Bizarrely, Communication and the Arts was only one of four Departments to be pulled apart and ‘merged’. With 5 Department Secretaries to be laid off come 1 February 2020, and with the PM offering no guarantees that there won’t be significant layoffs as ‘the great combining of 2020’ begins, it must be feeling a lot like Christmas in the public sector at the moment.
It should also be noted that this “shake up” of the public sector, comes with the PM’s self proclaimed reasoning that, “having fewer departments will allow us to bust bureaucratic congestion, improve decision making, and ultimately deliver better services for the Australian people.” Although of course he’s a little vague on how that’s actually going to work, especially considering that the Department shakeup will not be reflected in the Ministry Portfolios or the shape of his Cabinet. It’s also reassuring to see that Federal Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety, and the Arts (and don’t they go together like wine and cheese) Paul Fletcher has said… absolutely nothing about the shakeup.
All of this is to say that this newfound assault on Arts and Culture is… not newfound. It is a consistent, unrelenting attack on something that is in no way valued by our leadership. Not just today – but ever. We, as artists have been at war for years – although the assaults come so infrequently, and so insidiously, that it can be hard to keep track.
But we have to.
We must keep track of the minutiae. We must find a way to maintain the rage – because even as the week comes to a close, the anger is dying off. The interest is waning and that cannot be allowed to happen. It must be maintained at all costs.
Our political system is built to diffuse the noise made by minority classes and smaller ‘insignificant’ groups. To ignore it and to obfuscate until it is lost in the machine, and the consistent, practised ignorance of politicians who are trained in empathy and how not to answer questions.