Labor’s Revive policy promotes First Nations culture. Reparation? Not so much

Six months ago, when it was announced that the new Labor government would draft a national culture policy, your correspondent suggested it could be reduced to three points: having culture that the market won’t fund is good, so the government should fund it; granting of this funding should be shaped to maximise equality of access; large-scale broadcasters should be subject to local content quotas.

That was it. That was all you needed. 

On looking at Revive, the new national cultural policy document (so called because titling it “Breathe, Damn You, Breathe” would have been unseemly), I wondered if Labor had taken up my suggestion. There is nothing of the grand pronouncements of past documents about what culture is or how it serves a nation.

There are a lot of stories about how important stories are, case studies (“Gruppo Whoop-Di-Do of Marble Bar WA is using mime, earthworks and the oboe to show a new side to Charmain Clift”, etc), oodles of recommendations and initiatives, and a lotta lotta First Nations stuff, but no big national cultural branding. Has cultural policy learnt its lesson?

Sadly, no. The First Nations stuff, as well as being good initiatives in their own right, is the national branding. First Nations First leads the “five pillars” of the policy (which support 10 principles, which the document does not call “the principles architrave” — philistines), and it’s made clear that this is the most important pillar, even though that’s not how pillars work. It’s the way to solve the problem of an Australian cultural identity when every other way of shaping it has been exhausted.

That process may honour and fund First Nations cultures, but it also co-opts and appropriates them, to a nation of which they are one part, and to which they have a complex and ambiguous relationship. I shall explain.  

The Albanese government faced a problem when it went to create a national culture policy. It would have been desperate not to recycle, for one last time, some sort of left-critical cultural nationalism, the faintest echo of the Whitlam years. Not only would that have been an imposition of a de facto Anglo-Celtic obsession that has been rendered obsolescent by waves of immigration, but for many artists it marks a history so saturated with notions of colonialism that it cannot be owned by the government. Nor is there any desire to. At the same time, in 2023, it cannot actually have no thematic policy at all, a sort of Burkean (Edmund, not Tony) conservative refusal to have any programmatic policy at all. 

This is not a dilemma that I am suggesting it is responding to cynically. It looks ahead, as left nationalist social democrat neoliberals, and sees a giant hole in the middle of a culture policy with all sorts of bells and whistles. It looks for what’s missing. Where once it would have found a national culture, it now finds a First Nations culture (or two mega-cultures, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) that must be our missing content. What else could it be?

This is the deep logic driving the policy. The last outing of left cultural nationalism was under the Rudd government, which steered funds towards work that would tell our history in a critical fashion. The result was that TV networks took the bucks and made hagiographies about their founders (Howzat! Kerry Packer’s War, Black and White), while Martin Ferguson blew tens of millions of taxpayers’ money on Baz Luhrmann’s crappalaooza Australia. After that Mr Tony knighted Prince Philip to try to restore our British continuity, Malcolm looked to the future, and Scotty beamed us up to Star Trek, reminding us that Captain Kirk was Captain Cook, and both were Jesus.

Anglo-Celtic culture dominates…

That time to be alive is over. The new one begins. For about 125, maybe 150 years, we had a reasonably defined culture in the fullest sense of the term: that of multiple practices of meaning from the immediate — how people bodily greet each other, the brands they buy — to the more deliberate processes of reading and writing, listening and playing, etc.

But the “we” was Anglo-Celtic Australia. With First Nations peoples sequestered or subjugated and all but a few foreigners excluded, we were possibly the most Anglo-Celtic nation on earth, outside Scotland and Ireland. Protectionism made us self-sufficient: we had our own architecture and our own biscuits, plays and short stories, and everything in between. A lot of British stuff came in, but a lot of what we lived by was home-grown. That persisted even as American products and styles began to flow into parts of the market. 

When the first wave of social liberalism came with the boomers in the late ’60s and early ’70s, a reshaping of the culture was seen in those terms. The biscuits were all very nice, but we wanted our own movies too, as we would have had if the Lyons government (advised by a bloke named George Palmer; I wonder what happened to his little boy Clive?) had not killed the industry in the ’30s.

So a broad movement arose in every art form and genre to reclaim a national culture in the name of its independent and democratic spirit. The First Nations part of all this was expressed by the Black Power movement, which connected to global Blackness, rather than indigeneity. The statement “You are on Aboriginal land” was part of a wider socialist notion that we would get the land back for the whole population (and the land councils, with their pre-Mabo judgment notion of land returned by right, without the question of an abstract “title”, was an expression of that). 

There was enough of this around after the 1975 coup for Malcolm Fraser to merely reduce the funding, rather than change the direction — though he nobbled the anthem changeover, a new flag and other stuff — and a cultural leftism was one of the features of the Hawke government. But so too was offering to let the US test its missiles in our waters.

This was the two-step that has become Labor’s modus operandi: give in the culture, take away in the economy and society. Every time Victoria’s Daniel Andrews government does something like offering a “non-binary” checklist option on dog licences or some such it uses the resulting cheers to cover the noise of privatising VicRoads. 

By the late 1980s, we had Aussie films, but the biscuits — and the burgers, supermarkets, soft drinks, clothes and cars — were increasingly American or global. The films increasingly were crap. Once the political push for a left nationalism had died away, the culture carapace that remained began to wilt. In the early 1990s, the tariff walls came down, Australian brands disappeared, pay TV and diluted quotas drowned out Australian content.

Paul Keating’s version of the culture-politics two-step was disastrous, destroying much of what remained of an everyday cultural base through the final destruction of the tariff walls, while giving big cheques to individual artists.

