A week and a day after giving the arts the best news it has had in 20 years, the Arts Minister Simon Crean fell on his sword for reasons that had nothing to do with the National Cultural Policy.
Whatever one’s feelings about the leadership of the ALP, the loss of Crean is a disappointment for all of those who welcome Creative Australia and the many excellent initiatives it contained.
But will the change at the top make a real difference to the implementation of the policy?
It’s worth remembering that a National Cultural Policy for the next 20 years was not a Crean-initiative but a core promise of the Labor Government in the days when Kevin Rudd was Prime Minister. The National Cultural Policy was mooted not by Crean but by Peter Garret in his role as Federal Arts Minister back in 2009.
Though there is no question Crean did a great job driving the policy and, in particular, achieving cooperation from Treasury and other government departments, the policy is not dependent on him.
The sector may now benefit from the very long waiting period and negotiations. So much has been invested in this policy that it is not just a political manifesto dependent on one Minister and we have every reason to think a well-constructed and costed policy will survive the movement on the front bench and be championed by the next Federal Labor Minister for the Arts.
But therein lies the problem.Yesterday’s leadership spill did nothing more than increase the chances that the next Arts Minister to hold the post for any significant length of time is now sitting on the Opposition benches. The Opposition has had nothing positive to say about the National Cultural Policy and clearly has no commitment to implementing an expensive policy, albeit one that is an excellent investment in Australia.
Coalition arts spokesman George Brandis told The Australian last week that an Abbott-led government would ‘feel bound by nothing in the National Cultural Policy if we are elected to government later this year’.
The Opposition need do nothing to gain that opportunity at this point. Crean’s call of a the leadership spill yesterday was another blow to a Gillard Government, already behind in the polls. It is a great pity he did not concentrate on what he was doing well and butt out of the disastrous leadership speculation, which is distracting and damaging to the arts sector – among many others.
The real loss of Crean at this point is not the loss of a good Arts Minister but the further reduction of the likelihood that a Government that spent four years developing an excellent National Cultural Policy will be around to implement it.
