Australia: a nation at risk

Culture is the accumulated experience of people interacting with one another and their environment.

Why is culture important? Is it because the cement of social cohesion, like friendship, is the bond of common experiences?

A 1983 US report by The National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation At Risk, warned that nation against slipping into a mentality of mediocrity and over reliance on the nation’s natural resources and sounded the alarm bells that “History is not kind to idlers”. Many argued that the report over emphasised the importance of focusing on mathematics and science education, at the expense of the arts and social sciences, to minimise the risk of falling behind other industrial economies.

More than 20 years later, in October 2003, Simon Brault, Vice-Chair, Canada Council for the Arts, delivered a speech to a Culture Ministers’ Conference in Halifax that examined the intrinsic virtues of culture and its impact on individual and community development. He noted the now keen interest in the specific relationship between arts and culture and the economic and social development of communities.

Three years later John Gordon, of the OECD Statistics Directorate, delivered a presentation on the Importance of Culture To the Well-Being of Societies. By that time, the economic importance of culture was obvious to Chinese entrepreneurs who were starting to ask if China’s rich cultural heritage could be translated into products of universal appeal.

The economic importance of culture was further reinforced in February 2008 when NESTA published Beyond the creative industries: Mapping the creative economy in the United Kingdom, a report aimed at accurately measuring the contribution of the creative industries to economic activity.

In the meantime, in October 2005, UNESCO had approved the adoption of a new convention on protecting and promoting cultural diversity. The need for protection came from US pressure to extend the free trade regime of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to cultural products. When that didn’t happen quickly enough the US sought the same outcome by including broadcasting and audiovisual commitments in bilateral trade agreements, including its free trade agreement with Australia.

In the lead up to Australia's ratification of its agreement with America many people (PDF 114KB) involved in our arts industries aired their concerns Not surprisingly, their protests seemed to fall on deaf ears. In the year following the agreement Australian exports to the US declined, while US exports to Australia increased. One wonders whether this remains the case, both generally and in relation to cultural trade.

What intrigues me about all this is not the intrinsic interest of the topic but the question of what underlying malaise has prompted such vigorous and escalating attention to culture? Why are countries now concerned about the importance of culture and the consequences of its decline? Is social cohesion diminishing? With such widespread concern, where does Australia rate on the “cultural misery index”?

Society has followed economics down the path of selfish individualism. Every day there are fewer opportunities for common or joint cultural experience, and hence for gaining shared points of reference and developing common preferences.

If art in all its forms creates culture, and culture inspires art, where and what is our Australian culture? Surely we are at risk of becoming a nation of “exhilarating ordinariness” if we continue to define our culture by reference to our "lifestyle”, or by resorting to an idealistic assortment of “mateship” and “fair go” values (PDF 240KB) that in reality are simply a dusty relic of a distant colonial past.

Albert Einstein spoke of imagination as being more important than knowledge because knowledge is limited. It is not surprising then that an Education Professor, Elliot Eisner, discovered that the mental abilities and disciplines developed by the arts include: the ability to wrestle with problems that have no single correct answer; the ability to analyse a problem from many different viewpoints; the ability to absorb new information even when immersed in a project; the ability to change strategies and even set new goals; the ability to work with others towards a common goal; and the ability to imagine what doesn’t yet exist.

Obviously art isn’t just the social frosting. Renaissance Florence is a case in point.

Art is everywhere, in just about everything we see or touch in our daily lives. Early in June 2005, the Hivos Culture Fund organised an event called Beyond Diversity: Moving towards Millenium Development Goal No 9. Its topic was the importance of supporting art and culture and its findings revealed that:

• the more people suffer violence and poverty, the more art they will practice and the more support they should receive;
• in times of war and poverty, when the most basic human needs are least satisfied, people create;
• when cultural life is vibrant, the brain drain is reduced: intelligent young people stay inside their society, and migration to the "rich" world goes down;
• arts and culture are the main force against social stagnation;
• culture is now a major source of income. Supporting cultural production in developing countries creates an economic counterforce and protects local income;
• those without power are supported and given voice by men and women coming from the arts and culture sector;
• the definition of what development is always comes from the cultural world; and
• political projects fail if their cultural component is rejected.

