was a $230-million national cultural blueprint called Creative Australia. It wasn’t perfect, and there were those, including the current Minister, who mounted substantive criticisms. But it was the first whole-of-government federal cultural policy in two decades. There was new money. There was also a new policy direction that promised a more joined-up national approach to arts and cultural funding and regulation.

The Strategic Plan doesn’t even mention Creative Australia. Nor does it contain the phrase ‘national cultural policy.’

The inescapable conclusion is that Creative Australia is dead. Whatever direction the Coalition is taking arts policy, it is apparent that the previous blueprint has been junked.

That’s a tragedy, because nothing has been put in its place. The Coalition went to the last election without a cultural policy, and 11 months into office, George Brandis shows no sign of formulating one.

As I’ve argued many times, cultural policy is bigger than the Australia Council, and bigger than ‘the arts’, narrowly conceived. Creative Australia encompassed the Australia Council, Screen Australia and the national cultural institutions, but also a broader palette of cultural practices, and important new attempts to negotiate federal-state agreements over cultural policy, recognising the key role played by state and local governments.

Read more here.

Excerpt from Australia Council website: