Author: justinoconnor

In March-April 2024, Professor Justin O’Connor launched his book Culture Is Not An Industry in a series of talks across the UK and northern Europe. Professor O’Connor also gave a lecture on the book to UniSA students and lecturers just prior to his booked-out Adelaide launch.

This recording of the approximately hour long lecture, highlights the key elements of the book.

About the book: Culture is at the heart of what it means to be human. But twenty-five years ago, the British government, adapting Australia’s “Creative Nation” policy, rebranded art and culture as ‘creative industries’. They were now to be valued for their economic contribution, and treated as an industry generating jobs, growth and innovation. Where does that leave art and culture now? Facing exhausted workers and a lack of funding and vision, culture finds itself in the grip of accountancy firms, creativity gurus and Ted Talkers. At a time of sweeping geo-political turmoil, culture has been de-politicised, its radical energies reduced to factors of industrial production. This book is about what happens when an essential part of our democratic citizenship, fundamental to our human rights, is reduced to an industry.

Published by Manchester University Press, Culture is not an industry argues that art and culture need to renew their social contract and re-align with the radical agenda for a more equitable future. Bold and uncompromising, the book offers a powerful vision for change.

The book launch was co-presented by UniSA Creative and the Creative People, Products and Places Research Centre (CP3).

Michael O. Johnston, Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University interviewed Justin on the New Books in Sociology podcast.

You can listen to it here: https://newbooksnetwork.com/justin-oconnor-culture-is-not-an-industry-reclaiming-art-and-culture-for-the-common-manchester-up-2024

Justin was recently a guest on the Cultural Studies podcast by Toby Miller. Justin discusses the creative industries discourse, cultural industries and his new book, Culture is Not an Industry.

Part Two of four essays on Culture and Economy – on how art and culture got tangled up in economy sometime in the 1980s. They are written looking backwards, from the perspective of the Covid-19 crisis of 2020, in order that we might go forwards. Part Two takes a closer look at the idea of the music industry.

1. Music: A History of Neglect 

On August 5^th, Jenny Morris, chair of the Australasian Performing Rights Association gave a National Press Club Address. It was a heartfelt evocation of the power and potential of Australian music, of its current painful contraction in face of the viral emergency, and a direct accusation of government (State and Federal) neglect not just in the present disaster but over many long years. It was a strong and well-informed articulation – succinctly summarised by Laura Tingle at the ABC – of a question raised repeatedly right across the arts and cultural sector: not only are we culturally important but we are a real (and potential) export industry, so why do you ignore us? 

Jenny Morris’ accusatory plea comes out of her role as APRA chair, an organisation crucial to the livelihood of Australasian musicians and the flourishing of its ecosystem, making sure that at least some of the money sloshing around this multi-billion-dollar industry gets redirected to its creators. In being a major advocate for music and musicians, she is one of the good guys and can be counted amongst those that actually put some money where their mouth is. What follows is not meant to be a critique of Jenny Morris, or indeed Gordi (who spoke her words at the address) but tries to account both for why this plea was necessary and why it is likely to fall on deaf ears. It is an attempt at reculer pour mieux sauter, to just pull back and think, the better to leap into a future that is coming at us hard and fast. 

Morris’s argument represents the ‘new normal’ in cultural policy advocacy, one that combines a self-evident appeal to cultural value – ‘humanity’s pulse’, ‘our connection to time and place’, ‘bridges between people’ – with economic value – ‘a good song creates jobs’, adds to ‘Australia’s property assets’, ‘generating big incomes’. This is the ‘win win’ scenario that found expression in 1994’s Creative Nation, and which went onto inspire a hundred advocacy documents, often under the moniker of UK New Labour’s ‘creative industries’, re-imported later that decade. Its rhetorical logic is irresistible – the power of popular culture, in the form of a major export industry, delivering a positive international profile where ‘our global popularity multiplies every year’. However – for this is ultimately is the point of Morris’ address – it is resistible, very much so, music’s historic relationship with government one of being ‘publicly adored but rarely supported, often seen as a nuisance, and regularly shut down’. Why?

In part, according to Morris, this is something specific to the music industry, or what is variously described as ‘Australian music’, ‘rock music’, contemporary music’ or just ‘songs’. Although literature and other arts (including classical music), along with film, were supported through the establishment of the Australia Council in the 1970s, only in the 1980s was ‘contemporary music’ deemed, by a ‘government committee’, worthy of support. This belated recognition was based on its popularity and economic potential. According to the committee, “rock music is Australia’s most popular performance art, is the country’s largest cultural industry (larger than all the others put together) and is capable of producing high export earnings”. So why has government support been so unforthcoming, given that, according to Morris, this statement remains true today? 

Morris gives four reasons. First, music policy is challenging, as it would not just involve the Arts portfolio but those of Trade (exports/ tourism), Foreign Affairs (cultural diplomacy/ touring), Small Business (‘we’re all small businesses’), Planning (regulation of venues), and Education  – and of course the complex State-Federal interface. So basically, the need for joined-up thinking has knocked it into the too-hard basket. Second, poor quality music education and (something to which we will return) an over-emphasis on classical music. Third, ‘absurd planning decisions’ and ‘over-zealous council… red tape’, closing down live venues or regulating them to within an inch of their lives. Fourth, a ‘cultural strait-jacket’, which is in effect a trade policy strait jacket: we do not protect our music industry through content quotas, either because of negotiated international treaties – such as the ‘US Free Trade Agreement’ – or complaints from local radio and TV broadcasters and foot-dragging from global streaming services on local content reporting. The government has not acted on this, coming up with neither carrot nor stick to support Australian music production and performance. 

Is this an explanation? The ‘music industry’ is a very complex thing, often described as an ecosystem or ecology, involving a range of different skills and roles (musicians, sound technicians, managers, accountants, events management, marketing, web builders and so on) and economic interests (creators, labels, studios, events, set designers and builders, logistics, IP lawyers, streaming services, global corporations, marketing, A&R services, and venues – from the back-room of a pub to huge stadia). Supporting popular music is, on the surface, very different to say, providing grants to creative writers, visual artists or contemporary classical composers. But much the same could be said about the challenges of supporting the film industry, or radio and TV, or publishing, or video games. Basically, any cultural industry – defined roughly as the mass reproduction and distribution of cultural goods – is a complex entity which would require some kind of the all-of-government approach Morris seeks for music. In fact, scratch a bit deeper and there are similar challenges in contemporary visual and performing arts, with their own complex institutional and educational infrastructures. In the end though, in terms of public policy, it should not be such a tall order to support such activities. It’s a bit fiddly, and fast-moving, each sub-sector facing their own distinct challenges (music is different from film and games), but what public policy object isn’t like this? Other countries manage it (look at France, or Canada, or South Korea), and so too could Australia: if there was a will.

That this comes down to lack of will can be seen in the failure/ refusal to impose local content quotas, and indeed the further deregulation of audio-visual content in the current crisis. The legal scope for such interventions is amply provided by the UNESCO 2005 Convention on the Promotion and Protection of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, to which Australia is signatory. Many countries have used the treaty’s notion of ‘cultural exception’ and avoided (mostly) WTO censure, especially now this agency has become a ‘paper tiger’ whose strictures are regularly flouted by the global hegemon itself. Australia has chosen not to use it. More tellingly, this lack of will can be seen in the failure by the current government to do anything significant to alleviate the suffering of the music sector during the pandemic. This neglect, which it shares with the rest of the cultural sector (and of course, higher education, especially arts and humanities), is pretty well documented by now.

Musicians give their ‘time and money to the nation’ whenever there is a crisis (such as the recent bushfire benefits) and they now need support in return, letting out a ‘scream for help’ in a recent open letter to government, the signatories of which ‘read like the greatest homegrown festival bill of all-time’. But the current crisis, Morris tells us, merely exacerbates long-standing issues in the music industry. Music is the ‘original gig economy’, ‘we are just small businesses’ earning money from live performance and licenses from businesses using music, both now severely curtailed. Musicians work a lot of the time for free, being ‘the biggest subsidisers of our artform’, giving just ‘for the love of it’. The government continues to look away.

Yet despite this long history of neglect from government, and her portrait of a sector marked by the precarity of a gig economy which is ‘unsustainable’ (backed up by multiple studies right across the cultural sector) Morris’ response is to double down on ‘music as industry’. Goldman Sachs estimate the global music market will be worth US$140 billion by 2030. Australia has a potential to earn a 5% market share. Australia can be a ‘net exporter’ of music (if Sweden, Canada, or Korea, why not Australia?): “With the right approach, and a singularity of purpose, Australia can join that handful of nations who are net exporters of music, and create a sustainable and thriving local industry”. 

This argument has run now for a quarter of a century, and it has failed dismally. Not only has the government failed to buy into ‘music as industry’ in any meaningful way, but the very growth of the global industry, and Australia’s ever more visible mark upon it, has still resulted in widespread precarity, with musicians themselves the primary subsidisers of the industry at its grassroots levels. It appears as if the music sector – and the cultural sector generally – are the very last believers in trickle-down economics. That there is a ‘national industry’, which can, with government support, become a ‘net exporter’, capturing 5% of the global market, and that this would somehow result in a ‘sustainable and thriving local industry’ – this is the illusion that keeps us crashing in the same car. 

2. Industry and Nation

Essential to this illusion is the idea of a ‘national industry’, one that can be grasped in terms such as ‘net exports’ and ‘global market share’, the steady increase of which will add to a shared national (music) pie, providing sustainable income and employment. It took flight from 1994’s Creative Nation, which repositioned commercial culture as an ‘industry’. This was something more than an accountant’s totting up of employment and value-added. It came after a long recession – ‘one that Australia had to have’, according to Paul Keating – and a prior decade in which older manufacturing industries had been left to decline and state-owned companies, such as the Commonwealth Bank, Qantas and Telstra, privatised. Culture – contemporary, commercial, multicultural – was part of Keating’s optimistic embrace of a global trading future for Australia, with the cultural industries representing a new source of employment. Creative Nation needs to be read alongside 1993’s Working Nation, with its concern to get back to something like full-employment in a new global era. 

However, if music was the new car industry, it would not be one protected by tariffs, integrated into government industrial planning systems, along with the labor unions, or be privileged recipient of government procurement contracts. It would not be patted on the head but expected to stand on its own two feet, left to sink or swim – just like the shrinking car industry. Music was recognised as an industry at the very moment industry policy itself was effectively abolished as a central pillar of national capacity building. The nation was no longer the self-contained economic unit, exports paying for imports, governments looking nervously at ‘balance of payments’ charts. Australia was now part of a global trading economy, and it was not the job of governments to support industries in the old way. Global competition was good, and markets were the most efficient way of punishing the inefficient and rewarding winners. The Australian music industry, thriving commercially as part of an expanding global market for (mainly) US-Anglo ‘rock’, could be expected to get out there and score some goals. 

The first problem this scenario encountered was the classic one of challenging incumbent players. The ‘global’ music industry was dominated by long established US, UK and Western European corporations. The 1990s saw a process of concentration (mergers/ take-overs) and cross-ownership (music, film, TV, leisure, telcos), as the music industry moved from basket-case maverick to corporate respectability, multiplying its ‘feeder-routes’ from local scenes through the integration of the ‘indie’ record labels. After some serious wobbles, the arrival of the internet, MP3 and the rise of streaming platforms have reconfigured the global music industry but still not dented the vast inequalities of wealth and power within it. Nor, despite great creative success, have any major Australian corporations broken into this global playing field. It is symptomatic that Morris’ main focus is on the amazing rota of Australian artists who have ‘made it’ – these provide the ‘cultural capital’ and the intellectual ‘property assets’ (managed in part by APRA) of the Australian industry. But this is not where the big money is, which remains with distributors and aggregators. As we have seen, despite the growing numbers of successes, musicians are still living precarious lives and subsidising the sector via their labour of love – or what Andrew Ross called ‘sacrificial labour’. 

The problem of structural inequality internationally is reflected in the domestic music industry, something masked by arguments about the music industry as a ‘net exporter’, suggesting a rising tide floats all boats. The ending of national industrial policy was part of a shift to neoliberal forms of governance. Since WWII GDP and export metrics had been indexes of a national productive growth, distributed within that nation via a commitment to full employment, subsidised public services, redistributive taxation and the integration of Trades Unions into the state system. Economic nationalism meant import replacement and self-sufficiency, plus exports to pay for the imports that were needed. It meant ensuring private capital was productive for the nation as well as generating profit. Hawke and Keating saw this system off and Howard built on their legacy. GDP growth and export metrics still counted, but in a different way. They were indicators of an economic health now attuned more to global credit ratings and uncoupled from any actual commitment to full employment and redistributive taxation. 

In the new orthodoxy of the 1990s such commitments, along with the burden of public services and employment protection that went with them, were seen as liabilities to be managed not the central goals of a nation’s political economy. Economic growth, driven by deregulated markets, would makes its way, after some initial pain (the Kuznets curve) down to the least well-off members of the community, primarily via employment along with welfare payments and public services. These last two were now dependent on the unhindered ability of the wealth creators to create wealth, and ultimately accountable to ‘taxpayers’, who were to oversee this transfer of funds from the ‘productive’ (profitable) to the ‘unproductive’ (unprofitable) sections of economy and society.

After 40 years and an ever-growing mountain of data, it is clear that this wealth has not been shared, at least not equally. Australia has now been in continuous (compound, not simple) growth for 28 years, but the proportion of the growth accruing to wages rather than capital has barely moved. The country has witnessed rising inequality, stagnant wages, declining demand, festering student loans, growing household debt and over-leveraged mortgages, accompanied by the exclusion of many sections of the population from access to secure employment, home ownership or affordable rental housing, viable superannuation and the rest. Social services and welfare benefits have received ever small percentages of national spending and have barely kept pace with inflation in the last decade. 

Yet music (and other creative) industry advocates still imagine, when promoting net exports and industry development strategies, that ‘we are all in this together’, that industry growth would necessarily ‘float all boats’: as opposed to some very successful artists, plus some commercial radio and TV, one or two big festivals or promotion agencies, a few on-line marketing and PR firms, not to mention the global streaming services which already reach into the living rooms and ear-pods of millions of Australians.  

These arguments are as old as the hills. Simon Frith and colleagues in the UK made them repeatedly, as the rhetoric of ‘the music industry is bigger than steel’ took off under New Labour in the late 1990s. The ‘music industry’, they suggested was in fact a ramshackle ‘ecosystem’, as we outlined above, encompassing garage bands and student unions all the way to stadium rock and global music and streaming corporations. When the UK government finally spoke to the ‘music industry’ (as opposed to staged PR events) it was precisely these big players that they invited to Number 10 for orange juice and Danish (beer and sandwiches having long disappeared). This was pretty understandable from a government point of view: who else would they talk to if they were to take these ‘invisible’ exports seriously? The question then, and remains – whose industry, whose interests? 

3. Double-Edged Swords….

‘Now’s the time for Australia to make a big statement about the economic value of our culture’ – but what if that economic value is lacking? If Australia is not yet, despite its creative successes, a ‘net exporter’ of music then perhaps we should simply apply Paul Keating’s ‘hammer test’. If it takes $15 to make a hammer in Australia but $5 in China, then import the latter and release the other $10 dollars into the consumption economy. (Indeed, along with expanded credit – more hammers and coffees – this is basically how western economies have grown over the last few decades)? It’s what happened to the textile industry, which employed far more than music could ever hope to. Should not the same be true of music – or films, books, TV content, games for that matter? If Netflix and Spotify can do it cheaper and more efficiently, why not let them? This is the logic of global trade, a logic the 2005 UNESCO Convention set out to resist; in effect it is more or less the attitude of the current government, prodded along by the Institute of Public Affairs. Music-as-industry, it turns out, is not always win-win. After arguing for the power of music based on it being a cultural industry ‘bigger than all the others combined’, it can be hard to suddenly slam on the brakes and start talking about the need to protect music as part of our national identity. 

What if an industry strategy cut against our wider cultural values? What if Australia became a ‘net exporter’, based on one or two massive talents, doing what Abba did for Sweden (‘bigger than Volvo’)? The question then would not only be how this success could be made to benefit the industry generally (not guaranteed), but also whether the industry strategy should now be to try to produce more of the same, ramp up investment and generate some kind of ‘new Aussie pop’ as a lead brand. Or promote First Nations as a new kind of antipodean ‘world music’ brand? Or, as I have heard proposed, we use digital analytics to identify what genres, and sub-genres, of Australian music are doing well, where and with whom, and seek to ramp up supply to satisfy that market – perhaps in a just-in-time system like fast fashion. I assume there would be some serious qualms about such instrumentalization of Australian, and First Nations’, music. There are values in music that don’t stand being reduced to pure economic calculation, and sometimes these might require to be asserted against music-as-industry. 

We can see this in music education, one of the four strategic areas on which Morris focuses. Music education, she says, is good in all sorts of ways, encouraging participation and attendance from First Nations’ children and in ‘low socio-economic and remote areas’, generally improving students’ grades and achievements. Good, but ‘even better, teaching composition and songwriting invests in Australia’s intellectual property, so we’re creating careers and generating income for the nation’. How should we read this statement in the middle of this viral emergency, where, in response to a catastrophic collapse in overseas student numbers, the government (in a bad omen for music industry advocacy) has let higher education, the country’s fourth largest export sector, swing in the wind? All the better to push through reforms, deeply rooted in an ideological antipathy to the quasi-independent universities, which seek to marginalise the arts and humanities, and other unproductive indulgences, all in the name of ‘job ready’ degrees. It is highly unlikely that this government would ever countenance making ‘song-writing’ part of the national curriculum for schools or, something Morris did not call for, exempting popular music degrees from the degree price hike. Yet how is this educational rationale – songwriting ‘to generate income for the nation’ – different from Minister Tehan’s concern to produce those ‘job ready’ engineers, nurses and teachers for the nation? 

Leaving ideological antipathy aside for the moment, if this industry rationale for including songwriting in the school curriculum was to be taken seriously, then it should be subject to stricter economic – ‘job-ready’ – tests. South Korea is the current posterchild for its national music industry, building, according to Morris, ‘national pride’ (AKA soft power) around its songs. They have a powerful, government-led industry strategy (through KOCCA) around K-Pop, mobilising its large scale ‘developmental state’ apparatus to apply industrial development techniques acquired (with Japanese and Singaporean help) since the 1950s. As part of the new music content strategy large numbers of young, good-looking (though singing ability helps) kids are taken, via talent spotting operations, into very competitive industry training programmes, then selected for a very efficient and well-resourced music production machine which has moved the country from a purely local, to East Asian and now global player. 

This is an industry strategy, but it has little concern for anything called ‘culture’, other than ‘soft power’. It is not in the slightest grassroots led, but certainly does have an all-of-government approach. Be careful what you wish for. South Korea’s ‘net export’ success inevitably enhances the nation’s economic and cultural capital, both of which recirculate through the local music scenes to a degree. But the ‘indie’ music scene and the livelihood of musicians outside the K-Pop corporations have not benefited significantly. The rapid gentrification of the hip parts of Seoul through an influx of K-Pop money is well-documented. I doubt if Morris had this kind of industry strategy in mind. Her (and Gordi’s) emphasis is on songwriters, creators and performers of original content and with an ‘authenticity’ suited to a particular kind of career path whose milestones are ‘Coachella, Bonnaroo, Glastonbury, Lollapalooza and Governors Ball’. Education for this industry would require a specific kind of professional songwriting training, one that combines (as per all the advice on the Reality TV talent shows) ‘finding one’s voice’ and ‘being yourself’, with a practical knowledge of what will sell. It would not just be about the craft of songwriting but also the coaching of creative selves, how to nurture and present them to the right people. This something at which schools are likely to be very bad. Which is why this is best learned in a ‘garage’, and the aesthetic sensibility, the intuitive knowledge of the field, the swagger of the habitus, better honed by those daggy music venues and sticky hangouts that form the real basis of a grassroots music industry.  

It follows that school songwriting programmes, as an industrial investment, should surely be subject to some kind of economic evaluation. If the key goal (apart from boosting school attendance) is ‘creating careers and generating income for the nation’, then some kind of graduate earning test could be applied. But as Morris shows, and it’s backed up by reams of evidence, most musicians are working in unsustainable conditions. Should we be educating kids for a lifetime of precarious employment? Or is it that the education of more songwriters would boost the talent pool and enhance exports, ‘growing the pie’? But is not the problem always too many song writers, too many artists, driving down the price of labour, wannabe stars two-a-penny? A more rational strategy would surely be some kind of musicians’ guild that would strictly limit entry, and enforce guild-only workplaces with set rates, like US media unions. They might then want to take songwriting out of schools and put it under the control of, say, a musicians’ guild academy, or the TAFEs, or the growing number of private sector popular music courses currently available. If kids want a future earning potential for themselves as musicians, then they ought to pay for it.

I’m extrapolating the argument to suggest that there are other reasons to value music – and of course Jenny Morris and Gordi are completely aware of this – than contributions to exports and GDP, and that these other reasons are frequently at odds with the logic of music-as-industry. The response to this might be that this is a question of balance. So it is, and I will have something to say about this below; but these kinds of arguments are not really about balance, they are about justifying one kind of value (cultural) in the language of another, more dominant, one (economic). Arguing for music education in terms of future careers and export earnings is doing precisely this work of translation, and if it uses this advocacy sword it must be prepared to die by it too. 

4.… And Dangerous Petards

Education has been linked to some kind of industrial logic since the 19^th century. Compulsory elementary schools teaching literacy, numeracy and self-discipline required for factory work; compulsory secondary schools and technical colleges for a more complex advanced economy; state-funded higher education from the 1960s, for technicians, engineers, scientists and legal and medical professionals; the explosion of paid-for university degrees from the mid-1990s in light of the new ‘knowledge economy’. But it has never been just about industry. Education has also been about citizenship, about the ability of individuals to participate (economically, socially, politically) in the nation, whether in its liberal humanist or state corporatist versions. In both ‘advanced’ and ‘developing’ countries investment in education, the long view has been about building a nation’s ‘culture’ in the broad, civilisational sense of that term – the collective store of scientific, artistic, technical knowledge whose (in theory) common possession is held to ensure that nation’s collective development, materially but also spiritually. 

There has always been an instrumental approach to education, making it serve the immediate needs of the nation, though these needs are highly differentiated, such as between the professional and governing class (an elite non-instrumental learning) and for the ‘learning to labour’ industrial workforce (skills-based, job-ready). Governments are right to try and identify what these needs might be and tailor educational opportunities accordingly, just as we are right to argue about the (in)equities of class, gender and ethnic access to such opportunities. However, there have always been limits to what governments can actually predict about future jobs, not just because of ‘disruption’ (photographic chemists to pixel engineers etc.) but because societies get more complex and globally connected. What actually interests students is also unpredictable, as with the explosion of social sciences and humanities in the 1960s and 70s, or media and cultural studies in the 1990s. These are the known unknowns of mass education in the modern world, and they need to be managed of course. States try to direct via a range of carrots and sticks, but they do so also with a view to the more general capacity building of hard-working, law-abiding citizens (or taxpayers), and to the wider cultural (intellectual, technical, scientific, artistic) capacity of the nation to adapt to the future and make it their own. 

Such investment in mass education marked the era of nation-building, giving people an education to get them the jobs that the nation needed. It was never exactly sure what kind of jobs or if they would properly utilise the education given to them at public expense. Education was general – though in some countries there was a STEM/ Humanities divide from age 16 – with specialisation at university, college or through apprenticeships. The value of such investment for the future is described in economics as a ‘social discount rate’ – the relation between present investment and future benefit. It is often applied to climate change – pay now for benefit later. Without getting into arcane mathematics or philosophical discussions of Pascal’s Mugging, let us say that it is impossible to determine future benefits in direct cost-benefit terms, there are way too many variables, the unknown unknowns. Whilst we have good reason to invest in education now for future collective benefit, seeking to broadly direct it towards what we need as far as we can determine this, we are unable to put a precise cost-benefit figure on it. We invest in education, in part with instrumental economic reasons, as far as we can determine these, and in part as a compact of hope with the future. We are passing onto the next generations the best of what we know so as to give them the best chance of flourishing in the future. Education has thus always been central to a national (and international) culture viewed as a process of individual and collective development, through tools, knowledge and our understanding of the world.

To return to songwriting. The idea that education in such a ‘craft’ would be provided by the state via the national schools’ curriculum, because it can lead to a career in songwriting, is not only fanciful but something to be resisted. What other element of the national curriculum is so directly tied to a specific industry career, and one that employs such a small number of people at below average wages (if they get any). Chemistry students might go on to be chemists, a field far wider than ‘songwriter’ – from those people behind the glass in Chemist Warehouse, to those mass-testing Covid-19, or assessing the quality of crude oil, or turning coal waste into fertiliser and so on. We can say the same about English, Physics and Art classes.

Music education – and it has to be framed in this broad way if it is to make any dint on a school curriculum – might be justified in terms of ‘creative thinking’, or cognitive development (‘listening to Mozart makes you good at maths’), or improving school attendance. It cannot be tied to a specific career in the ‘cultural industries (around 2-3 percent of national employment), let alone music, let alone songwriting. The pressing task at the moment is to defend the continued existence of music, and the other creative arts, in the school curriculum. The current strategy is to talk about creativity as a skill applicable across all professions and industries, and that these creative skills can occupy a ‘gap in the market’ left by the rise and rise of AI technologies. These are both dubious propositions, analytically (creative arts have no monopoly on creativity) and ethically (‘become an artist and keep your job whilst others lose theirs to a machine’). But nested in the kernel of the creativity argument is an unconditional gift from the present to the future, passing down a capacity for knowledge different to that of the technical and scientific disciplines, one essential for individual and collective flourishing.

That music education – like other creative arts – can and should be part of this future capacity is the argument that needs to be made. Some people will make a career from it, Australian might become a net exporter. All of that would be welcome, but it cannot provide the foundational rationale for music education. To make it so is to be hoist on your own petard.

The current government’s education policy doesn’t believe in social discount rates either, but rather than providing a generous gift to the future, it simply doubles down on present cost-benefit. Governments can’t know what the job market will be, just like they can’t plan the economy. Only markets, Hayek’s social calculating machine, are capable of processing this information. The best way to determine the value of the economy is to let its consumers decide. Education is an investment in human capital, often by the older family members in the younger. Degree students get the benefit of high wages so they should pay (not the working-class taxpayer), and if they have to pay then they will calculate what is most beneficial to them. At the same time as Hawke and Keating abandoned a national industrial policy, they also ended a national education policy, turning it into a state facilitated market. Given that students had to pay, and universities (increasingly) dependent on these payments, then the market would decide what was the most valuable degree, based on future job prospects. Faith in the future was now a privatised economic transaction between universities, the job market and students (or their parents). 

The impending multiple catastrophes resulting from this way of thinking go beyond university education and research, reaching down into student and family debt, across to a collapse in a shared sense of public good and solidarity, and forward into deeply troubling social, economic and environmental challenges which this government does not think are worth the present cost of trying to mitigate. Its most immediate flaw can be seen in the current government intervention. Humanities and creative arts have been immensely popular in terms of market choice – these kids sovereign consumers actually pay for the privilege of being indoctrinated by Cultural Marxism after all – but they are now to be ‘nudged’ by fee hikes because those sovereign consumers were making the wrong choice. In the current governmental bin-fire of ideology and incompetence, it is best if advocates for music industry education step back, slip on an N95 mask, and move to higher ground.

Musicians need to earn to live. If they make it internationally all the better. The Australian music industry office attending South-by-South West is good too, and how it should be. I attended MIDEM in Cannes on two occasions with the Manchester Music Office. It would be stupid for Australian music not to be represented, though I’m not sure what the direct ‘cost-benefit’ is, apart from what it says if you are not there. It’s a sign of support and compared to the huge expenses incurred by just one Australian university international marketing event, the handful of people sent to these global music conventions is bargain basement. So too there is good reason for music development offices in the states and territories. But saying this is different from justifying music education, and the whole state support for music in Australia, and its collective heritage of 60,000 (+ 232) years, in terms of a music industry export drive. 

Why are they forced into making their argument in this way; why must they translate the cumulative cultural value of Australian musical heritage into an economic value? Why must an aspirational vision for the flourishing and prospering of our national music be expressed as becoming a ‘net exporter’.

Arguing for the value of music education based on jobs and exports is symptomatic of the widespread corruption of language and understanding by a long-rampant economic rationalism. This language is no friend to music advocacy and should be avoided like the plague. Its wholesale adoption by music and other cultural sector advocates from the 1990s was an abandonment of art’s long historical opposition to life being defined in purely economic utilitarian terms, that there were other meanings, of sense and spirituality, that ‘made life worth living’. It has paid dearly for this culturally but also, in the end, economically.

Morris places contemporary Australian music in a long historical context. We should not be surprised by so many acts breaking internationally: ‘For tens of thousands of years the songlines of First Peoples shaped this sacred land. There’s something about this place.’ Is this then to hoovered up into the necessary infrastructure for a net export industry with 5% global market share? Is this what the songlines have passed down to future generations? Or is this language not precisely part of that brutally instrumental exploitation of the continent’s indigenous human and natural ‘resources’, still hell-bent on an ever-expanding growth, with little thought for what it might pass to the future beyond a burnt-out, pock-marked landscape, and a First Peoples scarred by dispossession, incarceration and poverty? 

5. Dream Factories

What the response to the C-19 pandemic has only confirmed is that this government is not interested in arguments about the economic impact of the music, or any other creative, industry. When it stepped forwards onto the policy stage in the late 1980s, blinking in the unfamiliar spotlight as one of Australia’s new modern industries, it assumed it would now be treated like the rest, an industry of ‘proper jobs’ deserving of government investment and support. This was not to be. Even with Labor it was mostly a rhetorical flourish with little by way of actual policy. Music advocates presented themselves as an ‘industry’ to the new Howard Coalition government in 1996, but it did not take them seriously an industry and persisted in seeing them as a culture, one it did not like, popular music situated deep inside the culture warzone. In a sense the Coalition was right. 

Music could only become an ‘industry’ by redefining what an industry was. Industry, more or less equated with manufacture, used to mean integrated systems for the production and distribution of goods for need (demand) and profit. The decline of traditional manufacturing and the growth of the service sector shifted the weight of ‘industry’ from factory-based production to home-based consumption. So too the emphasis moved from needs to wants, or desires. In the 1970s it would have been the Holden car in the picture above that spoke ‘industry’. In the 1990s it’s the beach party, consumers and their desires that count, the Holden becoming simply a stylised life choice amongst others. Music and the cultural industries were about desire, and as we all know desires are endless. You can have too many cars, but never too much music.

Economic growth came from expanded domestic consumption now centred on leisure-based wants rather than the family ‘necessities’ required for the (mostly female) work of domestic reproduction of the (mostly male) workforce. Cultural goods, previously divided between the cheap popular and more restricted ‘up-market’ middle class, now became mass consumption items driven by desires that could translate into significant levels of expenditure. This has been exaggerated. In the 1980s John Myerscough estimated UK spend on cultural goods at around 4 percent of total national expenditure. Recently A New Approach put this at 5 percent – hardly a world transforming rise but significant. Of course, if we add in electronic hardware/ software and the telecoms and internet providers the figure goes up, though we need to remember that Australia is a ‘net importer’ of hardware and software, just as it is of cultural goods.

Music-as-industry supplied leisure goods to households and individual consumers. It was an ‘industry’ like gambling, footy, sex-services, hospitality, accommodation, tourism and so on. These industries do not sell themselves to governments based on the needs of the nation but on its wants, in the form of discretionary spending. The market decides, sink or swim. Governments promote such spending in general, as the more, and more frequent, transactions there are, the greater the growth in GDP, and thus tax returns, especially after the introduction of GST. The problem was always visibility to government. Tourism is a huge earner, from visitors domestic and international (‘exports’), and has been organised enough to get direct state investment – Tourism Australia, and its state and territory versions – and other tourism friendly legislation. Last year, for example, retail and hospitality lobbying got the government to reduce penalty rates. Sports Australia won huge amounts of investment, as witnessed in the ‘sports rorts’ scandal. Casinos are routinely given VIP treatment by governments. Urban and regional infrastructure and planning decisions are built around large retail chains. ‘Big Pharm’ is deeply embedded in the lobby system.

In order to flag their needs to government as something more than a mendicant arts sector, music had to present itself as industry. This meant counting as an industry, producing the impacts statement: tourism is worth $X billion per year, so too retail and hospitality. Music learned this in the 1990s, aggregating its ramshackle ecosystem into a single ‘spend’ or value-added figure, coupled with employment statistics. Music is bigger than steel, culture employs more than mining, and so on. It learned to see itself as an industry, got comfortable with market shares and value-adds. The first production of the new music industry was itself as an industry. 

The ‘creative industries’, newly re-imported from the UK in 1998, only confirmed these beliefs. Creative industries floated on the back of the ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’, expanded to include a cutting edge ‘creativity’, Schumpeter meets the artistic avant-garde in creative destruction: ‘breaking is making’. This was to be a small and micro-business economy, grassroots, disruptive and entrepreneurial. Had not the music industry pioneered this, before it was given a name, bands and labels and festivals and venues the original start-ups? The old Holden got a thorough pimping-up with the help of a few Ted Talks. Music business seminars were as important as guitar lessons, and music export agencies now sharp-elbowed symphony orchestras at consulates and embassies celebrating Australia Day.

What they did not realise, and nor had Keating, was that in this new post-National global economy it was not ‘production’ – those who organised it and those who did the work – that was to count, but ownership of property, capital and wealth. The music industry, beyond a few top players, was historically short on all of these. 

6. Credit Ratings

Industries need to present powerful single voice to government, one that can authoritatively promise to give them what they want. The single voice is not just so as to reduce confusing, multiple messages: we’ve all been to cultural sector conferences, where the cats, yet again, refused to be herded. More importantly, this single voice ensures that governments are rewarded, given credit. Quite understandably they want to be seen to be helping. This can be done via hi-viz events and shiny new buildings, at both of which, on occasions, culture excels. Sitting a minister next to Cate Blanchette at an awards event will do more for advocacy than a thousand KPMG multiplier equations. Politicians like all that, but they also seek long term political reward for services rendered, which boils down to donations, votes and jobs (for them, that is, not on Deloitte spreadsheets). 

The Pharmacists Guild has an inordinate amount of lobbying clout. It donates primarily to the Coalition and, one assumes, when it comes to voting, its members know precisely on what side their bread is buttered. Construction, real estate, banking similarly. Mineral and fossil fuel extraction involve less a revolving door between government and industry, more like an office co-share. The recent ‘sports rorts’ scandal is interesting for more than just being a particularly egregious example of ‘pork-barrelling’, which of course has a long history. What stands out is a new level of careful calibration to marginal constituencies, integrated with sophisticated modern electioneering techniques, now linked to the robust assertion that such decisions are ultimately the gift of the minister not any intermediary bodies. The diminishing of the ethos of public service is not simply about a particularly sleazy bunch of ‘pollies’, but far more systemic. 

As governments have moved away from any attempt to think about national ‘need’ as far as industry is concerned, trusting the market to make these decisions on their behalf, then their relation to that industry has inevitably changed. The walls between government and industry, enshrined in various codes of conduct and ‘Westminster’ systems, have become paper thin. Indeed, if public administration is now built on the quasi-market principles of New Public Management, and governments themselves are expected to operate in the ‘marketplace of ideas’, then the influence of lobbyists and the ability of government to directly respond to these, is a sign of efficiency. Governments represent those industries that are best able to represent themselves. They respond not to abstractly aggregated ‘industries’, where breathy advocates try to convince them with consultancy metrics, but to companies or associations of companies that can operate effectively within the government’s clientele networks. Governments and their industry lobbyists share the same belief, that public interest is served best by market efficiency, as indicated by profitability, or a high rating from ‘the markets’. In delivering industry policy it is to those large companies or associations, built on market efficiency, that government looks. The recovery from the Pandemic will be business-led, we are told, and so it makes sense to pack the Covid-19 Coordination Commission with those large, efficiently profitable businesses.

At a systemic level this ‘market conformity’ is policed by global financial markets, who are able to materially affect any government tempted to break ranks by the threat of lowering their credit rating. Jenny Morris is by no means alone in calling for an ‘all-of-government’ industry policy, it’s just that there already is one: deregulation of markets, reduction of ‘inflexible’ employment rights, wage reduction through the restricting union bargaining, lower penalty rates and unemployment benefits set below poverty levels. These all help establish a healthy, growth economy in the eyes of ‘the markets’. And, as we know from the history of the last forty years, and especially since the 2008-9 financial crisis, market conformity requires restriction on the oversight reach of the democratic organs of government. Efficient governmental response to the organised lobbying of powerful industries is oiled further by sharing personnel; ministers might not be businesspeople before they go into politics, but they frequently become so the moment they step down. The ‘revolving door’ between political office and the corporate boardroom ensures that for the politician’s own career at least, calculation of future benefit is made fairly straightforward. 

The cultural sector in general, outside a few big players – Foxtel, News Corp, the Nine and Seven Groups, local offices of Netflix, Amazon and so on – has little money to donate, and probably wouldn’t want to anyway. It is not really an industry worth speaking to, and mostly not one with which one can do business. The more high-profile subsidised arts are useful for the acquisition of cultural capital by corporate professionals and businesspeople, who now crowd out most others from their boards and committees, and are attractive to some politicians (Brandis, Turnbull) though not to others (Abbott, Morrison). Even for the more supportive Coalition ministers, faced by an artists’ boycott of Transfield sponsorship, the cultural sector was seen to lack the requisite gratitude, constantly ‘biting the hand that feeds it’. The boycott brought immediate punishment from the arts minister of the time, threatening that no cultural organisation should receive money if it engaged in such politically motivated actions. 

Few in the Coalition believe there are many votes in the cultural sector; it is more likely to gain votes by the deploying a fashionably populist anti-metropolitan, anti-elite rhetoric, added to a well-worn Australian distrust of artists and intellectuals. It is a combination of ideology and political calculation perfectly illustrated by Prime Minister Morrison’s justification of ‘relief’ money for the sector: ‘it was as much about supporting the tradies who build the stage sets or computer specialists who create the latest special effects, as it is about supporting actors and performers’. 

Music and other cultural industries get more traction at state and local levels, as we shall see in a moment, but even here, the ease whereby the New South Wales government were willing to hobble Sydney’s late-night music sector for over three years (Casino excepted, naturally) speaks volumes about the importance accorded to the ‘music industry’. Labor generally is more sympathetic, for in Australia at least it ‘owns’ creative industry policy and can be expected to reap the gratitude and the votes. But its ‘industry policy’ is mostly rhetoric, the vast bulk of the resources going to the public cultural sector. It’s as ‘culture’, rather than as ‘industry’, that the ALP embraces music, resulting in that odd juxtaposition of cultural value and market rhetoric which so marks the music advocacy we are discussing here. 

Music is an integral part of the contemporary economy of discretional leisure spending, but its dispersal across a ramshackle ecosystem, lacking large-scale, highly capitalised companies who can give the government what it wants – donations, voter gratitude, future employment – means music simply doesn’t cut it. The coalition has little to gain from supporting music either as culture or as industry. Music is ubiquitous and cheap, going on free. The majority of its creative workforce are willing to work for a pittance, providing the give-away content by which others make money. In the grand marquee that is the leisure economy, host to gym chains, global aggregators, internet providers, marketing behemoths, audio-visual hardware manufacturers, telecoms companies, sports/ leisure brands, promoters and big venue operators, music is always present, but, excuse me, madam, sir, could you step away from the cocktails please? Those are for the guests, not the band.

7. Real Estate: Extraction from the Commons

Morris, like many others, is deeply concerned with the survival of live music venues in the face of ‘noise’ abatement which she puts down to ‘red tape’ and ‘over-zealous councils’. No doubt that happens, but for the most part it is nothing to do with ‘red tape’ (that’s usually around security staffing, alcohol and health and safety regulations) but a response to complaints from residents about the night-life whose ‘urban vibe’ often brought them there in the first place. State governments can deal with this when they want to, as did Victoria after the famous protests around the Tote Hotel. Its ‘agent of change’ principle prevented developers coming in, and then objecting. As shown by the special legislation passed by that state to see off a developer challenge to its new Collingwood Yards cultural precinct, it is able to this stretch this principle if required. 

The real problem is the general rise in property prices, and the reclassification of older (lower rent, noise friendly) industrial zones for both commercial and residential use. ‘Gentrification’, that quant word for the systematic giving over of the spaces of the city for the purpose of increasing ‘return on investment’, rental income and tax yields, is a global problem. A hugely expanded financial sector, no longer investing in productive industry, now roams the globe in search of high-return property investment opportunities. Music industry advocates (as in other cultural sectors) attempt to tot-up live music spend (tickets, drinks), travel, accommodation, band and staff wages, and so on. This misses where the real value-added is, and which accrues elsewhere. It goes to all those leisure industries gathered in the grand marquee, but also to the real estate company that has just brought the ground it stands on and whose nearby development it is intended to promote. 

Music scenes – the venues, cafes, pubs, bars, clubs, record shops, rehearsal and recording spaces, indie clothes shops, along with the wider set of (public and private) art, culture and fashion scenes of which they often form part – are immensely valued for what they give to the image and attractiveness of cities. In the 1990s city governments bought the arguments, from Charles Landry and others, subsequently quantified by Richard Florida in the 2000s, for the ‘creative city’: art and culture, as high as you like and as bohemian-multicultural as you like, are good for cities. As we know now (so too Landry and Florida) the proposition that the ‘creative city’ is good for the employment and economic prospects of the city as a whole is dubious; but that it is good for real estate developers, and associated accommodation and hospitality companies, is not at all disputed. Artists and musicians move into an area; it gets hip; prices go up; artists and musicians move out. This is an old story, going back to SoHo and Soho. Some suggested this was good and natural, they can move on to other parts of the city and work the same magic. By now though the game is up. 

In the novel Catch-22 there is a Native American, Chief White Halfoat, whose tribe gets thrown off their reservation because they found oil. They find oil on the next place they moved, and the next. By the end, some bright things at the oil company invented a way to predict where the Chief was headed and got there before he did. In the new millennium, Cool was the new oil. Developers were not looking for ‘going concerns’ to buy, profitable music businesses they might take over; rather, they sought the cultural capital value generated through networks of cultural producers and the rising economic potential bestowed by the urban consumers drawn to the area. Picking up on these urban value currents demanded new skills. Cayce Pollard, lead character in William Gibson’s 2003 book Pattern Recognition, was a ‘cool hunter’, who could walk the city, the eddies of urban vibes feeding directly into her sensorium, and through her to the corporations. We’ve all met them. Now companies such as We Work – who managed to scale up the distributed back-room, old factories and above-the-shop workplaces of the creative sector into a global stock floatation offer – have turned to algorithms, the digital AI sensorium ensuring that wherever the cool-oil is, they get there first.

What cities are belatedly recognising – from London to Berlin, New York to Singapore – is that is it very easy to kill off the scenes that made the city attractive. The problem is that the developers and landowners killing off the scenes are rarely the ones who have to live with the consequences: sales have been made, anchor tenants locked in, city councils inevitably committed to making them work (who wants a failed development on their doorstep?). Local music coalitions may try to assert long-term interests, and all the shops, cafes, hotels and (most) residents want ‘vibrancy’; but as effective demand this pales next to the tsunami-like business model of a cashed-up developer. One can make a ‘business case’ for live music, but it rarely washes with anybody outside a few like-minded council officers. By the time it gets close to treasury it is usually dead in the water. Though councils might ultimately have to live with the declining occupancy and street blight this causes, it takes many years for the pea of a vacant building in Brunswick to irritate the skin of a real estate corporation in Singapore. Developers, like the fossil fuel extractors, tend not to concern themselves so much with Social Discount Rates.

Music scenes, music ecosystems, their producers, intermediaries and paying participants generate value beyond that which provides income (sustainable or otherwise) for those whose work in it. They produce collective social and cultural benefits, which, rather than being shared as part of the urban commons, have been increasingly annexed as private profit by those who own – or seek to own – the land on which these take place. Though Morris and others call for urgent action to defend the live music ecology as part of an ‘industry strategy’, such a call ignores how the language and practice of economic rationalism has transformed planning systems into facilitators of the city as real estate market, the most important metrics for treasury ( and ‘taxpayers’) being increased rental yields and land prices, feeding into tax receipts. Music-as-industry stands no chance (in fact, neither does industry-as-industry). 

Many cities are coming to realise that the only grounds on which to protect such urban music ecosystems are socio-cultural ones, that they provide public value – liveability, ‘place-making’, vibrancy and so on. The challenge here is to develop a new way of talking about music less as an industry, and more as a public good. But if we are to ensure that this public good is not simply extracted by developers, along with large-scale hospitality, accommodation and tourism companies, we have to think more clearly about this public good.

8. From Public Good to Public Extraction

Cultural economists talk about cultural goods as ‘public goods’, by which they mean goods which are not used up in consumption. The Holden car cannot be bought by two people at the same time; my listening to the music coming out if its radio does not prevent all the others on the beach listening to it. Finding ways to ensure user-pays in these circumstances is one of the distinct challenges for the cultural industries, involving a complex mix of turnstiles, tickets and bouncers, subscriptions, distinct physical objects (vinyl, books), digital watermarks and paywalls, and (as with APRA) enforceable copyright. 

There is another more obvious notion of public good: a good (a benefit) provided for the collective enjoyment of the public. In the 19^th century cities, and later nations, provided public goods involving physical infrastructure – gas, water, electricity, roads, housing – and services – public health, hospitals, education, and social welfare. Cultural infrastructure – theatres, libraries, galleries, museums, concert halls, parks, public sculpture – was part of this. In the second half of the 20^th century this public service infrastructure – whether provided publicly or privately, by nations, states, cities or ‘civil society’, became part of our ‘social citizenship’. This was not the ‘welfare state’ conceived as a distribution of social benefits to the needy but a broader political economic compact with its citizens, to ensure each one had (as TH Marshall wrote in 1963)

‘the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to… share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilised being according to the standards prevalent in society’. 

How social citizenship was extended to embrace ‘cultural citizenship’, especially in the 1970s, and the effects of this democratising force on how we think of culture and cultural policy, have been of central importance politically. Which is why right-wing governments have been so concerned to wage a war on such culture. Jenny Morris is correct. Whilst popular music from the 1960s onwards became part of the weft and warp of a modern democratic and popular culture, it rarely had a voice in cultural policy, aside from the occasional bandstand in the park. Unfortunately, as we have tried to show, when popular music was finally ‘discovered’, its articulation as ‘industry’ meant its relationship with this infrastructure of public goods was inevitably distorted. Although attitudes had so changed by the 1990s that ‘commercial music’ was no longer a term of abuse but an index of a vibrant popularity, this merely confirmed it as part of a leisure industry fuelled by private discretionary spending. 

How are we to think of popular music as a public good?

If ‘industry’ is now about wants expressed as purchases, and the leisure industry about the stimulation and satisfaction of theoretically unlimited desire, the public sector is the one that has traditionally dealt with needs. In democratic countries, from the 1940s public utilities and physical infrastructure were mainly (the US is a famous exception) provided directly by states as part of an economy strategy focused on the needs of the nation. Energy, agriculture, mining, transport and manufacture were all set within a strategic planning framework aimed at satisfying national needs, even if these were primarily privately owned. What became known as the ‘welfare state’ provided a huge range of public services in health, education, housing, and social relief payments which were seen to be more efficiently and equitably provided by the state for collective consumption. These services were inevitably based on decisions made by government not individual consumers, who cannot choose to have a free schooling system or health service. They were also set within a broader redistributive goal, in which wealth was transferred from the richer to the poorer sections of society. 

In the 1980s cultural policy began to heat up as the public cultural infrastructure suddenly looked like a 19^th century whale stranded next to our 20^th century beach party. The problem was not only the kinds of art being presented in the concert halls, galleries and theatre (or if art should be locked up in these antiquated places) but how to accommodate the explosion of interest in actually making and doing art and culture.  The was a desire driven by more leisure time, more education, more money, as well as new technologies and new aspirations, of which rock music was a quintessential expression. The very first iterations of ‘cultural industries’, before Keating reduced it into post-manufacturing employment, was an attempt to grapple with the two questions: how to reconcile a democratic public sphere with the ever-expanding commercial interests within it (newspapers, publishing, film and broadcasting mainly) and how to support this upsurge of popular creativity and participation. 

Creative Nation was a turning point, though it didn’t seem so at the time. After 1996 the public cultural sector – including broadcasting – would be pushed ever-backwards as its guiding principle became, as arts minister and IPA member Mitch Fifield suggested in 2018, ‘let the markets decide’. Popular culture – ‘now creative industries’ – would be left to that market, with the state taking an ever-declining responsibility for the arts, now in a terminal state of ‘market failure’. Returning popular music to the public good would require that we revisit some of those earlier debates, but at the same time recognising that the whole landscape of public services and social citizenship has changed almost beyond recognition.

The 1990s saw the progressive privatisation of big state-owned companies, inspired by the UK example. This was on grounds of efficiency, now equated with profitability, itself expressed as returns to shareholders. The shifts brought about by ‘shareholder value’, where management renumeration was increasingly tied to both dividends and credit rating (by ‘markets’ and new agencies such as Moodies), meant that profitability bore little (and sometimes inverse) relation to levels of employment, wages or productive re-investment. As the decade progressed this model was applied not only to private corporations but to the full range of government services, which were provided on need but delivered by profitability. National and local services – health, social benefits, social services, education, transport, pensions, post, roads, prisons, security, garbage – were outright- or semi-privatised, or their delivery outsourced and subject to quasi-market efficiency measures. As with the privatised industries, government sought to turn them into attractive investment opportunities for a growing global finance sector looking for high returns. Rentier Capitalism. 

What was being sold or subcontracted was the public’s needs (some of them natural monopolies) in health, education, social services, transport and so on, to be delivered by companies seeking profits. In the 19^th century the railways in the UK and across Europe were built with finance on a long-term yield of 5 percent. The current rate of return sought by these companies is 11 or 12 percent or more. This is good for finance but also for governments; it means their public services do not weigh down their credit ratings and the reduction in social spending underscores their robust dedication to GDP growth. It also provides for a whole new set of clientele networks, with these public services run by government appointees or deeply enmeshed in the government-lobby system. Even government planning regulations and mechanisms are predicated on a quasi-market system, such as the now abolished carbon-pricing and the infamous Murray-Darlingplan. 

In consequence public services, rather than being seen as underpinning social citizenship, or providing essential social foundations, are now for those who have ‘fallen through the net’, quasi-market systems, underwritten by state credits, providing high levels of return for the efficient operators willing to take them on. As we have seen recent in the aged-care sector, the primary form of efficiency is cutting wages and costs, whilst demanding government pay more. Culture as a public service is entirely privatised where possible (commercial television, newspapers, the NBN, Foxtel etc.) and otherwise it is to have its funding squeezed. The music industry, along with other ramshackle low-pay, low-productivity, low-yield creative industries, barely registers in these calculations. There are few water buy-backs in culture. 

9. Culture as Basic Infrastructure

Even before the Pandemic this situation was being challenged by heterodox economists. Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics was a best-seller, arguing for an economic model which provided for the basic social foundations (need) and restricted overall resource consumption to what was planetary possibly. Economic goals ought to be returned to the sphere of human values and needs, not given over to the mathematics of endless growth. Mariana Mazzucato dismantled the idea that the state can only be a dead weight on private entrepreneurship rather than act as a dynamic agent of change. She sought “a new and deeper understanding of public value, an expression found in philosophy but almost lost in today’s economics”. “Value”, she says, “is not created exclusively inside or outside a private-sector market, but rather by a whole society; it is also a goal which can be used to shape markets”. And, we might add, radically rethink what we mean by ‘markets’.

This is not Economics but Political Economy, and it has direct implications for culture in general, and music in particular. Cultural economists have long told us that culture has value other than the economic, and have itemised these variously as social, cultural, historical, aesthetic and so on. Cultural advocates have sought to emphasise these social and cultural values, attacking the exclusive emphasis on the economic as reductionist or instrumental. What they don’t do is question these compartmentalisations. The economic is what economists tells us it is; we can choose to emphasise cultural or social values but we are not allowed to question how this economic has come to be and who has the power to determine how it is organised. Yet this is what both social democracy/ socialism (explicitly) and neoliberalism (hiding behind ‘there is no alternative’) have done. The burning question then is not about identifying the social and cultural value of these music (or other cultural) ecosystems, but how to transform their economic structure in ways that better deliver to whatever values with which we invest culture. This cannot be done through orthodox, neoclassical micro-economics. 

A group of UK economists and historians identified what they called the ‘everyday’ or ‘foundational’ economy. This is the material and immaterial infrastructure of electricity, water, gas, housing, transport, health, education, social services and benefits, and food. These foundational economies account for between 40 and 60 percent of local economies. They – to which they also added the ‘mundane’ services such as cafes, hairdressers, basic furniture, holidays – are the basics without which it is not possible to say we have that ‘modicum of economic welfare and security’, and we would not be fully participatory citizens. The foundational economy is far bigger than those advanced manufacture, business services or creative industries which are routinely identified as the key to local economic development. Though hollowed out by outsourcing and financial super-extraction, they still provide the needs of the vast majority of the population, those who have few savings, high-debts and over-leveraged home mortgages, relying on wage income and social benefits not rent, capital or wealth. It is these foundational economies to which we have anxiously turned in this pandemic and which many see as providing the basis for a more equitable post-pandemic recovery. Rather than trying to defibrillate collapsed discretional spending through consumption vouchers or cash transfers (such as a new kitchen top) we might look at direct public investment into these foundational services, including social housing, a needs-led economic recovery. 

Yet what stands out in all these three accounts is their lack of any mention of culture (though libraries get a brief mention). Televisions are basic necessities, but not the content they show. Raworth, ‘social foundations’ is similar to the basic rights of social citizenship enumerated in the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. These SDGs do not include culture, despite intense lobbying from UNESCO. In the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, culture is there in Article 28. 70 years later it’s not worth a mention. One of the first tasks for a radical reboot of our thinking about culture is to learn how to speak about it as part of a foundational economy, or even – breaking with the individualising program of Universal Basic Income – a more collective Universal Basic Infrastructure. 

We would need to think about music as an economy but not always as an ‘industry’, in the sense of a set of activities organised around the mass production of culture for profit. The majority of music and the ‘popular arts’ is produced in the interstices of the everyday economy. Music has industry tentacles reaching out to SXSW and Spotify’s corporate headquarters, but the vast majority of the action takes place at the level of inter-locking local ramshackle ecosystems. Much of the value it produces is public value, adding in different ways and at different levels to the social and cultural life of the city – and beyond that to state and nation. It also provides a livelihood and a lifeworld for those involved in its production, though currently withering on the altar of sacrificial labour. But can music be about social need, when it is so obviously about individual desires, tastes and identities, quintessentially private goods?

This is economists’ smoke and mirrors. The very concept of culture is collective, by definition it is about shared meanings; which is not to say it can’t also be unequal and oppressive, but these too are social effects. Art, as articulated since the beginnings of industrial civilisation in the 18^th century, has emphasised values beyond utilitarian necessity, but it was a human spiritual need, not a discretionary spend hived off to sovereign consumers.  Going beyond the utilitarian has always been what art does, though it often looked down at those deprived of the time and money this often required. Art, beauty, form, aesthetic meaning – all these have long been claimed as necessary to life, even amongst those deprived, who sought it in popular culture. This necessity was accepted in patrician fashion by those who built the 19^th century cultural infrastructures, ‘elevating’ the masses. But it was valued by the revolutionaries, as in the Paris Commune, who linked it to free worker and to provide for the collective enjoyment of beauty, what they called ‘communal luxury’. This persisted very strongly in social democratic, socialist and communist movements, especially at municipal levels. 

The extension of social citizenship in the 1970s to encompass culture involved new aspirations, new conceptions of ‘the good life’, opening participation in making culture and judging what was of benefit. It connected with those broader social movements seeking to democratise and extent social citizenship, the social democratic ‘welfare state’ itself. Cities responded by a revitalisation of their cultural infrastructure, not just the buildings but who and how they funded or facilitated the cultural life. Australian cities were ahead of the global curve in the 1980s and early 1990s. These were unashamedly political debates and demands, and extremely rambunctious, especially compared to the whimpered supplication that characterises todays arts advocacy. 

10. Rethinking Music as Public Good

This is a place to which we need to return. To recognise music making and music enjoyment as above all about public value, the social and sonic ecosystem as part of our ‘communal luxury’. Music policy should aim at facilitating its flourishing and helping musicians, managers, technicians and everyday workers make a living, as far as possible. Infrastructure is useful in highlighting the basic, everyday needs which make life possible, and which should rightfully be available to all citizens. Access to cultural goods is essential, but this need has been privatised, both in terms of individual ‘expressed preference’ and as private profit. Even the technical infrastructures – such as the NBN – have been privatised. The live music ecology, the pulsating heart of music culture and the main source of income for musicians and the rest, is difficult to privatise; rather its value-add is recouped by developers, or brushed aside in search of better returns, but in any respect has been left to the predations of the urban land market. 

Music cannot be supported only by local states providing buildings as infrastructure – city or state-owned venues can be useful but necessarily limited in number – nor by direct subsidies as with the traditional arts, as would never ever be enough grants to go around. Infrastructure as ecosystem demands a much more complex set of initiatives, and any such policy would have to radically shift its principle from top-down provision (and all that reporting) to democratic partnership and participation. But ‘ecosystem’ should not make us think of some self-regulating system, which requires only an occasional tinkering. The current urban ecosystem, where a few alpha predators are about to swallow the few remaining herbivores, should disabuse us of this. Political economy requires management, a ‘husbandry’ of this ecosystem within shared, explicit public values and goals. 

Reframe our values and goals: break with music-as-industry, focus on music as part of a flourishing public culture. If acts start to make it overseas – as they hopefully will – then these should be supported and encouraged. Breaking from music-as-industry will move us away from the dominance of Ted-Talk ‘creative entrepreneurialism’ which bears little relation to the way the contemporary economy is actually organised, let alone music. The ‘entrepreneurial self’ is about internalising risk and precarity, uncoupling your own life chances from any collective security and solidarity; if you fail that’s your failure and it’s on you. This has blighted many of the lives of the younger generation. 

We could then be released to explore other forms, some that have been around for many years, marginalised (or made safer as ‘social entrepreneurship’), others quite new.  A state Music Office might start to explore the role of co-operatives in the whole music ecosystem. Venues, aided by grants, cheap loans, and some expertise, might be shifted towards these collective, not-for-profit models (often a recognition of what they are de facto). There is now a lot of work on co-operatives in the cultural sector internationally, and in Australia. Music venues conceived as social spaces and given support and funding on that basis is long-established in Europe and in Australia, though usually linked to recognisable ‘arts’ venues. These can be extended. The Music Office could encourage and promote networks of such venues across the state and inter-state, as part of enhancing the ecosystem. 

There are a range of shared-ownership (including crowdfunding) and secure leasing models; as well as ‘planning gain’ options, where developers need to provide cheap space, and percent-funding, based on the value they gain from such activities. This is not about piece-meal interventions by smart consultants or of-the-peg ideas – pop-ups, short-term creative use, placemaking and activation grants – none of which can make significant long-term changes. This would also extend to the promotion of public digital infrastructure – platform urbanism and the digital commons.

Urban planning is central to this, and music-as-ecosystem thinking would have to engage with this as did early interventions such as Postcode 3000 in Melbourne, a radical reboot of the planning imagination. The prioritization of increased rental and land-value in this would need to be confronted, involving a political economy battle that would not be pleasant. It would have to be part of a wider question of land-use after the pandemic. The lock-down has ripped through retail and local cafes (as well as music) and pushed it towards on-line (as in culture). Though governments want the workers back in their offices, will it ever be the same again? Can we expect those men and women in smart suits, with a coffee and sandwich in a paper bag to be there forever? Bringing these spaces back does not have to be some market-based solution through state primed private spending, but active choices to bring local back into being. It would be linked at one end with our thinking about food and industry supply chains, their dependencies and susceptibilities to momentary disruption exposed. At the other end street activation needs to be more than increasing footfall for renters, but a more holistic conception of urban living in communal luxury. Read Dan Hill’s Slowdown Papers for a glimpse of what this might involve. We might even think of directly employing artists (and thus musicians) as job creation in the form of public works can take inspiration from the practices of the New Deal in the US.

All this would require multiple conversations and deep thinking, and it would have to be done in a more open and participative way. Rather than hand over millions to an accountancy firms to tell you about market share, we might be better places to spend the millions on those laborious conversations between experts and community – citizen assemblies for sure, but also well-resourced local authority planning offices and universities actually capable of engaging in public benefit rather than their own corporate gain. Public goods can only come out of a public service with an ethos of the public good. 

This might come with the promotion of new training programmes on the legal options for running not-for-profits, and university ‘arts admin’ courses might be re-tooled to include these issues, not just grant writing and marketing. We might connect with new forms of heterodox economics, and looking to the developing world for models, not just waiting for a new paper from Harvard Business School to trickle down to the antipodes. 

Australian Music

As I said at the beginning, this is not a critique of Jenny (or Gordi), who was speaking in good faith to a situation of great urgency. It is to say simply that we cannot go on making these arguments as we have done for twenty years, crashing in the same Holden in an ever-shrinking cycle of repetition. It is time to break out. 

How exciting would this be? To think about the music ecosystem – resources, aspirations, possibilities. To think of it as our communal luxury, as part of our universal basic infrastructure, as an essential part of our social needs without which our lives are diminished, with no songs to save them. 

Is this not a better way to start to be true to First Peoples, to think of connecting our common musical practices and spaces, to their sense that life and culture and not separable? To start the work of thinking life like this rather than another attempt to re-float the rusty hulk of music-as-industry rhetoric; let’s just leave this, like one of those failed engineering projects, concrete and twisted metal jutting out into nothing, as a monument to our folly. This attempt would speak to the songlines in a way ‘net exports’ cannot. It would not only talk the language of de-colonisation but begin to materially implement it, and actually begin to listen to a culture that would never, in 60,000 years, attempt to call itself an industry. 

An Essay by Justin O’Connor

This is Part One of four essays on Culture and Economy – on how art and culture got tangled up in economy sometime in the 1970s. They are written looking backwards, from the perspective of the Covid-19 crisis of 2020, in order that we might go forwards. Part One begins with the crisis of the arts in Australia and why they have found it difficult to articulate what this crisis is and how they can get out of it. 

The Agony and the Advocacy

The tweet, by respected financial journalist Laura Tingle, exemplifies much of the frustration in the cultural sector and its supporters with the lack of response by the Federal Government to its calls for help. The arts and culture sector, heavily dependent on live audiences, were amongst the first to be affected by the C-19 lockdown. Very quickly it emerged that many arts and cultural workers would not be eligible for the Jobkeeper allowance because they could not show 12 months continuous employment with one employer. The escalating precarity of arts and cultural work, highlighted by numerous publications and protests over the last two decades, has now become subject of mainstream public debate. This forms part of a general debate around the ‘gig economy’ and the changing landscape of modern labour, and how we might have to re-think the relations between work, income and social protection, from flexible pensions, though Universal Basic Income, to the 30-Hour working week. These are crucial questions, to which we return at the end. However, the immediate concern was two-fold: how could Jobkeeper and other forms of state support be properly purposed to support workers, firms and organisations in arts and culture, and more pointedly, why did the Federal government refuse to do this? 

In some sense this has been a long time coming. Federal funding for arts and culture, including public broadcasting, has been falling since the Coalition came to power in 2013. The ABC, despite being seen to have reclaimed its position as ‘essential service’ in the recent bushfire and C-19 crises, has been saddled with swingeing cuts by an unrepentant Coalition government. The dismal policy failure of the National Broadband Network, compromised and effectively privatised, is just another aspect of this evacuation from public culture and its infrastructure. If some of this can be put down to incompetence, at base it is ideological: the Coalition government, breaking with a century of Australia tradition, deeply resents any form of public provision outside of security and defence. The fate of the higher education sector – an interesting parallel with arts and culture – illustrates this well, as the government managed to rapidly shut down any loopholes through which public universities might claim Jobkeeper.

Laura Tingle’s tweet gives pithy expression to the consternation. First there is photo reference to the fact that the Coalition government, in a recent reorganisation, buried the arts portfolio in a ‘super-ministry’, the absence of ‘arts’ from the name panel reflecting this. Then comes the argument that has been threaded through all the commentary in this space since the crisis began: how is it that the Federal government can overlook an ‘industry’ worth $111 billion? As with the refusal to help Universities, Australia’s fourth largest ‘export’ generator, surely this is pure, self-harming, ideology? These questions were not predominantly rhetorical; there was real mystification as to why this was happening. Tingle’s figure of $111 billion – quoted repeatedly during the crisis – came from a 2018 Working Paper by the Australian Government’s Bureau of Communications and Arts Research (BCAR). The Australia Institute, a centre-left independent think-tank, also laid out the stark econometrics: creative arts employed more people than those two emblems of neoliberal Australia, mining and finance. What was going on? 

There is little doubt that this refusal to help is ideologically motivated. It is not that arts and culture have been overlooked or put aside as some trivial frill, irrelevant to the hard necessities of a national emergency. What the arts and cultural world is slowly waking up to is that the Coalition does not value them, and quite possibly deeply dislikes them. It does not value them despite the metrics of Gross Value Added (GVA) and employment thrown at a government sworn to a ‘laser-like focus’ on ‘jobs and growth’. This aversion to arts and culture is now a global trend amongst right wing governments; the European Far Right campaigns against arts funding, and the new wave of authoritarian rulers look to religion and ‘blood and soil’ as the basis of national cultural policy. The Coalition is part of this trend, and is a tendency certainly demands more investigation and analysis; but we need to start from a different place. 

We want to highlight another aspect of this situation, one that might be more uncomfortable for advocates of the arts and cultural sector but which we believe they must address. Our concern is with the ne plus ultra of arts and cultural advocacy that we now witness: for over twenty years the gamble has been that the framing of arts and culture as ‘an industry’, either in its own right or as part of a broader ‘creative industries’ or ‘creative economy’, would garner more government attention, support and ‘investment’. For arts and culture, in Australia, this has failed, the current crisis merely the final nail. Elsewhere, in countries where governments have adopted a creative industries or creative economy perspective (absent in resource extractive Australia) there may have been more funding for arts and culture, but mostly at the expense of framing these as an adjunct of this new industrial sector. So, we ask here: what did we lose when we started to call art and culture an ‘industry’?

Damned Lies

Let’s start with the statistics, which have been crucial to arts advocacy since the mid-1980s. The $111 billion figure from the BCAR is the total for ‘cultural and creative activity’. Two things should be noted immediately: the word is ‘activity’ not ‘industry’, and the figure refers to ‘cultural and creative’ not the arts. Is this just semantics? 

First, the BCAR immediately urge caution ‘when comparing the measurement of cultural and creative activity with activity that occurs in a particular industry of the Australian economy’. The ‘contribution of cultural and creative activity to the economy measures the contribution of that activity across multiple industry sectors’, including ‘manufacturing, education, information media and telecommunications and arts and recreation services. The contribution of a particular industry (such as manufacturing) measures the contribution to the economy of activity from only that industry.’(5) ‘Cultural and creative activity’ is not one specific industry but specified activities dispersed across many industries. Their economic value is (broadly) a combination of the contribution of ‘industry’ sub-sectors (broadcasting, performing arts, newspapers, clothes and footwear manufacture etc.) and that of cultural or creative occupations across different industries – a musician working in education, an actor in mental health, a graphic illustrator in a finance company but also, as we shall see, a computer systems designer in a mining company. If advocates for education, or manufacturing, or engineering, started to count activities in this way, then they too might come up with a GVA far exceeding their own particular industries. Hence the BCAR warning. 

Second, BCAR refer to cultural and creative activities. Unlike in so much cultural sector advocacy these two words are not used interchangeably, nor is ‘creative industry’ used as a catch all term for them both. The statisticians in the Bureau make the point that has repeatedly been made to promoters of the ‘creative industries’ – water off a duck’s back – that culture and creativity overlap but are not the same thing. For the BACR ‘creative activity’ involves human creativity as a ‘significant and identifiable input’; ‘cultural activity’ aims to ‘communicate symbolic meaning, such as in beliefs, values, and traditions’. 

This distinction immediately disaggregates the $111 billion into ‘cultural activity’ ($63.5) and ‘creative activity’ ($48.2). The distinct ‘creative activity’ is made up primarily of ‘Computer system design and related services’ and ‘Fashion’, i.e. clothing and footwear manufacturing, wholesaling and retailing. ‘Computer system design’ is four times bigger than ‘fashion’. Indeed, the BCAR notes that ‘computer systems design’, located in the ‘professional, scientific and technical services’ ANZSIC category, accounts for most ($19.5 out of $25.8 billion) of the total growth over the last decade in cultural and creative activities. 

Why count ‘computer systems design’? Though ‘human creativity’ is clearly an input into computer systems design, why stop there? Is that the limit of creativity outside of the cultural domain? Obviously not – education, health, finance and so on all involve human creativity. It is included here simply because when the UK Government came up with the term ‘creative industries’ in 1998 it notoriously added ‘software and computing’ to an established ‘cultural sector’. The Australian Bureau of Statistics was encouraged (because everyone else seemed to be doing it) to replicate this definition in earlier reports, an example which the BACR is following. 

This addition of computing system design (under various titles in different countries) has consistently added around 40% to both employment and value-added figures for the ‘creative industries’. It is the ‘engine’ at the heart of all those figures showing the creative industries growing faster than the rest of the economy and employing anywhere between 6-10% of the active workforce. Strip computer systems design out and the figures reduce pretty quickly. This 40% inflation is what is happening with that figure of $111 billion. This figure includes anyone employed as ‘computer systems design’ in other industries – such as a data-base designer in a mining company or a wealth management fund. These are not, by anyone’s definition, part of an ‘arts industry’. 

If we restrict our measurement to cultural industries – those sectors coded as such by BACR using the ANZSIC classifications, and not including people with cultural occupations in other industries – then the GVA is reduced by one third, from $63.5 to $41.9 billion. So already, just using the broad definition of ‘cultural industries’ we have more than halved the $111 billion figure. 

We are not yet at ‘the arts industry’. BCAR’s definition of cultural industries includes ‘design’ (minus the computing systems, i.e. mainly architecture, advertising and marketing) which makes up almost a quarter of the total GVA. After this we have book and newspaper printing and retailing, and environmental heritage. Arts and media combined accounted for just a little more than design, that is, just over a quarter of the $41.9 billion total. The ‘arts industry’ – including broadcast and electronic media – is pretty much reduced to just over $14 billion.

This is confirmed by the Australia Institute report, whose headline figures on employment in the ‘creative arts’ are quoted but less so its findings on value added – $14.7 billion to GDP in 2017–18. The AI report has a conservative definition and its does not include cultural employment in other industries. Creative arts includes, in descending order of employment size: Creative and Performing Arts Activities; Heritage Activities; Motion Picture and Sound Recording Activities; Broadcasting (except Internet); Publishing (except Internet and Music Publishing); Library and Other Information Services; Internet Publishing and Broadcasting. Total employment is 193,600, and according to the report, is bigger than Finance (190,600), Accommodation (97,500), Electricity supply (65,000) and Coal mining (49,600). 

Bigger than finance and coal make good headlines, but again the caveats. Live by econometrics, die by them. The Creative Arts ‘industry’ GVA is not $111 billion but $14.7 billion, or 0.8% of Australian GDP. This, the report admits, is ‘small, compared to industries like Manufacturing, or Professional, Scientific and Technical Services’.(8) If this relatively low GVA is combined with relatively high employment, then we have a problem: a sector with high employment but low value-added = low productivity. This low productivity is a well-known characteristic of the performing arts as well as the kinds of free or highly subsidised activities in museums, galleries, libraries and heritage sites. It is the highly commercialised sections of media and design (advertising, marketing, architectural services) that have the higher productivity rating (as, of course, do the ‘creative’ activities of computer systems design). 

Which is to say, using econometric statistics to advocate for the value of the arts is a high-risk business. A glance at the last three Australia Census datasets shows an absolute decline in employment in the cultural and creative industries (excluding computer systems) up to 2016. The numbers of those in cultural occupations grew, but at a rate lower than the rest of the economy – driven by design services (excluding computer systems), architecture and ‘own account cultural workers – i.e. ‘freelancers’. The BCAR paper shows a slight decline over the decade in the percentage contribution of cultural and creative activities to GDP: without computer systems design this would be a much greater decline.  

The BACR shows also that growth in cultural activities is driven by growth in ‘design’ (excluding computer systems) offsetting the absolute job losses in printing, manufacturing and related wholesale/ retail services. Other research has shown a significant collapse in ‘blue collar’ jobs in the cultural industries – newspaper and publishing, clothing and footwear manufacture, and other related manufacture. 

We might add to this the numerous reports into persistent below average and low incomes in this sector, despite cultural workers being more educated than the average workforce, and the growth in freelancing which is part of the general escalation of the ‘gig’ or ‘precarious’ economy. 

Even based on these sympathetic statistical accounts, the ‘creative arts’ is not the headline $111 billion industry employing more than finance and mining: it is a highly educated, low productivity, low waged, low job security sector, which contributes $14.7 billion or less than 1% of Australian GDP. Why then would any government even need to take note of it? 

Dying by the Sword?

A ‘jobs and growth’ industry policy, derived from such metrics is clear. Focus on Architecture and Design (including computing systems) along with broadcast and internet media. Find ways of moving high qualified, low paid, precarious workers from the creative arts to the media and design sector. Find ways of linking residual manufacturing skills to ‘advanced manufacture’ and encourage the growth of fashion retail/ wholesale rather than manufacture. The rest can be filed under ‘culture’ and ‘community’ and given over to federal and state/ territory support, along with an increased role for philanthropy. In return, these must show a contribution to R&D and innovation (art as ‘blue skies research’), community benefit and ‘health & well-being’, and achieve a certain level of audience figures or satisfaction based on a dashboard of metrics that would allow government to justify taxpayer subsidy. 

In many ways this is just what we have now. Creative industry promoters have argued for a separation of cultural and creative, commercial and subsidised, economy and community focused sectors. This is a de facto setting for many of the state and territories, who seek to split arts and culture from ‘creative’, giving this latter to economic development agencies or chambers of commerce. Art and culture are then allocated variously to community development, education (museums and galleries), or tourism (festivals and events).

This has not been the case in Victoria or New South Wales, where the existence of a relatively large and robust ‘cultural and creative’ sector indicates how difficult it is in practice to separate the two, and the destruction wrought when it is attempted. A complex ‘creative ecosystem’ involving a mix of large and small, public, private and not-for-profit, is not one amenable to ‘picking winners’ as in the standard industrial development script. Nonetheless, there is a kind of double vision, where the economic and the cultural rationales overlap or juxtapose but don’t quite coincide, policy goals flitting uneasily between them. Public policy for the creative industries is less oxymoronic than schizophrenic. It has public policy goals for culture but it is also industrial development; it seeks to provide art of the highest quality but needs to express this as GVA; it speaks of the ‘creative industries’ but the vast majority of its funding goes to public institutions in the ‘classical’ performing and visual arts, along with an array of public museums, libraries and galleries. Though it is not formulated in any analytical depth, the hope is that, somehow, what’s good for culture is good for the creative industries, and vice versa. 

Those working in the performing and visual arts, or the media, or the music business, or games development have been encouraged to see themselves as ‘creative industries’ and yet nobody really knows what this means – least of all the policy lead bodies. There is a constant verbal and conceptual stumbling between ‘cultural’, ‘creative’ and ‘cultural and creative’, with maybe ‘digital’ somewhere in the mix. ‘Art’ jumps around between all of them. In many gatherings ‘creative industries’ is repeatedly used as a self-identifier – this is after all the key terminology used by Victorian and New South Wales state governments – but everyone in the room turns out to an artist. The over- inflated claims and predatory inclusion of all sorts of activities to get the numbers up, coupled with the deep terminological confusion testify to an arts and cultural sector that has no real idea how to express its public value and even less how it should make its claims to government. 

Undoing Industry 

This is made even more frustrating when the federal government refuses even to heed the econometrics, bogus or otherwise. For at federal level, despite almost two decades of urging, the government has stepped away from the idea of creative industries. Even Labor, in their two recent terms, failed to deliver any coherent policy. Its Creative Australia in 2012 was a rather flat version of Paul Keating’s much vaunted Creative Nation, further confusing art, culture and creative industry policy. The Coalition government, elected in 2013 and still with us, displays a deep-seated antipathy to subsidised public sectors (the subsidised private sector is another matter entirely), especially in culture and education, which in part relates to Australia’s ‘culture wars’. In these, the broad consensus around the value of art and culture between 1960 and 1990 gave way to a highly politicised conflict. On the centre-left was a modernising cultural vision for the country, including reconciliation with the colonial past, a multiculturalist identity, and embracing the ‘creative industries’ as somehow emblematic of this forward-looking vision. On the centre-right was an increasing antipathy to this modernising vision, with a focus on colonial heritage and tradition (especially military), setting sport and entertainment against the ‘elite’ metropolitan arts, and simply ignoring the creative industries as a policy agenda (unlike, for example, the UK Conservative Party). 

Though the ideological opposition of the Coalition to publicly funded art and culture is widely recognised, this is less so with their dismantling of the kind of ‘industry strategy’ on which so much arts and cultural (and creative industries) advocacy has relied. The Coalition aversion to ‘industrial strategy’ is consequent on its accelerating shift to neoliberalism over the last two decades. In part this goes back to Thatcher and Reagan’s refusal to prop up industries that ought (in their view) to be left to sink or swim in the market. This was always deeply politicised, in that labour in these industries tended to be highly organised and their destruction was symbolic of a major defeat for the unions, consigned now to historic redundancy. Post-industrial was also to be post-labour movement. This was less pronounced in Australia, with strong social democratic roots and with the Australian Labor Party – anticipating Clinton, Blair and Schroeder – itself rolling out neoliberal reforms. It took the refusal of the Abbott government to step in to support the Australian car industry to fully register the Coalition’s final detachment from the pieties of protecting industry. 

However, though ‘industry strategy’ – a coherent set of policy goals and indicators aimed at framing investment and management behaviour within a broad national economic context – was jettisoned under the guise of ‘no bail outs’ and the primacy of the market, actual state subsidies only increased for finance, mining, real estate, construction and certain kinds of agri-business. ‘Extraction’ refers not just to mineral resources but also the ways finance has been used to extract value from real estate, superannuation, telecoms and utility privatisations, infrastructure development, Medicare, Centrelink and related employment services (such as cashless welfare cards), education and training, water allocations – the list is endless. These are all ‘industries’ in the loose sense in which that word is now used to mean any set of activities involving monetary transactions, but they are not ‘industries’ in the sense used in the era of ‘nation building’. This last – a broad liberal/ social democratic consensus – involved a highly resourced and professionally valued public policy body who sought to advance a range of different industries and services as part of developing the economic capacity of the nation to deliver some version of ‘the good life’ to its citizens. Those who use ‘arts industry’ or the ‘creative industries’ seek to appeal to such public policy settings, but these no longer exist in anything like the same way. 

This explains the lack of any significant investment in non-mining R&D, ‘creative tech’, renewables or advanced manufacture, the current default policy settings for most post-mass manufacturing countries. As Perry Anderson noted, outside its advanced economic heartlands neoliberalism tended to favour finance and extraction, rather than invest and plan for an expensive ‘knowledge economy’. Anderson was talking of Brazil, but this can apply to Australia too, which now has one of the least diverse economies in the OECD. It is hard to promote the creative industries as an advanced innovation system to a government which is simply not interested in such policies. Alongside the cries for simple economic recognition – $111 billion! – cultural industries bodies are deeply frustrated by the governments’ lack of basic knowledge as to how music, or the performing arts, or film, or publishing actually work. But this is not just about the cultural and creative industries. Corvid-19 has accelerated awareness of ‘supply chain dependency’ on China, and raised more general questions about what manufacturing capacity countries should attempt to retain. Some countries had already responded to the rise of China – especially its Made in China 2025 strategy – by launching a new generation of ‘national industrial strategies’ focused on technology intensive industries. But an Australian political and economic elite assembled around an extraction model will find it hard to develop the will, let alone the capacity, to deliver such a strategy; it is highly unlikely that the ‘creative industries’ would figure in any such.

The rise of financial extraction has hollowed out the public ethos of Australian governments, resulting in a combination of short-termism, incompetence and corruption (not illegality) that has accelerated in the last decade. In this context, framing art, culture or creativity as an ‘industry’ has little traction. Even Malcolm Turnbull’s short-lived ‘ideas boom’ and ‘smart tech’ fell afoul of the Coalition’s right wing. To an extent this is party political: ‘creatives’ seem less likely to vote Coalition, and in any event creative jobs are metropolitan jobs, far from the right-wing heartlands of outer suburbia and rural Australia. In part it is ideological (though not unrelated to the last point): the anti-cosmopolitan, anti-modernist, anti-arts turn in the global right has had very definite impact in Australia. Enlightenment means John Locke and David Hume, ‘Western Civilisation’ not indigenous art and cultural Marxism. But it is also about the economic interests of those in government, and the networks of personal investments, board appointments and other quasi-governmental sinecures within which their political careers are now embedded.

For outside the most high-profile media and design companies – the big newspaper monopolies cross-linked to free-to-air franchises; on-line streaming services; advertising and marketing agencies; creative real estate like We Work – the ‘arts industry’ is not worth much to them. The low productivity; the low levels and longer timescales for ‘Return on Investment’; the resistance to ‘scaling up’ and conglomeration; the complex value ecosystems and so on, mean that this industry, whatever aggregates the statisticians succeed in coming up with, is not particularly attractive or amenable to large scale financial extraction. The contrast with sport is interesting. Floating on a deep base of community participation and public money, the iceberg tip of the complex sports ecosystem is hugely profitable – venues, clubs, leagues, sponsorships, player management, TV deals and so on. It yields profits of a different magnitude than the major performing arts, museums and galleries – even the Australian music business – which are mostly used for the accumulation of cultural, rather than economic, capital. 

So while the arts advocates fire stats at the government, they look back cold-eyed. The Coalition allowed car manufacturing to go under – what chance the arts? Of course, the government are keen to put out political fires, hence the interminable bickering of how far they have, or have not, supported arts and culture during the pandemic. However, and whatever, we are counting with the figures, a 193,000 ‘creative arts’ workforce is a significant constituency and the narrative of ‘we are all in this together’ needs maintaining by the government. Advocates are right to highlight the real suffering in this sector, which needs to be addressed. But aside from this urgent plea to re-direct Jobkeeper to those that need it and to find funds to support the many cultural organisations that have taken such significant hits, this line of ‘arts-as-industry’ advocacy has hit a brick wall and requires, just as urgently, a radical rethink. For what we are faced with here is not just a cloth-eared government but something far more epochal. 

Art as Economic Impact 

The use of economic metrics to make the case for arts funding began in the early 1980s, as publicly funded arts institutions, and their policy narratives, sought a new accommodation with the overall shift in public policy towards predominantly economic forms of legitimation. Arts ‘impact studies’ tried to show how such funding was not just about taxpayer spend but actually generated economic activity. John Myerscough got his 15 minutes with his use of ‘multiplier effects’, where public subsidy was shown to create employment along with direct (tickets, interval drinks) and indirect (car parks, local restaurants) consumer spending. Every $1 spent generated $X in related economic activity. Cultural institutions and precincts, events and festivals, even whole year events such as Glasgow’s 1990 City of Culture, could be shown to be good value for money. This form of advocacy metric began as an optional extra for those institutions that could afford the consultancy and wanted to enhance their next funding bid. As New Public Management ideas made real inroads into public administration from the 1980s onwards, such metrics (and many more were added) became compulsory as part of any public funding, their application to this sector at a level that could only be described as punitive. These economic indicators formed part of a general shift in the legitimation of the arts from a publicly provided service to an economic ‘sector’.

Arts and culture, the argument went, accounted for significant consumer spending (5 percent was Myerscough’s figure) and was only set to grow as leisure, income and education increased; it was thus only proper that its economic contribution should be acknowledged (and measured). Familiar themes were already in place: arts smuggled within the higher figures associated with commercial cultural industries; ‘special pleading’ (spending on the arts ignored what was not therefore spent elsewhere – the Treasury were sniffy); and any consternation that the arts were being made to justify themselves in this way was dismissed as ‘unhelpful’. The new discipline of cultural economics took off in this decade, with practitioners such as David Throsby seeking to advocate for art and culture, and address many of their challenges by the application of standard economic concepts. They came not to bury the arts but to praise them, but this now needed to be done in the grown-up language of economics. Only in this way could they get government to take them seriously, and focus public policy on some long term problems, such as the actual, often dire, working conditions of artists. Economics as the only way to address employment issues facing creatives is another advocacy theme that is still with us, as are, of course, those dire working conditions. 

Art’s economic benefit was articulated at the Australian federal level in 1994’s Creative Nation, which strongly influenced New Labour in the UK. ‘Culture creates wealth’ was one of its claims, and many have seen its imbrication of art and culture with the economy as accelerating their instrumentalization, subsuming arts organisations into standard business and marketing discourses, and promoting the rise and rise of business leaders and corporate lawyers within arts policy bodies and boards. In particular, some saw Creative Nation as introducing the idea of ‘art as industry’: ‘cultural policy is economic policy’ it proclaimed. But the modernising vision which energised Creative Nation came less from its promotion of the cultural industries as an economic sector – retrospectively overemphasised – than its embrace of democratic-popular, commercial culture as part of renewed, forward-looking identity for an Australia stepping out from a colonial heritage and finding its new place in an Asia-Pacific world. Though economic impact was clearly flagged – the arts conveniently conflated with the ‘cultural industries’ when the numbers were needed – for Creative Nation art’s economic value lay primarily in employment and consumer spend (hence the subsequent emphasis on marketing and audience research) not as an integrated set of production and distribution activities associated with ‘industry’ proper. 

In the 1980s ‘industry’ had been mostly synonymous with ‘factory’, hence the polemical juxtaposition of culture and industry made famous by Adorno and Horkheimer. By the 1990s, in the Anglosphere, ‘industry’ was uncoupled from mass manufacture in factories and made applicable to any set of activities that involved monetary transaction –everything from sex, aged care, health, racing, football, education, therapy ad infinitum. In this sense one might talk (other languages found this more difficult) of an ‘arts industry’ loosely referring to the economic dimension of its practices. 

Yet even in this sense ‘art-as-industry’ was always awkward and had limited traction: the arts never really had the numbers and it was clear to (almost) all that they delivered a range of social benefits that should be stressed over straight economic impact. So began the taxonomy years. Throsby identified multiple different non-economic values for art and culture; François Matarasso itemised the various social impacts of art participation; John Holden developed his intrinsic-instrumental-institutional heuristic. Finding ways to classify and measure these non-economic impacts reached some kind of summit in the online ‘dashboard’ of Culture Counts. The ‘intrinsic’ value of art was separated out from its social and economic value, this last designated ‘instrumental’: art used as a means to public policy ends separate to whatever ‘intrinsic value’ it possessed. This form of value accountancy now forms the bread and butter of arts advocacy: art is economically valuable (especially when it piggy-backs onto a much wide ‘cultural and creative’ sector) but it also has other values too, which can be itemised.

The ability to articulate multiple values – a dual or triple ‘bottom line’, or ‘fourth pillar’ – is seen as sophisticated arts advocacy, but in fact it is incoherent and self-defeating. It slips ‘intrinsic value’ into a black box, consigned to the oubliette of ‘art for art’s sake’ and it accepts the ‘social’ and ‘economic’ as categorical givens, each with public policy agendas to which art can contribute but in which it has little say. That art and culture might radically cut across, disrupt or even help reframe the meanings of these given categories cannot be considered because this would disrupt the evaluation matrix itself. Equally, they never set the cultural ‘goods’ against the ‘bads’ – gentrification, social displacement, hyper-commercialisation: arts evaluation matrixes count only positives. These matrixes reify art and culture, and as a consequence they reify our social life in common. Rather than being a way of softening or supplementing economic rationalism with other non-economic considerations, they are its perfect expression. 

Moreover, these multiple-value evaluation matrixes systematically mispresent the actual economic value of art, which is created by art’s ‘intrinsic’ value’. The economic weight of the ‘arts industry’ is small in terms of employment and GVA; its real ‘impact’ is located not in these metrics but in the value added to other sectors, mostly urban real estate, hospitality and retail economies. It is not that art has been ‘instrumentalised’, used for an end (creating jobs, for example) indifferent its essential quality or purpose; the arts precisely bring their own specific, ‘intrinsic’ value to these other economic practices. The glitter of aesthetics, the patina of authenticity, the energy of artistic creativity – these form the economic impact of the arts. Art’s imbrication within the generation of high value urban consumption economies is far more ‘instrumental’ and corrupting than having to write reports on bums-on-seats and car park receipts. However, most arts institutions – and most artists – have little control over the context in which they are being used and, crucially, they recoup very little of the economic value they help create. They are routinely exploited. 

Yet though they demand the metrics governments rarely refer to them when deciding levels of subsidy. Big cities especially know that developers, hotels and hospitality, up-market retail chains and those ‘footloose professionals’ whose needs are indexed by Most Liveable City lists, depend on arts and culture but are incapable of providing for it directly. Publicly funded art and culture is part of the enabling infrastructure of the contemporary city, even though, like subsidised public transport, they are regularly dismissed as a net drain on the public purse – unlike the ‘wealth creating’ developer coalitions who retain much of the value the arts (and public transport) help generate. The systematic exploitation of artists and art institutions by the consumption-driven urban development they help foster has only gotten worse in the last twenty years, the term ‘gentrification’ being a common, if crude, identifier of this process. 

In this context a more production focused notion of ‘art as industry’ has retained its appeal, as more sustainable and less compromised than art as a consumption sector. Though the growth of the cultural, then creative, industries has rightly been associated with the economic instrumentalization of art, the situation is much more complex. For a start, aligning itself with these new terminologies allowed art to insert its ‘intrinsic value’, its own specific qualities as art, within a wider economic context, and in ways that go beyond brute metrics. This is exemplified in David Throsby’s highly influential concentric circles model of the creative economy, which places the arts at the ‘creative core’ of a wider set of cultural and creative industries, as privileged providers of key skills and know-how, creative ‘R&D’, arts-driven innovation. As the idea of the cultural and creative industries took off in the late 1990s, the arts were able to present themselves less as an inert statistical bulk and more as the dynamic base of the creative ecosystem. In the UK and elsewhere the arts not only borrowed the numbers from the cultural and creative industries, but also their access to the zeitgeist; the economic future was creative, and the arts were indispensable to it. 

In Australia, the end of the Keating Government just two years after Creative Nation, and the installation of John Howard’s retro-Australia, meant the cultural industry agenda fizzled out. Launching a conservative vision of Australia against the cultural modernisation of the Whitlam-Frazer-Hawke-Keating era, the ‘culture wars’ saw the Coalition progressively abandoning ‘culture’ as a field of contestation. They did not have a conservative cultural policy; they simply stopped having any cultural policy. Or rather, they felt their way to a cultural policy in which the arts were mostly peripheral. The cultural industries, on the other hand, resurfaced in Queensland in the late 1990s, as ‘creative industries’, with a strongly anti-subsidy, anti-art and pro-commercial inflection. Consequently, for two decades in Australia ‘the arts’ and the ‘creative industries’ have taken different paths; the latter became increasingly about innovation systems and digital technologies, the former left stranded as the creative zeitgeist seemed to leave it behind. 

The uncoupling of art and creative industries, and the governments lack of interest in either, have given the arts an air of pious irrelevance. They had to work hard to hitch a ride on the zeitgeist – Australian stories as soft power, creative occupations as resistant to AI and so on. Finding the future again– a different kind of future – is an urgent task for the Australian arts, but it will require a radical break with the impasse to which these various forms of economic impact arguments have led.

The Wasteland

There’s a coda to the Australia Institute report. After the acknowledgement that the economic value contribution of the creative arts was ‘relatively small’, we are told they have a greater economic impact than their production value alone: 

Art makes a significant contribution to shaping people’s individual tastes and preferences. The core theories of economics stem from the idea that each individual has a set of preferences that decide what goods and services they will consume. Yet these theories are silent on how such preferences arise. Clearly culture and art play a large part in this process of shaping individual preferences, and aligning preference across individuals, and subsequently indirectly shape major investment and consumption decisions that are based on those preferences. 

It is hard to know what to make of this, from a left of centre think-tank trying to make a case for the creative arts. During this pandemic it has been routine to argue the economic value of the ‘arts industry’ followed by a supplementary plea for how it makes life worth living – especially whilst we are all at home watching streaming services. This is different: art shapes and aligns people’s individual consumption preferences, and thus shape subsequent investment and consumption decisions. Are these preferences good or bad, or simply neutral facts to inform future investment? In the next passage the report seems to suggest that these preferences are part of the ‘cultural norms’ which art helps ‘transmit across generations’, so perhaps (depending on what kind of art and what kind of norms we are talking about of course) this is a ‘good thing’? What we have is a justification for the arts based their behavioural contribution to the coordination of consumption economies, with some residual contribution to ‘cultural norms’. 

It would be wrong to pick on some heinous argumentation from one report, were it not for the fact that this kind of ‘advocacy’ is so widespread. The title (rather bizarrely for a report claiming to advocate for the arts) is ‘Art versus the Dismal Science’. This is a common trope amongst economists who like to show that economics, dismal and hard-headed as it is, is quite capable of determining the value of art and culture. Indeed, best leave this stuff to the economists anyway and don’t worry your pretty little head about it. Beneath the specific problematic of an Australian government mired deep in corrosive extractivism lies a forty-year long ‘revaluation of all values’ in the name of economic reason.

Art, and the cultural values it animated, had been opposed to that reason – often hypocritically, blind to its own multiple complicities – since its inception at the end of the 18^th century; its progressive accommodation to that reason over the last forty years has been nothing short of catastrophic. Art-as-industry – which could in the 1920/30s or 1960/70s work as a salutary reminder to a smug, elitist art world that its roots lay in the material world – has now become a key source of its ‘social license’. What we witness in this war of statistics is not a gauche advocacy rhetoric gone awry but a withering of our ability to recognise and articulate the value of art and culture. Whilst the world desperately needs a sense of shared meaning and shared future in the other bigger emergency to come, arts advocacy has spent the time talking about employment statistics. As an economist might say, this was a major ‘opportunity cost’. 

