Well, crying for more government support, is not the answer, when, you tube or other current mediums can alleviate your frustrations with just hard work, selling and marketing to sort out your contributing peculiarity or eccentricities, and if you are not successful in promoting you images and ideas which you believe are currently popular, through these mediums, you can find some other private enterprise solution to drive yourself in expressing your desires of recognition, if that is what you really want, or maybe just place your work in storage until someone cares to value or take notice, if that is your desire. Maybe cutting into the publically funded ABC can solve the cause and effect, but please don’t inflate the pubic sectors funded costs on the private workforce who ultimately pay.

There is more to culture than art, There are more important things like mental "culture" in Parliament, that would improve it quite a lot. I get the impression that Australia is no longer regarded as an advanced nation, but is subsiding into a “3rd world”country. I get this impression because of the wholesale selling of our national resources, and the import of all our required manufactured goods. The prices of our resources is determined by the purchasers in foreign countries, not by a responsible person in our own country and they accept that the negotiators in our country are persons of low intelligence and probably low integrity, which of course, they are, I doubt if people can genuinely disagree with that assessment. It has gone well past the stage of accusing the Labor, Liberal or the LNP, It is all of them. I can see no sign of intelligence in the manner of their pursuing – any of them, in what they consider, the path to a profitable successful future for our country, their decision s are deplorable. The trade for our non renewable, non value added resources has been manipulated by our large companies, so we receive goods from China, Japan, Germany and many other countries, goods we used to manufacture here in Australia, ourselves. No party, especially Labor and Liberal can claim that they have had nothing to do with the destruction of our industries or farming economy, or of our total economy. Our position of the poor workers and very rich CEO's, has been created by the lowering of the top tax from 66.6% in the period from 1950 to 1970 and that was with the expertise of a Liberal person, Harold Holt. But no party, Liberal or Labor have had the integrity or maybe courage to continue that direction, although it also needed a change to the level of no tax, which should have been about $30,000 today to bring reasonable living conditions to our low income earners and small business. Both Labor and Liberal talk big but do little in that regard.

The suggested policy alternative still doesn't address the issue of access and participation. Currently cultural access and participation can be considered buying a postcard in an art gallery or going to a movie. While this has some legitimacy what we need is Jon Hawkes concept of cultural policy based on participation(making culture) and reception (receiving culture). To do this we need to free cultural policy from its arts shackles and part of this is clarity around the real meaning of access and participation.

There is very little 'Australian' culture, but a plethora of individuals calling themselves 'artists' while imitating the pop culture of the USA or the latest overseas fashions generally.

To compare the funding of Opera Australia, which employs many highly skilled genuine,dedicated artists and technicians, to the Torres Strait body is ridiculous. Bemoaning the dying out of indigenous arts is not to notice that 'aboriginal' music is typically simply music performed by aborigines, in imported styles, usually from the USA. It used to be country-and-western, then it was reggae, and now it's hip-hop and rap, where people who versify and chant doggerel to a drum machine or sampler call themselves 'musicians'. These 'indigenous artists' don the usual required dress etc. and hope to make it big in the USA.

To suggest that large organisations not be funded, but that individuals should, raises the obvious question: who chooses the individuals? There is enough nepotism and 'who-you-know' already, and this would make things far worse. Would there be a large organisation dispensing the money and, if not, who could do it? An individual? (Stalin and Hitler come to mind!)

I take the opposite view. Some arts require large amounts of money to produce (theatre, ballet, opera, film) and without funding would not be available to the public. Funding should be directed to lowering ticket prices. I remember years ago Opera Australia had very cheap tickets for under-26s and pensioners, on Saturday afternoons, and those who gratefully attended came from everywhere (some in their tennis gear). It was hugely popular. Opera Australia loved it because it was an audience of genuine music-lovers.

Individual artists do not need grants to create, but may need them to reach the public, or organisations to do this for them. Any individual who 'cannot create' without external funding is not a resourceful artist, but a fake or poseur. Kids do not need arts grants to create, but merely materials. And to fund those whose field is commercial pop music, which is more 'pop' than 'music', is to throw even more public money at private entrepeneurs, who do not and will not fund venues, just as the 'fans' do and will not.

Pop music is largely for the non-musical who require much more than the primitive 'music' to be interested; peer pressure and fear of ostracism, together with an adolescent need for idols and a focus for immature sexuality, plus well-marketed brainwashing (pop is all about repetition of every sort) prevail over music. It is rare to find people in possession of recordings which were never fashionable, just as it is rare to find people who do not change with fashion. If you do not think for yourself, others will do it for you.

Wake up Australia, and support individuals who are individual, not pretentious, lazy fashion-followers like yourselves!

I notice that this website is partly sponsored by large government organisations and huge companies (e.g. American Express). Should these, too, be dismantled along with large arts organisations? If not, why not, indeed? One way or another, the public is paying (where else does the money come from except from consumers, and ultimately from the productive?).