… Anglo-Celtic dominance ended forever

John Howard? Well, as a conservative, he was a classic cunctator, seeing his role as holding the line against any wrenching progressive shift until the last World War II vet had died. His political wars — Tampa, the intervention — were gonzo mayhem, the culture wars more measured. Howard knew the great globalisation wrench was coming because he made it possible: high immigration ended Australian Anglo-Celtic dominance forever, as deregulation further Americanised everyday life.

Rudd’s tergiversations were an attempt to work with the new framework he had inherited and try to get a leftish, popular result. Part of this was the history stuff, and part of it was adopting the “progressive patriotism” of Tim Soutphommasane, which attempted to reflow cultural attachments to abstract principles we had lived by (allegedly), and which rather made things worse. 

What we face as a nation now after a decade — was it a decade? — of reactionary malarky was to either accept that we were a nation with culture, but without a culture, or to find a wholly new way to brand it.   And any new attempt to construct it afresh from “majority materials” would collapse in immediate absurdity.

In Revive, First Nations cultures have been subbed in as a new form of the Australian brand, facing inwards to the country and outwards to the world. Indeed, this cultural First Nations First process is used in the Revive report to lace politics and culture together, with the first principle of the First Nations report being to ratify the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Since several of the nation’s leading First Nations artists are from groups such as Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance, which has a dissident relationship to the Uluru Statement, this seems like co-option. 

But of course it is. Without a full treaty and sovereignty process, the subbing in of First Nations cultures to serve as a metonym for a country that can’t have a culture is surely appropriation on a grand scale. This has been occurring for some time, driven by the white progressive classes and done under the cover of acknowledgment. White progressives have latched on to First Nations acknowledgment out of genuine ethical passion, but also out of cultural need. The frameworks of progressivist/knowledge class life are abstract, generalised. First Nations cultures retain rich and compressed meanings, which can assuage progressive anomie. 

This is why the polarities of Australian left cultural nationalism have flipped so absolutely. The Anglo-centred left nationalism of the 1960s to 1980s now looks simultaneously kitsch and offensive. The Australian left nationalist view of that period was that the country’s history was evolutionary and dialectical: within a cruel and racist colony, a universal spirit had unfolded, asserting itself and extending from its particular beginnings into a general form. This is why left nationalists revisited events such as the Eureka Stockade, the eight-hour-day protests, universal suffrage, and the like. This movement not only reclaimed the Eureka flag, it turned Blinky Bill into a folk revolutionary.

Much of this now looks like National Trust, open-house day dress-ups. And, by that, worse, since it fails to acknowledge colonialism. The critical meaning of that has overwhelmed any notion that Australia’s history was an emergence of greater good out of evil beginnings — 95% of our history is now, among the broader, say, 30-40% who debate these things, an orphan. 

Sticking to a rigid and servile history

Thus the right latch on to the most rigid and servile parts of our history — from the ludicrous overestimation of Robert Menzies to the ghastly death mall the Australian War Memorial is being turned into — with the living, progressive and responsive side of our history rendered as a null set. The right charges ahead unhindered. But there is practically no one remaining on the left who identifies emotionally with that progressive cultural-historical stream. The communists and Maoists did, but they are long gone. The Labor left once did. But it’s a farmer’s axe, changed over completely in a couple of decades, now near all deracinated progressives, and perhaps the main drivers of the appropriation of First Nations cultures.  

There is thus an enormous weight being placed on First Nations cultures, with the Voice and the cultural policy simply the leading edge of a pretty major process. This process remains a progressive passion, with much of the population watching on, living the culture — of sport, of Australian music that doesn’t need a grant, of the ways in which one does culture in how you holiday, or have a barbecue or whatever — while watching the process of state culture-making with the certain knowledge that the mass of the population are more excluded from this process than they have ever been.

The response to that at the moment is simply withdrawal to the “private social sphere”, and a protective cynicism to make bearable the spectacle of one’s own powerlessness.

But it may not be so forever. The uses to which the national cultural policy is putting First Nations cultures — to give a positive branding to the nation that almost extinguished them — are part of the enormous weight being put on First Nations peoples to save Australia from an encroaching anomie, the “kingdom of nothingness” that lies beneath “the vernacular republic”.

I do not see how it can bear the weight of such expectations and demand indefinitely. It’s only February, and with the Voice and the cultural policy and more to come, we are really wearing out this new self-branding at a pretty rapid rate. 

This should be obvious for what it is, whether done by progressives needing to import rich meaning into their own lives, or a national government (I doubt that the 14 culturati appointed to advise the process are complicit in this switcheroo) needing to give the country an identity on the world stage. Without material transfer — urban land, reparations, capital — it is extraction and exploitation.

We are mining First Nations cultures just as we have mined their lands, and giving them back fees in the form of expanded arts grants. We alibi this on the suggestion that a cultural-symbolic resource is iterative, i.e. the song, image, story I am co-opting is reproduced, not taken, as is land or iron ore. 

But that is not hard and fast. The more we abstract particular cultural properties — including texts and performances — from more immediate contexts or relationships, from their existence as culture unbent to wider purpose, we wear down the rich meaning we go to them for, dilute it, in a way that feeds back into the social life from which such culture comes.

I cannot imagine First Nations peoples will consent en masse to this forever; nor that the excluded mass society will agree forever that a national culture is what progressives and artists re-engineer it to be.

Revive has many good things in it, some shockingly bad ones, and both for First Nations peoples, but it is above all a document of wider intent by the Albanese government, and forms a statement of intent as to what it will do in the fields of economy, trade, foreign policy, and above all defence. And that show is just about to start!

Does Revive use First Nations cultures to assuage our conscience? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.