Alison Croggan, talking of the collapse of federal funding for the arts in Australia, described the process as ‘desertification’. The point is well made but perhaps a more apt image might be the landscape left after a catastrophic process of land-clearing, of the kind which Don Watson describes in The Bush, stretching back to the first years of white Australian history. Not the sparse but still complex ecosystem of a desert but stumps and scars and mudslides and dead animals. Like some injured Joey stumbling across the floor of what was once a magnificent rain forest, ‘art helps shape individual preferences’, seems the best we can come up with. ‘Art-as-industry’ has not only failed to convince the current government in Australia, it speaks to the wider crisis of cultural value, a gaping vacuum created by the metastasis of economic reason from useful instrument to humanity’s foundational raison d’être. ‘The art industry is worth $111 billion’ is less special pleading from all those workers, companies and organisations left to swing by this government, more a cry for help from a culture sinking slowly into nihilism. 

Yet becalmed in the doldrums, far from the zeitgeist, Australia culture has gradually discovered a very different temporal order, amongst a group who would never for a moment consider calling culture an industry. Australian art’s growing acknowledgement and connection with aboriginal culture is one of its greatest gifts, a small flame in the kindling. This is where we should look for the future, rooted in a different past.

The Experience of our generation: That Capitalism will die no natural death. 

Walter Benjamin, 1935

Business as Usual?

All around we hear ‘let’s not go back to business as usual, after this crisis we must do things differently’. A ‘people’s war’, there is talk of 1945, Beverage and Attlee, Curtin and Chifley, popular sacrifice making it impossible that we go back to what was before. We hear that ‘we are all in this together’, with Churchillian overtones from national leaders, though the absence of the US and Russia from the new global wartime coalition is telling. But underneath the war rhetoric, humanity united in the face of a common enemy, is a sense of deep systemic crisis, putting us more in mind of the Great Depression and the geopolitical catastrophe that followed. Business as Usual, the enemy vanquished, let’s get back to normal: if this is a systemic crisis, then C-19 is more than a test of our defences, it says something much more fundamental about who we are and where we are going.

Unlike the Spanish Flu, which appeared as a gratuitous death-bringer in an age already awash with slaughter and destruction, C-19 is much more central to this systemic crisis. There is evidence that the growing frequency of cross-species viral mutation is closely correlated to intensive farming and concentrated population growth, as well as the specific socio-economic and environmental disruptions which have led, in this case, to the intensification of the hunting and storing of wild animals in South China ‘wet markets’. Intensified agribusiness, rapid urbanisation, accelerated interconnectedness of global mobility. This is the revenge of Gaia, a reminder of our dependency on a terrestrial life-support system that is not ours simply to ‘master’; this is a dress rehearsal for the challenges of climate change to come, a shot across the bow. The systemic crisis comes from the sense that it is the capacity of a whole social system that is being probed, and that the enemy is within.

The crisis has highlighted a general reduction of the state’s own capacity for action, along with the public services it provides – a reduction damaging in the Global North but catastrophic in states of the Global South, systematically dismantled in the 1990s. The ‘small state’ thinking of Neoliberalism is dead, we are told. At the same time, ‘bringing the state back in’ is also the ‘rediscovery of the social’. Boris Johnson, like Scott Morrison, announcing unprecedented stimulus/ survival packages, burns 40 years of economic orthodoxy – ‘there is no alternative’, ‘there is no magic money tree’ – announcing that, after all, ‘there is such a thing as society’, thereby bringing to a close the period opened by Thatcher and Reagan in 1979-81. But though the Right squeal ‘socialism’ – as they did during the New Deal and WWII – this is no reason to take it at face value. The return of the state is not necessarily socialism, nor even Keynesianism. Similar squeals also accompanied the bank bailouts that began in 2008, though not for long. Then, the state also came roaring back in, the ‘free market’ now revealed as utterly dependent on it: but the result was a new accommodation between neoliberal financialisation, rising inequality and the state. Not only did things not get better, they got worse.  Whatever is happening now with the renationalised private hospitals, or airlines, or other ‘essential services’; with the underwriting, via employers, of wages and income; with the eviction freezes, free childcare and expanded payments from Centrelink (itself undergoing some kind of re-nationalisation) – these need careful scrutiny. This frantic action by states, whose capacity to act has been compromised, might be delivered by emergency de-commodification – a ‘holiday for exchange value’ – but is likely to be skewed in its targeting and, through the corporate agents with which it works, entrench us more deeply in a malfunctioning Business as Usual.

So too, though we hear stories of human solidarity, rather than the Zombie apocalypse we constantly watch on Netflix, the ‘return of the social’ comes after 40 years of arguing that this very ‘social’ – give or take the residual, grimly administered ‘safety net’ – was nothing but competitive market individualism. Old habits die hard, especially when the economic, cultural, institutional and administrative fabric of that ‘social’ has not so much been allowed to go threadbare but woven around other principles. It is not at all clear that we know what this ‘social’ actually means anymore – or who is included in it, some leaders (think Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán) tempted to set ‘the base’ against those ‘others’ suspected of bringing infection. After all, ‘social’ media is a highly ambiguous term, built on a networked view of society not just analogous to the cybernetic ‘information processing’ model of Hayek’s neoliberal market, but now, as ‘platform’ or ‘surveillance’ capitalism, deeply enmeshed with it. In fact, since the shock of 2008, and the social discontent (amongst non-bankers) to which it gave rise, the neoliberal state has seen government as a kind of ‘platform’, where ‘nudges’, Big Data and algorithmic predictions are now the stuff of public administration.

Before celebrating the return of state and social as a version of Polanyi’s ‘double movement’, a re-assertion of the human and the social against the fictitious and abstract ‘market’, we should also remember that in his account we first had to go through the fires of totalitarian Communism and Fascism, and of world war, before we got to 1945. Since 2008, (financial) markets and the state have had a partial reconciliation (or interpenetration), and the post-austerity shift to ‘populism’ has brought back the ‘social nation’, the new Right flirting with nationalisation and protection of ‘our’ environment. If the social has crept back in then, any ‘left’ political consequences have been strongly policed. The Right have not only ramped up the culture wars, setting a popular nation against metro-cosmopolitan elites, stridently denouncing ‘globalisation’ along with any accommodation with Communist (now no longer ‘transitional’) China. As in the McCarthy era, an attack on an external Communist threat serves to sever any resonances between that project (however degraded, or distorted) and transformative politics at home. Expect calls for the repatriation of manufacturing, a National Capitalism to combat the global export of Communist State Capitalism that has been going on, ‘under our noses’, for a couple of decades. Underneath this rhetoric, and impelled by the viral emergency, the re-tooling of social governance around surveillance, big data and algorithmic nudge – the social stripped of any sense of effective participatory democracy – is likely to go on apace (in both systems), if left unchecked.

Responses to the crisis will be, inevitably, contested and multiple – strong state intervention, laissez-faire (‘let it rip’), decommodification, mutual aid all in the mix. States will learn things, ready for the next time, but how far this learning will go beyond enhanced crisis capability to address systemic issues, is an open question. Rather than waiting for neoliberal capitalism to die its natural death, state and society marching back in after markets and individuals, we need to think very clearly and urgently about what is systemic in this crisis and what needs to change at the end of it. This is not just about what it needs to survive this crisis, nor only how it might re-think the principles of its organisation, but also what value does it represent for society and how might this be articulated. This systemic reckoning also demands we address how far art and culture have been deeply entangled with the system-in-crisis.

Art and Culture?

It is perfectly understandable that the first response of the arts and cultural sector has been to seek state protection for its livelihood – income for the part-timers, casuals, recently laid-off and self-employed – and to secure on-going organisational capacity and business viability for the bigger companies and ‘sector organisers’. Arts and cultural events and venues were amongst the first to be cancelled and closed, and no doubt, will be amongst the last to re-open. Other forms of cultural production – film and TV, regional newspapers – have been suspended along with the rest of ‘non-essential’ services. The sector has been the hardest hit; arts and cultural workers are in dire need – bare life – and need support immediately and until the ‘recovery’ is well underway.  This has been forthcoming (to various extents) in Australia, UK and across Europe. In Germany – at Federal and state (Länder) level – support has been made explicitly for arts and culture, ‘essential to our democracy’, at a time when their ‘creative courage’ is needed, artists being ‘indispensable’ and ‘vital, especially now’. Australia cut their funding. For the rest support for cultural workers seems to be delivered primarily as part of a general package for similarly affected workers. We can’t yet give an assessment of how successful these various schemes are for the cultural sector, and they need to be closely monitored as they too will affect the post-virus landscape. What we can say, if anyone was still under any illusion, is that the widespread impact of the emergency on arts and cultural workers has shown them neck-deep in the precarity of the ‘gig economy’. After the crisis, many are asking if getting back to Business as Usual is what we need – especially as this crisis comes at the end of a long period of declining income and conditions.

Lead organisations from the cultural sector have made a case for immediate need – as with any group of vulnerable people –and for the wider importance of the sector. In some cases, this was a re-application of the arguments from the last twenty years – “the sector is worth $xxx billion, compared to that one which is only worth $xx billion, and thus we are deserving of support as an important industry”. This argument, given decades of funding cuts, has failed to make any impact on most governments up until now; let’s hope this time it will fare better. Perhaps there will be a ‘creative industries’ argument, that the sector will be vital for our economic recovery; after the 2008 crisis we heard a lot about how the creative industries had proved to be amongst the most resilient sectors, leading the rebound. I suspect that this time, ‘not going back to business as usual’ would have to mean that the accelerating precarity of the cultural sector – AKA ‘resilience’ – must be reversed. This would involve a whole set of new labour regulations – applicable to the ‘gig economy’ generally – and maybe a Universal Basic Income. But must we accept the inevitability of the ‘gig economy’, with its intensification of anxiety and fragmentation of work, and the complicity of the arts and cultural organisations, who have promoted and normalised it? As Bruno Latour suggests, once we begin to ask questions about how we might fix the things we think are broken, we get into the kind of radical territory of the New Deal and post-1945 settlement. Maybe more so….

The demands for immediate support, and the recognition of cultural workers’ shared material condition of precarity with other workers, previously marginalised and dismissed as ‘low-skilled’, is important. Health and aged care, cleaners, transport workers, farm labourers, supermarket shelf-stackers, delivery riders, all are now recognised as indispensable, at least for the duration of the silence left by the suspension of the rat race and its ‘bullshit jobs’. But there are important caveats, as there always have been when ‘creatives’ are lumped into the general ‘precariat’, the self-employed illustrator with the hotel cleaner. Any effective sense of a shared fate, one which might help the arts and culture sector re-position itself after C-19, needs to register the differences as well as the similarities.

In the meantime, we hear that cultural workers, like these other devalued workers, also need better recognition and acknowledgement.  ‘We in the cultural sector produce all those things – books, games, TV shows, music, streaming entertainment – that make life in and out of quarantine bearable, enjoyable; but we also provide a sense of belonging, of human connection, of social cohesion that will be crucial for a time after neoliberal competitive individualism’. This social indispensability certainly means ‘decent wages and conditions’, and, as with Health for example, the state needs to reverse its ongoing funding cuts to culture. These cuts, as to Health, were symptomatic of the hollowing out of the state whose deleterious consequences we are now facing. In these claims culture is not just a victim of small state austerity, it also needs to be an essential part of any expanded ‘social state’ provision of collective services whose post-emergency retention, for many, would be the most beneficial outcome of the crisis. Not Business as Usual for arts and culture would require a restoration and expansion of state funding for culture and, necessarily, a renewed acknowledgement, by government, of art and culture’s importance for any liveable post-virus society.

Trouble Ahead

 Well, before we get to this, let me suggest that the cultural sector is not yet in any place to make these sorts of claims, on public funding or on a reinvigorated social purpose, until it has come to terms with its own complicities with the last twenty-five years of neoliberalism.

Let me start – more or less at random – with an Open Letter to the EU from Culture Action Europe, which argues that the EU emergency funding package should, under the ‘Cohesion and Values’ heading, be extended to arts and culture:

Culture is the foundation of who we are as human beings. It grounds our collective life, binding us together, nurturing our feeling of belonging. Without the explicit recognition of the European project’s cultural dimension, the future of the European Union as a common endeavour is difficult to imagine.

This is laudable of course, but its claims are weakened if we acknowledge the current situation of Europe, where ‘cultures of belonging’ have also gone in a ‘blood and soil’ direction, and where the ‘culture of belonging’ to Europe and its ‘project’ is itself deeply compromised. Compromised, that is, by the EU’s capture by the neoliberal project, one whose link to rising inequalities within and between member states is clear now for all to see – despite its other valuable progressive social, democratic and environmental aspects. In short, to what, and in what ways, are we being asked to belong? This applies equally to calls for a national belonging: is it about social solidarity, or putting our collective backs into a national economic recovery, or maybe keeping the borders closed?

The call for a re-invigoration of culture’s role is also compromised by the ways in which many in the cultural or ‘creative’ sector, especially at the leadership levels, whilst acknowledging the growing inequalities all around them, have failed to acknowledge how these inequalities are actually deeply entangled in their idea of ‘culture’. We have witnessed the shocked disbelief of many urban, educated ‘creatives’ – the majority of whom are by no means rich – when their compatriots or co-Europeans embrace blood and soil nationalism, and seek out other ‘retrograde’ ‘populist’ forms of cultural belonging. What we have seen, since 2008 certainly, but starting well before that in the 1980s, is a growing divergence, on multiple registers, between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. The ‘cultural and creative sector’ may identify with the latter – ethically, politically, and sometimes materially through its own participation in precarious labour – but in significant ways it is aligned with the former.

This is not an argument about the ‘elitism’ of the arts, nor of the lack of representation – women, ethnic minorities, working class – within them, to be rectified by various forms of ‘positive discrimination’ and diversity programmes. I am suggesting that what the cultural sector sees as universal – the possibilities opened up by culture and creativity – is in fact highly circumscribed by class chances (intertwined with gender, ethnicity and regionality). That is, it is no longer so much a question of the content of culture being ‘elitist’ – those battles fought by Cultural Studies, by Bourdieusians, by pop culture warriors – but that the chances of participating in cultural production or creative labour as a viable career path, is now closely circumscribed by class, as refracted above all through education.

Over the last thirty years the primary policy justification for the cultural sector has become an economic one. Beginning with ‘arts impact’ studies in the 1980s, then its identification as ‘growth sector’ in the 1990s, culminating in its systematic integration as catalytic economic driver within a wider ‘creative economy’ – culture, in the form of the ‘creative industries’, sought to move itself away from the periphery of ‘the arts’ and towards the powerful centres of economic development and innovation. This happened in Europe and Australia, extended across Africa and Asia, and is revving up in South America. ‘Creative economy’ is now used by international agencies such as UNESCO and UNCTAD, as well as diplomatic agencies such as the British Council and the Goethe Institute, as the main legitimating discourse for the adoption of ‘modern’ cultural policies by governments, and ‘creative cities’, across the globe.

Clearly there are other strands, some older, some emergent, that weave their way through this, but it is indisputable that ‘creative industries’ or ‘creative economy’ has become the central organising concept for contemporary cultural policy in many areas of Global North and Global South. It is not as simple as ‘economic impact’ and ‘multipliers’, a line used by arts organisations from the 1980s. It is rooted in claims for a more epochal shift, where the practice of symbolic creation, of meaning-making, was to be part of a wider transition from an industrial Fordist to a Post-industrial economy. The transformative potential of art and culture no longer lay in its complex symbolic, meaning-making function but, rather, in the possibilities it held out for meaningful work and the realisation of individual creative potential in a post-industrial world. This was set within an ‘imaginary’ of creative social (though mostly metropolitan) transformation which validated the aspirations of educated young people, able to identify themselves with a viable and desirable future. This creative transformation would be, in turn, be recouped by government gaining a ‘key economic driver’, expressed variously in increased GDP, innovation, soft power, development, modernisation, progress and so on.

This creative ‘imaginary’, I would suggest, was running out of steam even before the C-19 crisis. It was an aspirational future, an economically framed historical narrative of transition from one form of production (industry, mass, material) to another (information, knowledge, individuated, immaterial). In this there would be winners and losers, people inevitably left behind as others – the educated young especially – made the transition to the new economy. The ‘cultural and creative industries’, if I may use that term, overwhelmingly employ educated people, at higher rates than other industries. Since the arrival of digitalisation this has accelerated, the sector has been staging its own internal de-industrialisation, losing huge swathes of ‘blue collar’ jobs in printing, publishing, textiles, ceramics, and the wholesale, retail and distribution of physical ‘creative goods’. The famous 1998 definition of creative industries, as those based on ‘individual creativity, skill and talent’, with a ‘potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property’, worked to combine the heroic struggle of the avant-garde artist  with the amoral ‘creative destruction’ of the Schumpeterian entrepreneur. The creativity mythos effected a trade-off between individual creative fulfilment and collective social justice.

This is the story told by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, who chart the emergence of ‘creative capitalism’ in the growing separation between the younger white-collar workers looking for ‘quality of work/ life’ and the blue-collar workers seeking better pay and condition in the older trade union manner. The ways in which the former, over the 1970s, became re-attached to a new form of creative capitalism, whilst the organized working class was systematically marginalized, is a complex one, but the rise of the ‘creative economy’ is clearly entangled with it. This story re-appears in Richard Florida, who blithely consigns the industrial working class to economic, social and cultural irrelevance. Thomas Picketty’s new book charts the consequences in detail. The parties of the Left become the parties of the educated (‘Brahmins’), those of the Right of the (educated) wealthy (‘Merchants’). Left outside, disenchanted, are the (disorganized) working class. The acceptance by Brahmins and Merchants of an educational meritocracy, and the abandonment of redistributive policies as futile or undesirable, has had deleterious political consequences, as we know. The ‘creative industries’ are set deep within this ideological formation.

This has not served ‘creatives’ well. The transformative potential of the creative economy gave way to new forms of exploitation and labour discipline; the financialisation of the ‘new’ economy meant public services that used to be free or state subsidised – health, education, social insurance – were now transmuted into private debt. Public housing shrank, gentrification ripped through urban real estate, above all in ‘creative’ cities, and younger people were locked out of the housing market. Young (and not so young) creatives (along with their educated peers) have increasingly resembled the losers, the uneducated precariat, stuck endlessly in low paid work rather than temporarily paying their dues in Bohemia. It is less and less likely that they will join the ‘progressive’ middle aged, middle class (“Gen X”) who benefitted so much from the ‘third way’ social democracy of the 1990s – let alone the now infamous “Boomers”. Piketty’s work points to some of the baleful consequences of this age of galloping inequality, within and between countries and regions. But already we can see how precarity drives cultural workers into the bigger cities, a necessity in order to make a living across multiple employments, pushing up rents and pushing out the older ‘blue collar’ workers to the urban outskirts. Inequalities explode within and between cities, between cities and countryside, between region and region (take a look at the Brexit map).

How this will play out in this crisis nobody knows, though already the armature of inequality is showing through the skin of ‘we are all in this together’. What seems clear is that it will accelerate further the exit of cultural workers from the ‘creative imaginary’, its promises now hollowed out further. Though it still appeals to aspirations to self-fulfilment within an imagined global modern, the dissonant juxtaposition of this imaginary with deepening inequality and ecological catastrophe is becoming difficult to ignore. If this crisis really means Not Business as Usual, with some form of a return of ‘state’ and ‘social’ focused on social justice, solidarity and re-embedded markets then, possibly, we might emerge with a different configuration of culture and society. But for this to happen it will take more than just saying ‘see, you need culture now’; what that need for ‘culture’ actually is no longer seems clear, and the growing discontent amongst those inside and outside the creative imaginary currently finds no collective articulation.

