Talking to the cultural luvvies

End the culture wars and make way for a renaissance - Opinion - smh.com.au

Julia Gillard gave an address to someone last night (the SMH doesn't say who,) but the edited version of it reported above certainly indicates it was a vacuous effort at reminding the cultural luvvies (as if they needed it) that Labor is the one who really loves and supports them. Some extracts:

We need to get a real conversation going between our cultural producers and the public. This isn't just about elites; it involves all of us. It's time to end the culture wars.

Within TV what examples does she give? Not exactly hard to guess:

Another good start would be for our TV networks to take seriously their commitment to providing quality Australian content. Recent dramas such as Curtin and Bastard Boys show what can be achieved...

Presumably, it's the Whitlam career, the Hawke ascendency and a TV version of Keating: The Musical that she is hanging out for. (Personally, I would prefer to see a musical interpretation of the Latham Diaries, but I am not sure even Julia wants to see that.)

More pap follows:

This great Australian cultural renaissance could be one of the most important national investments we could make, because Australian culture is ideally suited to the challenges of today.

Kissy kissy arts/cultural community. We will give you more money; remember Keating?

Now to cover the aboriginal cultural lobby:

We should never forget Australia's indigenous culture is one of the longest-surviving cultures in the world and we should never forget to be proud of that fact. We can also learn from it. Climate change is giving us an urgent interest in doing so.

We need to develop a new respect for the reality of our harsh physical environment and adapt to its changes. Aborigines were never passive occupiers of the land. As we have, they moulded the land as it moulded them. But we're leaving far too big an ecological footprint and have much to learn from indigenous land management and ecological knowledge.

We should be proud, Kimosabe? Seems a bit of unwarranted cultural appropriation going on here.

As for what we can learn from Aboriginal land management, the lesson I take is: yes go ahead and mold the land, it's there to be turned from forest into grassland by regular CO2 producing burning, but if that is what you need to survive comfortably, then go ahead.

It's a feature of her side of politics that soft-headed thinking attempts to give moral credit to a pre-industrial society for only modifying the landscape to the extent that they could without bulldozers and dynamite. Oh, and for making it "sustainable" for 40,000 years. I trust that the extinct megafauna probably don't see it the same way as Julia.

Of course, some local Aboriginal knowledge may be ecologically useful, just like the knowledge of any non aboriginal who has had a family living in an area for, say, 100 years. It's just the suggestion that indigenous land management is "special" or more moral than what modern society does that irritates.

Julian ends by talking about the movie Happy Feet:

You might think I'm pulling a long bow in drawing conclusions from an animated film about a dancing penguin named Mumble. But Mumble is a man - or should I say, a penguin - for our times. He won't conform. Instead of singing like everyone else, he dances. And along the way he uncovers some important truths about the need to change our ways.

Australians are a bit like Mumble. In terms of world culture, we're unique: young, unusual, at times exotic and usually undermining authority. We can choose our path. We shouldn't feel we have to sing along in harmony with the rest of the world to have a positive effect on it. But we can dance like no one else. The last thing we need is culture warriors trying to force us to conform.

How exactly have the "cultural warriors" been trying to force conformity?? By suggesting the arts community should be more self sustaining and able to produce products that the public wants to see and read ? By pointing out that the bureaucratic systems for funding arts have in fact been producing material that conforms to a soft left view of the world ever since the cultural revival of the 1970's? By noting that historians who are directly relevant to things like High Court cases have made (at best) careless claims in some of their arguments?

Julia doesn't really dislike cultural conformity; she just wants it to conform to her view of the world.

Silly Julia.