A tale of two exhibitions: fortitude at Bondi and fawning at the Biennale

This year’s Federal Budget was a washout for arts and culture, with few significant cuts or windfalls. Most notable, for me at least, was the complacent support given to the National Cultural Policy, with its five shaky “pillars”, and extra funding for Creative Australia, as a reward for another year of dysfunction and scandal. It’s clear the treasurer is happy to leave all the cultural stuff in the hands of Arts Minister, Tony Burke, who has shown a complete unwillingness to question any of the status quos he has created.

There are dangerous outcomes of the government’s cultural policies, and one of the worst has been the steady shift of political priorities in funding bodies, the national broadcaster and associated media. This has seen public money and exhibition opportunities channelled away from some groups, such as those of Jewish or Chinese origins (not to mention the Old White Blokes!), and lavished on those who identify as Indigenous or Muslim.

In saying this, I’m simply identifying an obvious shift in focus. I’m not saying that Indigenous or Muslim artists are in any way inferior or less deserving than their Jewish or Chinese counterparts, I’m arguing that artists of all creeds and ethnicities should be allowed the same opportunities. This may sound like pure fantasy in the current political climate, but it is the way a healthy liberal democracy stays healthy.

What should be a source of alarm for the government is that their funding priorities and policies tend to mirror the views of that strident alliance of pro-Palestinian and Indigenous activists, who draw a false equation between Israel and Australia as “settler colonies”. The upshot of this political manoeuvre, which ignores the radical differences between both forms of settlement, is to create a group of saintly figures who are history’s heroes and victims, and another who can only be portrayed as villains. It’s historically preposterous to maintain such a fiction, but one sees the impact of these ideas in every part of our cultural life.