The legacy of this last 30 years will be hard to shake off. A full recognition of, and accounting for, the entanglement of the creative imaginary with exacerbated global inequalities will be difficult.

In the last two decades governments and cultural agencies in both Global North and South have presented creative economy as vision for equitable and sustainable growth and development. It has not been that; there is little evidence, outside of China and South Korea, of any creative economy shift to the Global South, and non to suggest that this new ‘economic’ driver is less – rather than more – inequitable and exclusionary. The creative economy discourse has become increasingly self-serving as cultural agencies refuse to register any of the downsides for fear of getting thrown out of the meeting room, not allowed back to the top table. The desperate bid to promote culture through its direct association with economic development – jobs, exports, innovation, branding – has had a corrupting effect on those international agencies. Its altruistic illusions of culture being a universal ‘good’, able to deliver greater equality, social mobility, gender equity and sustainability, have shielded the promotors of the global ‘creative class’ from acknowledging their complicity with ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ – its investment in an educational meritocracy of ‘talent’, its caving in to an economy-centred vision of human progress, its lip-service to the disenfranchisement of those left outside – the rural migrants, the old and the new working classes, the vast precariat. Always presenting itself as the ‘clean’, sustainable development option – what resource is more ubiquitous, inexhaustible and cheap than human creativity? – creative economy’s association with unsustainable urbanisation, gentrification, resource extraction (‘no copper, no digital’), the diffusion of the languages of entrepreneurial self-improvement and of endless, insatiable consumption – this is all firmly locked away in the attic.

Thirty years of chasing neoliberalism’s tail has left the established voices of the cultural sector mute. Their self-positioning as willing servants of culture as economic development, modesty ensured via the fig-leaf of ‘sustainability’, has left them unable to articulate anything like a critical purchase on the current global situation. Without this reckoning, avoiding Business as Usual will be impossible. If the ‘return of the state’ or the ‘social’ is to mean simply more funding for arts and culture (itself still a distant hope), then all this will simply continue unabated, feeding resentment of the ‘metropolitan elites’ and the growing disaffections of the ‘age of anger’ which now apply as much to the ‘creative precariat’ as they do to the uneducated excluded.

Learning to Speak Again

It might come as a surprise, to somebody who has not had a steady salary for a decade nor managed to earn more than $40k a year in that time, to be told they are ‘complicit’. In many of the most socially devasted areas of our cities, towns and rural areas, the shoe-string funded arts and cultural projects, barely surviving cinemas, struggling book shops, occasionally functioning music venues, underfunded local museums and galleries – these represent some of the few signs of hope and life. In the last decade the shift to non-commodified production and exchange, mutual aid, co-operatives, socially embedded cultural projects have gone on apace; it is just that these register as the ‘not-for-profit’ part of the creative economy ‘ecosystem’. These everyday life-worlds make up the ‘social factory’; or the ‘dark matter’ of local art practice sustaining the glittering art world; or act as an assemblage of non-commodified labour, integrated nonetheless into capital’s global supply chains, like the Matsutake mushroom pickers at the ‘end of the world’. That all this might, in fact, represent something very different from the organising narrative of the creative economy, built on a different organising principle, a different way of seeing the future, is barely registered by cultural sector leaders. Whilst this sector represents the most vulnerable workers who require urgent support, in seeking ‘creative justice’ we might also look for the beginnings of a different way of organising arts and culture outside the imaginary of ‘creative economy’.

Calls now for a return to social values, with culture as its ‘heart’, ignore how deeply the cultural sector has absorbed the language of neoliberalism. The ‘creative economy’ was always about horizontal networks, the state ‘getting out of the way’, albeit after it had invested heavily in research and capacity-building. It was about entrepreneurship plus markets, set within a distributed social innovation system. The consequences of such ‘network sociality’ have been well documented. The reality of the creative industries – winner takes all, supply chain domination, platform oligopolies, massive financialisation, aggressive free trade and Intellectual property legislation – was something very different, as were the actually existing ‘big industry’ policies of countries such as China and South Korea, the US and Japan. The less industrialised arts and cultural sector developed its own economic impacts, as ‘core R&D’, generators of tourism and essential to city branding. They also had a ‘social impact’ which, suitably metricised, justified state subsidy framed as ‘market failure’. Not a failure of the market per se but rather culture’s failure in the market. The positioning of art and culture as ‘welfare’ worked to cow its leaders, as they, along with all those who took hand-outs, were reminded that their dependency on benefits would only be tolerated by taxpayers if they showed themselves to be deserving. In accepting this mendicant position, and the need to fill in the ever-expanding forms detailing how money was spent and with what results, they also accepted the right of a certain kind of economic theory to define not just ‘the economy’ but also the whole purpose of public administration, and indeed, society as a whole.

The period since 2008 has accelerated critiques of neoliberalism, about which we now know much more. We also know that it stubbornly persists. In Australia, even though the Rudd government bought in a stimulus package after 2008, heralded as a ‘return to Keynesianism’, it was vehemently attacked by the opposition Coalition, who attempted, when in power, to bring in the ‘austerity’ that was sweeping the UK and EU. This stimulus did little to change the basic acceptance of (soft) neoliberal orthodoxy within the Australian Labor Party. The massive spending in this crisis, completely dwarfing that of the ALP (and of 2008 globally) is not a return to Keynesianism but something else, about which little is known, and which will require considerable parlaying. What seems clear, is that, outside the secure firewalls of the current emergency, the basic settings of economic rationality, as established at the heart of treasury and economic development departments across the globe, remain locked firmly in place. It is the market not the state which delivers efficient growth, and all values are, ultimately, expressible as a numeric economic value.

So too, the language of public administration has been re-written in these market and metric fixated terms by the New Public Management of the 1980s, which in turn had roots in the cybernetics and logistics of the ‘military-industrial complex’ (remember that?). The cultural sector finds it difficult to see beyond this, thoroughly internalising its position as welfare recipient whose value-for-money must be accounted for to taxpayers in a set of metrics. In this logic, as Terry Flew writes, it is its economic contribution that ‘demonstrates the social license to operate of the cultural sector’. The reality of the massive on-going transfer of state revenue to banks, hedge-funds, mining, real estate, airlines and so on, is completely ignored in this kind of account. More damagingly, the memory of an older form of public administration, based on need and addressed through a professional public service corps responsible to indicators of success set by its substantive value-laden assessment of that need – this has evaporated. The history of how this economic rationality utterly transformed public administration – its ethos and that of the polity it served – is retrieved only with difficulty from the recesses of a collective amnesia.

If the state and society are to come back, along with a re-invigorated role for culture within these, then a lot un-forgetting needs to take place, and not just at the abstract theoretical level either; our everyday language is sodden with the common sense of economic rationality. We may point out how ‘efficiencies’ in public administration have hollowed out the state’s capacity to act efficiency in this emergency, but still economists stubbornly claim the high ground of ‘hard’ rationality. Prioritising saving lives is ‘sentimental’, economists must think with the head not the heart: when this is over the efficiencies must begin again. Choice of lives and livelihoods is indeed very hard, but that hard choice rests squarely on ground of a shared political ethics not sub-contracted to the death-rattle calculations of our economist-actuaries.

The ‘social’ which we hope to bring back has also lost much of its capacity under the onslaught of this economic common sense. When we have been told that acting rationally means taking individual responsibility for our own life choices, maximising our opportunities whilst the market aggregates this into statistically expressed ‘social outcomes’; and that public administration must use informational levers (‘signals’, ‘nudges’) built around the rationally optimising individual; then it is difficult to ask people to self-isolate, and take a significant cut in income in order to save, not themselves – “it’s not a plague for God’s sake, calm down” – but somebody else, over there, with whom they have little connection. Altruism is a social capacity. There is no need to idealise or mystify, but the capacity of many Asian countries to act with collective solidarity in this emergency is something to be taken seriously. Especially when the global hegemon has gone AWOL: for, propaganda aside, this is the first global crisis since 1945 that is being faced outside any US attempts at leadership.

Culture’s ever-growing reliance on economic impacts, and the social metrics that accompany this, has not only undermined its sense of its own value but has blinded it to the fact that the values culture claims to stand for are at best surplus to requirements and at worse, threats to be contained. ‘Culture employs more than agriculture, as much as construction; music adds millions to the economy, the tourism industry is unthinkable without art’: the failure of these arguments to cut through, then and now, should indicate that the burial of art and culture under a mountain of metrics is not just part of the collateral damage from New Public Management.  It is purposefully punitive. Culture must be (seen to be) put to work in the creative economy, its residual values eradicated or de-fanged (or taped to the wall of an art gallery). Neoliberalism is not (just) some outbreak of hyper-instrumental rationality, spread by ‘bean counters’: it is part of a long counter-revolution set in motion at the end of the 1960s against the culture of that epoch. Culture must be made to pay for the temerity it had to challenge – however symbolically – the fundamental values of a modern capitalist society. For those parts of culture than cannot be moved wholesale to commercial distribution, where the only ‘intrinsic value’ that matters is that which results in a purchase, there is a long slow death by reporting, that expands in inverse proportion to the amount of funding.

The success with which economic rationality has colonised ‘common sense’ can be in the way evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience replaced sociology and psychoanalysis in the popular imagination. The ‘selfish gene’ responds to informational signals, from which the ‘blind watchmaker’ constructs the edifice of creation. Networks of individual neurones, responding to electrical signals, produce a subject with a set of behaviours, responding to external (or in the case of drugs, artificial internal) stimuli. ‘One day’, Matt Ridley promises, thinking of Romeo and Juliet, ‘some scientist will know exactly how the brain of a young man becomes obsessed by the image of a particular young woman, molecule by molecule’. Enter art as serotonin. And the promise of Big Data, after all, is that it allows us to go ‘below’ culture, directly accessing the real, aggregating its vast data outputs through computational power rather than a wet-wear based symbolic system. Culture is not needed in a world of algorithmic governance.

As with universities, reporting to metrics is not about ‘bean-counting’ but control. They dissolve any form of participatory democracy – collegiality, peer-review – and replace crucial occasions for substantive judgement by robo-scheduled data input. Art and cultural workers, taking the money, are bound by contracted deliverables not the mutual trust of partnership. In the face of such an onslaught art and culture diligently offers up its metrics as down-payment on its social license to operate, though it continues to clutch an ‘intrinsic value’ like an orphan with a crumpled photo of her parents. That this ‘intrinsic’ value is precisely its social, its human value, rather some residual self-indulgence, barely rates a mention.

Others have valiantly tried to add ‘cultural value’ as a ‘fourth pillar’ of development (economic, social, environmental) or adapting the ‘triple bottom line’ (the phrase is telling), adding culture to economic, social and environmental outcomes. What these ignore is that art and culture’s job has always been to give meaning to the world, a world that includes within it what we call the ‘economic’ and the ‘social’. It makes no sense to identify ‘economic’, ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ outcomes unless you have already previously separated the world into these distinct categories. The ‘four pillars’, as viewed from government, are grotesquely asymmetrical, the pathetic stump of culture overshadowed by the tower of economy. In fact, buried inside the black box of ‘intrinsic value’ culture’s ongoing challenge is that to organise the world in terms of the absolute priority of individual and collective economic advantage is a disaster. It is culture’s job to protest that the sheer preponderance of ‘economy’ can only lead us to a catastrophic social and environmental nihilism. It is art’s job – along with the other natural, social and human sciences – to help articulate how we might inhabit the world in a manner that might promote human thriving not its extermination.

From Not Business as Usual to Another World is Possible

Not Business as Usual, where culture regains its role in a post-neoliberal state and society, cannot just be about more funding. It is also about how this funding is allocated and distributed, along with a clearer articulation of the grounds on which that funding is given and for what purpose. This is crucial, for without it more funding will come with more metrics, expanded ‘dashboards’, more triple bottom line KPIs.

We must think how we organise the economy of culture – how public funding is given (the conditions of acceptance, reporting and judgement), but also how commercial and state agencies produce cultural goods and services. Crucially important is to start the long haul back from a default system in which advertising and marketing not only represent the main source of employment for cultural workers – what a crying waste of creative time and energy – and the only socially acceptable form of funding for some of the most crucial parts of our political, social and cultural life. We are currently living with the disastrous consequences of giving over the public sphere wholesale to private sector companies – not just the late evolved forms of FAANG but also older reptilians, such as News Corps. Just thinking how to organise all this, outside of ‘let the market decide’, will be a huge challenge. Not many in government have this capacity, and the accumulated knowledge of public broadcasting and cultural administration have been allowed to dissipate.

This must go hand in hand with a new settlement with art and cultural workers, not only refusing the inevitability of the gig economy but also extracting them from their association with ‘creative entrepreneurship’. We must look instead at promoting greater de-commodification, through forms of direct public funding but also co-operatives and community-based enterprises. Why try desperately to call the thousands of underpaid musicians in break-even venues ‘an industry’, when we could see it as a fantastically enlivening collective enterprise, for musicians, venue managers and audiences alike? Rather than paying for music industry masters’ programmes we could facilitate a thriving network of co-operatives and community-owned music venues. So too an increase in cultural funding must come with a new conceptualisation of public funding as accountable not to metrics but to the full range of participatory democracy, from Porto Allegre-style budgeting to peer review based on substantive judgement not generic KPIs – including cultural worker representation  on high level decision-making boards (rather than just bankers and lawyers).

Think of the energies such a radical rethinking might release! The chance to reframe the way we think about funding, producing and enjoying culture together, outside the ideology of market efficiencies. To re-embed the economy of culture in the social life of those it serves. And while we are at it, we might want to use the words ‘art’ and ‘culture’ again, giving the term ‘creative’ a well-earned and extended holiday.

This would also help us reset relations with those excluded from the educational meritocracy of the creative industries. There can be no conception of a new equitable social state that does not include strong re-distributive policies; this also means a reassessment of the accelerating credentialism, bringing with it crippling debt, over-qualification and the corruption of the university system that willingly supplies them. Re-investment in ‘technical’ or ‘further’ education not only financially but in social recognition – valuing differently skilled education for those performing crucial social tasks, not underfunded job training for career market losers. For the cultural sector, this might herald a reappraisal of all those making skills which have so rapidly diminished or disappeared, buried under a narrative of progress in which immaterial creation supersedes material making.

We also need to reset our relationship to the ‘audience’, to establish a different language, a new way of talking, that can re-centralise culture’s role in our public life, and articulate how these relate to our collective conception of ‘the good life’. To reframe the public beyond ‘bums-on-seat’ metrics, or digitally enabled audience feedback dashboards. To fundamentally rethink what ‘public’ actually means– more diverse, more active, more adept but also more united than ever before. Something like this happened in 1945; it happened again, more chaotically, in the 1960s and 70s, but rolled back over the course of the 1990s, reduced again to the mass of consumers after the brief frisson on the ‘digital revolution’. Such a reframing did not happen after 2008, social solidarity extending only to the bankers, with culture (and social services) taking a massive hit. I think some kind of reframing of the social will have to happen after this crisis, but which way will it go? To some new post-neoliberal authoritarian ‘Big State’ with an expanded social reach and firmly policed borders, or a social state, operating within an expended democratic participation, whose common values are expressed, amongst others and in appropriate fashion, by art and culture?

In this crisis it is not just the organising narrative of the global hegemon that has absented itself, so too have the routines and infrastructures of everyday life. This is a global experience, involving a dimly imagined community the like of which I do not think we have seen before. Many have tried to call this community into being in the face of global climate catastrophe, to limited avail. Now we are all locked up together, and we all know it.

What words do we use for such a collective experience – neither trauma nor celebration, neither war nor world cup? It is less the spectacular stopped moment of Diana’s funeral, perhaps more the collective, slightly unsettled leisure time of the 1968 general strike in Paris. What words will be used – an interruption, a glitch, a void, an interregnum, a pivot, a birth?

What we have is a momentary [Pause]. For those of us whose time is not overshadowed by hunger, domestic violence, debilitating isolation and precarious anxiety, the question is: what do we do with that time? In the [Pause] brought on by this crisis will we, who are concerned with art and culture, find the time to think and reflect, and then the will to plan and act, in a way that will allow art and culture to come out and take their rightful place in the debates about the future of human society on the planet, our common terrestrial life? For this is what comes next, the virus being just a first global red light – though there are whole rooms, buried or locked away, full of such desperately flashing red lights.

The cultural sector might have jumped last into the new world order that grew apace from 1980; it is currently looking like the last one out too. Political debate is aflame, as are dissident economists, feminists, ecologists, philosophers, and artists and cultural workers too: but, like the global hegemon, the cultural leaders are missing in action, ready for Business as Usual, with a bit more cash to splash around, some new ‘post-virus’ KPIs to add on the end of their funding applications, some more creative economy programmes to mop up the unemployed.

We do not only have to have a [Pause], we can also have a [Reset]. This could be to the default factory settings of Business as Usual; it might brutally delete years of hard work in an unequal ‘now we have to pay for it’ austerity; or it might connect the return of the social state to the need for the systemic reforms exposed so brutally by C-19. Art and culture are there to help show us how another world is possible.

Why should we expend our collective creative labour on keeping afloat the rusted hulk of a catastrophically dysfunctional system, when we could be diving for pearls?

Title Photo: In Good Company

I wrote this when I left a job at a university. It has been published by Memefest but here it is also on this site.

I’ll be leaving formally at Midnight January 6^th.

Contrary to popular rumour, I did not decide to leave in order to escape the health and safety training sessions, nor to avoid my turn taking the section meeting minutes. At least, that was only part of it. The decision came from a realisation that my basic understanding of how universities, faculties and schools actually worked no longer applied. My pretty crude working model was one in which growing student numbers fund new members of staff, who then begin to form a research concentration, which then attracts more students, and the growing student numbers allows a certain amount of research funding (conferences, visiting speakers, an RA to help organise things). In my case I thought that a masters’ program, which should have around 120 students next semester, most of whom pay international fees, would provide the basic engine for that kind of growth. This, I have been told in no uncertain terms, is not the case. With no meaningful connection (we simply have no say in it) between the teaching we do and the money this generates, or how this money is spent, any strategic vision a school might have is pretty much dead.

Our school is now caught up (and I must keep repeating that we not alone, just ahead of the curve) in a management system, one of the biggest and most highly centralised in Australia. Schools do not set their own research budget lines anymore, these are allocated by Faculty, line by line, each one demanding fragmented micro-justifications using financial planning models drawn from the corporate world (from where most of our senior administrators now hail). Any sense of disciplinary/ school autonomy has evaporated. Teaching too is now determined in its basic framework by Faculty, on similarly mindless financial metrics. And when I say ‘Faculty’ I don’t mean Faculty; that collegial entity has effectively disappeared (the professoriate met once, never to be heard of again) leaving just a shadowy set of grumblings and rumblings around the edges of the blaring management publicity machine. No, Faculty means the Management of the Faculty. So for me the virtuous circle of student income-new staff-research funds is broken. Teaching and research are disconnected and distributed across different managerial functions with different priorities. Schools no longer have much say in this, spending their time managing the commands from above, supplying the necessary compliance and metrics. Academics simply respond to these in fragmented fashion, each task now embedded in IT systems and compliance metrics. Digital Taylorism.

