Your piece seems to 'end' abruptly ... has something been lost?

There is a logical paradox in the idea of a cultural policy that is not really a policy about the government funded self describing 'arts':

'Whole of culture' is everything we do, thus 'broad cultural policy' is simply a odd way of labeling the total policy mix of the whole Government of Australia.

...I agree with the author, an expansion of the narrow description of culture is way overdue. The official definition of culture could be likened to the existing description of the official economy: A view of a rich garden-bed wherein grow the "joyous" roses in perpetual bloom, the view which refuses to concede the existence of another sinister "ugly step sister", struggle town.

...As the necessary tool of propaganda, culture, outside of the traditional zone of the arts, remains forever a toy of the "cultured" in society. Chances of an expansion on the currently accepted narrow definitions of an "arts" only inclusion, would be akin to converting the Liberal Party into Socialists! Change will not be permitted whilst "Culture" is a heavy artillery piece, belonging to elites and their game of Multiculturalism, which effectively destroys the host culture of Australians.

...Good luck with cultural expansion, most Australians are destined to remain happily outside the inclusion zone, exactly I believe, how the Australian Politic would prefer it to be.

Personally ,the government sector 'arts' and 'arts education' are a unpleasant, inbred , gangster world ( and full of weird anachronistic Marxist rhetoric), I am very happy that they remain contained behind the big razor wire fence.

Thank you for taking the care to put this together (although as another contributor noted, it does appear to have been cut short). I would, however, have liked to know if you were part of a submission, I am guessing not. (Neither was I.)

I don't like saying this, because I am sure it must be unnerving for the authors of the submissions to find their words reproduced in this context, but reading your piece was a bit like walking through a Dali or Ernst dreamscape, not knowing what kind of unimagined, misshapen beast might be around the corner. The government, or the minister and his staff, are most to blame as you say, but I also felt that some of the respondents hardly needed encouragement to perform the contortions they did.

I want an arts policy, and I want the funding to go to the arts. I am not an artist, but I see art as perhaps the only thing that might save our communities and our world. Art has the potential, as Josef Pieper wrote in two beautiful lectures at the end of WWII (published as Leisure: The Basis of Culture), to lead us out of the maze of "living to work" (Max Weber). "Then again," he says, "there is a pseudo-art and a spurious poetry which, instead of bursting through the vault of the workday word, merely paint deceptive ornamentation upon the inner surface of the dome."

Art is only going to get more important (but increasingly distant?) as we become increasingly distracted by strange new toys that obliterate leisure, obliterate our familiarity with silence, and obliterate our sense of place.... Their advance will not cease, of course, but only art will make a home for us in the new world they bring.

cardigan
I am an artist. What you say is well intended, but in truth it is part of the problem.

Art can help us to becoming aware of being aware, but it is not a substitute for spiritual practice; Redemption comes only by going to the crossroads , accepting that I am nothing more than a very clever and very destructive monkey , bowing down before one of the great teachers and asking for help.

Only that can break open the prison.

Pedestrian,

I am not sure I have much faith in "spiritual practice" apart from a thinking that truly deserves that name.

A monkey named Awake to Vacuity did almost exactly what you describe, and he did it in a work of literature, Journey to the West.

Art and thinking have a special relationship, and I am not sure current practices in education and cultural activity encourage much that could be called thinking through that relationship. Pieper and others notably argue for the importance of such ongoing thinking through for the Humanities and for humanity.