Columnist Tamim Ansary pointed out that “Reading, writing and arithmetic are probably enough if you want to produce a nation of competent clerks. But developing leaders, visionaries and entrepreneurs? That’s another matter.”

We know that many Australian artists (the creators of our culture) are living on the poverty line: it is well documented in Throsby & Hollister’s report Don’t Give up Your Day Job.

We also know that we have “lost” up to one million younger Australians to the opportunities (PDF 106KB) they can find only by living and working in exile.

Perhaps the ongoing loss of the nation’s “A” grade students prompted the Australian Government to conduct its 2004 Senate Inquiry into Australian Expatriates. The report is worth reading for its discussions of the extent of the Australian diaspora: the variety of factors driving more Australians to live overseas; the costs, benefits and opportunities presented by the phenomenon; the needs and concerns of overseas Australians; the measures taken by other comparable countries to respond to the needs of their expatriates; and ways in which Australia could better use its expatriates to promote our economic, social and cultural interests.

Although other countries are quickly realising the importance of their creative sector to their societies in both monetary and, more importantly, in non monetary terms, it appears that Australia’s lack of appreciation of our creative industries is as enduring as the national delusion that we are a country of cultural significance. And it certainly doesn’t seem to have shifted in the last 50 years. In 1963 architect and writer Robin Boyd described this ignorance of the arts and the poverty of establishment tastes in both architecture and popular culture in his book The Australian Ugliness.

As recently as September last year the then treasurer Peter Costello responded to a call by Labor to support artists on welfare by saying:

Poor old artists: they are on welfare and they do not have enough time to paint! We had better intervene! Let me tell you what you do have to do if you are on welfare. Here are your obligations: you have to keep a job diary, which would ask you to record 10 job search efforts every fortnight. I do not think that would get in the way of the next Mona Lisa.

How creative would our politicians be, living on $15,500.00 per year?

Future Directions international discussed the need to strengthen Australian identity in their 2007 publication Australia 2050: An Examination of Australia's Condition, Outlook, and Options for the First Half of the 21st Century. It suggests that:

... given the reality that globalisation and wealth creation have ensured that society's focus is increasingly in the short term, it is essential - if Australian society is indeed to prosper as a unified nation-state until 2050 and beyond - that Australians understand how they will sustain their societal spiritual values in an environment of enormous secular pressure ... History has shown, for example, a withering of spiritual values in times of great secular distraction: rising wealth, short term focus on material gain, etc. But will society be ready to return to (or have the core memory and structures) a recognisable spiritual set of values and hierarchy when times become less easy and more challenging?

It goes on to say:

... Identity may be one of the most complex aspects of the Australian equation, yet one of the most important in determining the success of the nation. It is the driver for productivity, educational discipline, the creation of goals, and the determinant of harmony and happiness. It is the intangible which determines the tangible.

Australia clearly must consider its future beyond the “natural resources boom” and work towards supporting itself through the export of elaborately transformed manufactures, services and culture. But to export culture we have to develop it, and Australia, perhaps like America in 1983, is a nation at risk.

Developing culture takes time and requires support; it is not something that can be manufactured by governments. At least the enduring benefits of culture to Australia, both as a vital ingredient to our internal vitality and as a sustainable export, are becoming more clear and better documented. The Rudd Government should be off to a good start if it holds true to the pre-election promises it outlined in Federal Labor Arts Policy Discussion Paper. Its forthcoming Ideas Summit also holds promise, as does the recent announcement of the “Prime Minister’s Literary Award”.

But it does seem that the Rudd Government faces a significant challenge in many areas - from film, to literature, to theatre, linguistics, music, and dance - to encourage both public and private investment on the one hand and to preserve our culture and independent thought on the other.