Research strategy does not involve academic staff in schools or sections trying to find and develop synergies and shared ambitions, building a common narrative or group of narratives around intellectual purpose and broader academic profile. Research is about metrics, and metrics are about money. Teaching income is always the biggest source of income. But whilst we have three very successful masters, bringing in many millions a year ($20 million?) in a way that puts all research income into the shade: well, that’s nothing to do with research but teaching and so we’ll take that thank you very much. School research strategy then becomes about how best to facilitate the accumulation of metrics that can speak to the requirements of senior management, following the priorities du jour. It’s like an ant hill. Thousands of tiny little outputs and impacts, all sourced and carried by tiny little ant-metrics, carefully put together into a narrative shape that bears very little relation to what you actually do. If you look closely you can see fragments of your work – a nose, a toe, a scrap of text – but they are broken up and glued back together by the narrative secretions of whoever is charged to do this. So, input your outputs onto the [insert name of research capture machine here] and let the ants do their work with them. You can rest content that your KPI/ Professional Review metrics have been satisfied.

But, you’re only as good as your last metric. And every day, over the loud hailer, we hear of massive pig-ironCat. 2/3 targets being met and overshot, unheard of millions coming in from sources nobody ever thought possible. Are you doing your bit? Why are you stood there whilst somebody else has just landed a contract with Sewers Victoria?

Meanwhile there is teaching (and learning). It must be clear to everyone now that the business of universities is to sell courses to students who (think they) need a qualification to get a job. It’s clear to the students, who have been told this by everyone, including universities. It is clear to the policy makers, who can’t see why they should pay for it if it results in students getting a higher paid job. And it’s clear to the teaching and learning people, who are relentlessly vocational. If only it was as clear to the academics.

This is what the student-consumer wants, but as the neo-classical economists have it, theirs is imperfect or asymmetrical information. The perfect consumer knows the value of what they are purchasing and has access to the information about all the other goods on offer. Not so here. Many students (or more often their parents) simply do not know what a job in a creative (or not so creative) industry sector looks like, let alone what skills it requires, or which program offers these in the most effective way. But that the main purpose is to get a job is never in doubt, because that is what is sold to them. At point of sale the focus is not just on the superficial aspects that marketing likes – the bright young things with cameras, the investigative journalist, the digital entrepreneur, the TV Newsroom presenter – but the practical, the experiential, the hands-on. It sells to ignorant consumers.

I’ve been teaching masters programmes almost continually since 1995. In my experience, the only practical outcome that matters – getting a job – comes from a set of understandings and skills that involve creativity, deep knowledge of the field, critical thinking, ability to work across different areas. Getting a job demands a sense of purpose (even if not quite focused on a specific job) and a resilience that comes from a sense of self-worth. These are not acquired via ‘practical’ or ‘vocational’ elements alone. The conflation of the ‘practical’ learning outcomes with the practical outcome of getting a job is a huge category mistake with long lasting consequences for Higher Education. It is a disastrous mistake that is not confined to glossy websites and Twitter feeds of the marketing departments – of course they sell practical outcomes with promises of practical skills, as asked – but it has permeated deep into the rationale of universities.

In the contemporary Australian university it is an undisputed truth that academic knowledge is of little value other than to other academics (echoed by the current government but also in large parts of the Labor Party). If universities are to make people ‘work ready’ then it is a zero-sum game between the practical and the academic. This has resulted in the collapse of the very sense of self-worth of universities. I might even go so far as say they basically engage in self-hate. ‘Academic’ is a cipher for the redundant and self-indulgent, especially amongst those who have left their peer-reviewed paper days behind and now travel on Platinum Cards and are welcomed in the First-Class Lounge. Well yes, we need to do that stuff for the research metrics and the promotions and the prestige but please, keep it well away from the students. A very senior faculty manager suggested that universities are not about ‘pushing content’ in lectures – they can get all that on Google – but rather about ‘experience’. Not only is this a complete misunderstanding of what Google is actually about (which of the 10,379 answers are actually the content we need?) but of education itself. Students are not perfect consumers, they don’t know things and we are there to help them do this. This is a moment of trust, and one that has historic roots, whether Socratic or Confucian. To guide students from a state of relative ignorance to something like knowledge, which is also self-knowledge, is our job. It is not our job to give them second hand practical skills, all tied to identifiable learning outcomes, each of which is part of the commercial contract with the student (though basically unenforceable, the University will always win), and which will be redundant in a few years.

That moment of trust – where the student-consumer is in the dark and where they must rely on the seller (caveat emptor) to lead them – is something to which most academics adhere and they take it very seriously. Because we were all there once. We do it in our spare time, and off workload, and out of a sense of commitment. But that bond of trust, and the spaces in which it is fostered, is utterly anathema to university management and has been rooted out with a vengeance. The everyday administration and organisation of teaching, which used to be based around a school, has now become a management prerogative. Not just the enrolment systems, where instead of a pastoral advisor the academic is now like one of those powerless check-out support people at Coles: “oh, credits not come through and you can’t enrol? Have you tried taking the bag off the scales and putting it back on? Well, I’ve got a swipe card but I’ll just call the supervisor”. Not just timetabling, which continues to be a nightmare of its own making, simply to save money (KPMG see empty rooms as a wasted asset) with not the slightest thought about student/ staff experience. IT systems have efficiencies but administratively this means we now spend time doing the inputting and learning how to input. Our lost time is their efficiency saving, as digital machines extract all previously untapped slack time, like fracking technologies on previously useless gas fields.

Our actual carbon-based school administrators, who have been absolutely brilliant and who have saved (or cleaned up after) a million messes and disasters, and who sit in hot offices talking to confused academics with politeness and grace: they have gone. Sorry people, we apologise for any inconvenience caused. This loss of people who know how things work and can really help you solve problems is the clearest indicator I know of how little the management care about academics.

Not just those systems but the framework of every unit, the nature and spread of the assessments, the content – yes, it is now down to that – of each unit, is thoroughly gone over by T&L enforcers. Though that is increasingly about self-censorship I suspect – we avoid anything that smacks of ‘pure learning’. Look at us, we do video essays! As one V-C made clear a few years ago – academics don’t own units, the university does. You are interchangeable. We are Borg. Lectures are systematically undermined not just by live-streaming (you can watch it in the bath!) but by students being told BY THE UNIVERSITY that they are redundant. Without any evidence – indeed ignoring the evidence to the contrary. And with thousands and thousands of overseas students thinking – why I am actually here then? It’s not about lectures vs. flipped classrooms, Moodle content and so on. Lectures are good, bad or indifferent; same with ‘task based’ assessment and video essays. You chose the form that suits you/ the content/ the class. It is not about this or that form or technique: the symbolic assault on lectures speaks to a deep sense that academic knowledge is worthless. We should tend the T&L check-outs.

One question I’m always asked is why would the university want to do this, to make its academics feel worthless and tell its students that only in the vocational/ experiential can practical advantage, and any real worth, be found? Senior management declared war on academics (‘content-pushers’ to the last) a couple of decades ago. Simply put, the idea of a profession cuts against the logic of the corporation. If the university business is to sell things to students, it needs people who can deliver but they must do so on the terms set out by management. Academic autonomy, teacher-student trust, the commitment to knowledge for its own sake: these are values which have no place in the modern university.

This is all well known, a hundred papers, books, newspaper articles tell us this. They tell us we are de-professionalised, that Higher Education is a commodity only, and that students are beginning to cotton on to grade inflation (see the recent reports coming from the UK), rip-off fees, craven marketing and a life of debt. Any ‘industry’ which, like universities, has put their own profit margins (or salary pay-rises) above the interests of those it is supposed to serve is in big trouble. A ‘banking royal commission’ for universities is long overdue. I spoke to somebody who was about to leave this university who said something that cheered me up: “someday somebody is going to have to put this whole mess right”. I left feeling happy that somebody thinks they actually can and will be put it all back together. Maybe they will, but only external political forces will be able to do this. Management is so deep in they are lost; academics are utterly defeated.

I’m saying nothing new. What I learned here (again, we are not alone) was how people work and live in totally alienated environments. Alienated not: ‘lack of well-being? Please sign up for school mindfulness classes’. Alienated: to see the products and process of your labour– not just the teaching environment or the research metrics, but the whole life investment we all have made in what we know and try to pass on – utterly taken out of your control and used against you. These are psychological damaging places. I am sure that behind closed doors there are groups of scholars and teachers who know and respect each other, and can feel open and engaged in what they do together. I do see that all the time. But what I also see is that outside these small circles, intimate academic protective bubbles (in the Sloterdijk sense) this is an alienated workplace, perhaps the most alienated I have encountered.

It’s tough to say this, but stepping out of the confines (de facto if not de jure) as I have in the last few months, I think we have all been frogs in the water. Do the frogs not notice, or do they think, hang on, it’s just a passing phase, the temperature will drop? Or do they just not know how to scream? I witnessed the collapse of any democracy in the school, that strange hierarchical democracy of academia that is so often dysfunctional but, you know, it’s our dysfunction, not that of a senior management far away on a distant planet. That gave way to the efficiencies of a corporate hierarchy based on willingness to do the bidding of management. Of course, like many professional attributes, the academic based hierarchy was not so much abolished as co-opted. The academic hierarchy was an odd mix of respect and fear, but it was kind of rule-bound because ultimately it was based on a collegial group who were committed to it. Hierarchy is still hard-baked into the system, but it is no longer governed by the school, by collegiality. It is metric based, performative, disciplinary and divisive. It has left academics fearful and without respect, though it does have better conditions than working for UberEats.

In conditions of fear and alienation it is hard to cope. I have seen how little micro-grains of administrative (no longer ‘service’ but ‘leadership’) authority lead to a hyper-identification with power. I am finally in control of something and so am aligned with all the heads and deans and pro-vice deputy associate chancellors all the way up the chain of power, to the Big Other herself. It is a good feeling, one we have all shared, being aligned, head-patted, off the hook. But takes a lot of vigilance for that not to become a path to doing onto others that which has been done to yourself, a pattern familiar in authoritarian states. And universities, in case you need telling, are essentially authoritarian institutions. I came to understand more the endless performance of public congratulations – grants, awards, SETU scores. Yes, it is pig iron production figures and employee of the month notices. It is also a craving for real collegiality and solidarity and for some shared sense of purpose and recognition. Yet one does not need to read Adorno to see how distorted a form of collegial respect this has now become. Such public congratulations reminds me of Shostakovich talking about the Second World War: finally we were allowed to cry openly in public.

What is happening in Universities of course reflects the wider world. The possibilities opened up by mass participation in higher education; the cultural shifts that have made the fearful hierarchies of the past less acceptable; the breakup of the cannon into multiple cannons and the proliferation of voices blossoming in the realm of formal knowledge; the promise of the digital, liberating knowledge and teaching from older forms founded on scarcity and analogue. And the existential challenges we face as a country and a species. What brilliant, committed fun we could all have, if we were just allowed to get on with it, set our goals, with the technology and the facilities, the freedom, and the culture of multiple proliferating students from all over the world. Where we could all feel happy about going in to work on a Monday, a spring in our step, really enjoying the challenges ahead. Not the slow dread of Sunday email-checking, the deadening meetings, the affectless communication, the sense of never-ending tasks over which you have no control. We could be lighting up the world. Instead we are pissing away the institutional memory and ethos of learning and teaching in the service of a corporate machine which – we all know don’t we? – will hit the buffers sooner rather than later. Instead of introducing students to all the possibilities that they might become, and the world with them, we are cheating them of that profoundly vital space between childhood and work which, at least since the 1960s, have been the most fecund and creative moment in our lives. Now we go from school to work, via that simulation (simulacra) of work called the vocational university.

You may say that I am leaving, jumping on the last stage out of Dodge/ helicopter out of Saigon. Maybe it is less cowardly to stay, and try and salvage respect and meaning, for yourselves and for the project of university education. There are many in the school and faculty doing this, and doing it well. What is being done to universities drives me to anger; maybe I should learn the self-control displayed by people like Gillian Triggs, Christine Blasey Ford or (God help me) Hilary Clinton who, under relentless pressure keep their cool. There are people fighting the good fight, better than I could. So in this sense I leave feeling like a failure. Whatever the case, I do think you all deserve better, because you are the ones who pull everything out of the fire, who actually deliver what the university is selling. You make up the gap between the marketing hype, whose job is done when the dotted line is signed, and the reality of learning about the world, yourself and how the two fit together. You are the value-creators and every management strategy sets out to remove control of this value and to make you forget that it is you who create it.

You deserve better. And I do think there are changes with positive, green shoots afoot. But I’m not going to be around to see these, and so, with all due respect I wish you good luck.

Ten years ago I arrived in Australia. A bit like Columbus I was looking for China, but drifted south. A job in Brisbane, I thought, was just down the road from Shanghai, where I was spending a lot of time. Well, it is, kind of. Ten hours flight, but then again, no jet lag. I did not know anything about Australia, other than accumulated images and ideas, trapped like the shreds of grey plastic on the barbed wire of my inattention. Cricket commentary around the Ashes. Tennis players from old. Some vague notion of right-on surfer conservationism. A sense of tough independent guys, who did not take wimpy poms seriously. Some frontier mentality mutated into hard-assed social democracy?

Australia did not wake me up, but I woke up in Australia. Many people never went to sleep, and others still dream on. I think of the opening of Man with a Movie Camera.

Open your Eyes!

Last July I was in Shanghai as the city, with the same population as Australia, introduced a tough new waste recycling regime. Backed up by trained volunteers, fines, and a huge waste processing network, one of the world’s largest cities took an important step towards sustainability. Good news, one would have thought. Yet the Guardian’s headline was ‘A Sort of Eco-dictatorship’, replete with grumbling residents, fines as ‘coercion’, and all dismissed by an ‘expert’ as ‘mere window dressing’. A shift to sustainable waste management on a vast scale, a pilot for the largest country on Earth, was simply put in the ‘authoritarian China’ bin. This at a time when Australia was still working out what to do in response to the Chinese ban on landfill waste export two years after it took effect (and they’d had warning). This kind of reporting resurfaced in January, led as always by the vociferous China hater Bill Bishop, as the Corona Virus began to make news. That is, an immediate locking down of China as authoritarian regime, now exporting its mistakes to us.

This was to be Xi’s Tiananmen moment, the Communist Party’s Chernobyl, its failure to protect the public revoking the ‘mandate of heaven’. A Guardian podcast, in the middle of this crisis as 1.4 billion people were confined to their homes, discussed initial cover-ups (a fair point) but then suggested this maybe the end of the Communist Regime. Reports of someone out of curfew being handcuffed to a lamppost elicited discussion of ‘the struggle of the Chinese people against the Chinese state’ and the question ‘why are people not in revolt on the streets’? These predictions – as anyone who knew China would tell you – were utterly ill-founded, and yet they filled the headlines and op-eds of the mainstream press. They built on a growing international relations literature in the US and Australia which had pivoted from a realist view – how do we deal with the rise of China – to a ‘woken’one – China has been given a free run at our expense and to our detriment. The Thucydides trap is inevitable, so better spring it now whilst the US and its allies still have an edge. This aggressive pivot and the reporting to which it gives rise has not served Australia – or the West – well in this crisis.

In its desire to see the demise of the Chinese Communist Party – in this view the only viable option – it deludes itself and others as to the CPCs capacity and its wide support in China. These writers are keen to make a distinction between the Chinese government and the Chinese people, but they talk of ‘regime change’ as if this meant the same as ousting Morrison or Trump. What they mean is a large scale political, social, economic and cultural transformation of China into something acceptable to the West. Not only is this not on the cards but it has zero support in China. Reform yes, but not regime change. This failure had serious consequences.

The concern to force China into a ‘dictatorship versus the people’ narrative meant that the lived experience of the virus emergency in China went under-reported. The ‘human interest’ stories we saw in Italy or France barely surfaced, though they were there to be seen. Many people in Wuhan– undergoing what we all now might have to go through – saw themselves as saving their fellow citizens, and the rest of the world. A Chinese colleague mailed me to say that they felt proud of what their country had done to earn the gratitude of the world. I tried not to deflate her. This all contributed to the ‘othering’of the virus, as something that could only happen in China, a backwards country not able to deal with it as would an advanced democracy. It also suggested that China’s strict methods, which gradually gained some grudging admiration, could not be implemented in the West. They were needed as in China no-one trusted the government, whereas in democracies we have open information. There is less of that now.

This is not to excuse the Chinese government of its mistakes. Ok, the virus was unknown, and it threatened the lunar new year holiday; but all mistakes reveal the qualities of the system that makes them. In this case risk averse local officials not wanting to put their head up first and sitting hard on those that did. But who now globally, after a crucial month of highly visible health warnings was wasted, is able to keep on casting stones – other than those who blame China for exporting its mistakes. The Chinese response, when it got going, was ruthlessly efficient. It will require some serious investigation, by health professionals and epidemiologists, to determine what they did well, what not, and what could be done differently. But there is also a political reckoning, and it will be a hard one.

China has shown that it possesses a certain state capacity that has been seriously eroded in the West, especially the Anglosphere. Political scientist Christopher Hood suggested thirty years ago, that ‘new public management’ was imposing cost-efficiencies at the expense of commitment to ‘honesty and fairness’, and the capacity for ‘reliability, adaptivity and robustness’. He asked presciently, ‘whether the emphasis on cost-cutting, contracting-out, compartmentalizing and top-slicing is compatible with safety culture at the front line’. Some answers are now forthcoming – from the health services to the NBN. At bottom, there is an erosion of trust in government. It is not just the obvious decline in the capacity of states to deal with this crisis, but also of the social capacity to work collaboratively with trusted state authorities. China has both capacity and this trust; so too do the democracies of South Korea and Taiwan. A country does not need to be ‘authoritarian’ to act competently, but nor does being a ‘democracy’ guarantee that it will do so.

Underlying the hollowing out of the state has been the extension of the market to every nook and cranny of social, cultural and political life. It is now held as the very essence of the rational. In the China narrative the progress of ‘free’ market capitalism and democracyare as one; that things have not turned out as planned shows that these markets – state capitalism – cannot really be free. What this occludes is the growing sense in the West that capitalism and democracy are not always happy bedfellows. In fact, capitalism is quite happy to dispense with democracy when circumstances require. The current global crisis raises questions about every state’s (lack of) capacity to ensure the basic welfare of its citizens. This crisis thus connects us to China, because there too people are asking about how the system can be made more responsive to their needs, able to listen to their voices. This, it should now be clear by now, is not guaranteed by the bare mechanism of a party electoral system. A new compact between state and citizens is required, in both the West and China, and this challenge takes us beyond Us and Them.

For right now the Thucydides trap has mis-sprung. It is China that is a global health leader, the capable state to which one might consider turning to for help, as the US fumbles its way into disaster. And the Party has made propaganda capital out of it – right back at that coming out of the US and Australia. The task now is surely to step outside this binary and refuse to be told what our core values are by those who would wage cold and hot war against China. The world faces some profound challenges and China has its contribution to make, as do we.