Last saved by: Jason

‑ Good evening everyone.  I can see half a dozen already.  Please let us know where you are, I can see some familiar names and faces there, which is just fantastic.  I always enjoy this part to see where everyone is.  A big all caps hello from ‑ saying hello to George as well, Glen from Shellhaven.  People of the Kulin Nations here in Melbourne.  George, where are you? 
‑ I'm under the radar from you, not very far at all.  I'm not in a COVID hot spot. 
‑ We don't hesitate to say it.  It's been very distressing seeing our neighbours to the north actively discouraging people interacting with us. 
‑ I expect next trip to the supermarket it will be deja vu all over again.
‑ I hope not.  Lovely to see everybody coming in. 
            Now who was here last week for the discussion with Michaela?  And goodness me, that's I think really feeling for her colleagues and everyone at the ABC today, and we will get into that in a little minute, I am sure.  So as we are all coming in, as you know this is the NAVA advocacy program.  My name is Esther Anatolitis the Executive Director of NAVA.  Leya Reid is our communications manager, she's on the chat and she's already posted up and pinned the link to the live captioning, and you can click on that if it's helpful to have that as we are speaking, that is right there.  We are also of course recording and transcribing and the recordings and the transcriptions are available the very next day which always strikes me as being absolutely amazing.  Helen, our captioner is in Brisbane, so hello to Helen again and thank you for your very fast work in live captioning.  So this session, as you know, we have been breaking up our advocacy program into chapters focusing on the arts, on advocacy questions on policy questions, on media questions for these four weeks, and then getting far more deeply into the political questions, because advocacy of course is a complex set of conversations, and happens in a range of different platforms.  I am so thrilled that George Megalogenis was available and happened to join us this afternoon, because I always get so very much from our conversations and many of you know George as Australia's finest political explain err, so it's my great pleasure to welcome George Megalogenis author and journalist.  Welcome.
‑ Thank you, Esther and welcome all.  I see a lot of hellos in the corner.  I'll try not to read too many texts while we are doing it.  I will try and focus on the questions, but I appreciate everyone who has tuned in.
‑ It's great having a parallel of speaking and commenting.  I hope everyone has got the comment view open.  As we go add your notes and thoughts and questions for George, because as far as is possible it's just so great to be able to make this conversational.  So look, there is so very much to talk about, but before we get into some specifics around figures, around recent figures, economic and employment data, and the broader impacts of this current period on arts and culture, George, let's talk about the role or the place that arts and cultural policy has for our current government.  We have long established in our conversations these past months and of course there is no written arts and cultural policy in Australia.  This has not been one that has survived a change of government but we do know, we've certainly observed and judge and interpret the government based on the decisions they make, whether those are policy decisions, funding decisions et cetera.  So on what is observable, what do you see the role, the function, how are they using arts and cultural policy.
‑ The government as an entity a conservative government, we've had three Prime Ministers since 2013, the one in the middle, not Tony Abbott and not Scott Morrison, Malcolm Turnbull is a philanthropist at heart and very pro the arts, a very cultured individual but I think across the three Prime Ministers there's a very consistent theme and that is that arts isn't a priority for them in terms of money they want to spend, things they want to talk about, that doesn't mean that they will destroy the arts but it's not front of mind for them.   And the one the coalition, the why it's governed over this triple cycle over the three Prime Ministers they are clinging to two parts of Australia that are very, very strong for them, Queensland and Western Australia in electoral sense but culture in the sense of older rather than younger Australia, and obviously within older Australia there is a very, very strong constituency for the arts but it's not one the coalition readily associates with its messaging, so they don't talk much about the arts because they don't think it's ... paradox for us to get through.  Robert Menzies, if he could crawl out of his grave would be shaking his fist at contemporary liberal party.  His party was the in coalition with the old country party, regional Australia, the party of well‑mannered Australia, the working class, the labour party was the party of ... but it wasn't really (unclear) it wasn't really that sort of mid brow or upper middle brow sort of cultured well‑mannered Australia.  So that's something to start almost as your baseline observation.  But within the coalition constituency, and this is where the paradox comes in, art lovers, people going to galleries and theatre, they represent the community, and in our particular home in Melbourne people will go to NGV over the course of the year than the MCG.
‑ That's right.
‑ And twice as likely to go to the NGV than (unclear)in Sydney.  But to the conservatives why wouldn't that be part of your story and your conversation in Australia?  It just so happens that the people who are associated with the creation of the arts view it as a bit left of centre so the conservatives, these people are not their people, so the performers, the artistic  community isn't isn't seen as a natural constituency, farmers, miners and the like might be seen as natural constituency.  Parents who send their children to school (unclear) end up in university they become another priority or less of a priority.  So that's the way to think about it.  It's neither a good or bad thing it's just the way they see the country, and I think that is why you're probably getting a sense right now, because COVID has accelerated a lot of pressure points, it's done more than accelerate, it's broken open a whole lot of conversations that the country needs to have about where the government sits where the private sector sits, how you hold a community together, and I haven't heard much out of the government that tells me that one of the things they see holding the community together is a (unclear).
‑ I think that is a completely, a characterisation that is easy to relate to, that sense of who and what the government sees as their natural constituency as opposed to, and I think this is an evolution of global politics in the English speaking world, the notion of addressing or playing to the base as opposed to governing with all Australians, what would Menzies say if he rolled out of his grave.
‑ Who are you?  I think that's what he'd say.  I think he'd say who are you?  But the political animal in him will be intrigued that the conservatives transfer out of the labour column (unclear) into the coalition column.  He would be just as intrigued that women have conserved to conservative voter to labour voter.  He wouldn't recognise the country but the political animal in him would start to compute what the transaction was.  He would be concerned, and the reason for that is this is not the country that he imagined when he was Prime Minister for the 16 years from 1949 to 1966.  The country he thought he was building, although it was a white Australia, valued education and valued arts. 
‑ And so if we look at the broader arts community, arts industry, the people who make art, it's far more diverse than that, it is very active and engaged, it is on the whole more educated than the average Australians, and so perhaps that is something that Menzies would have been interested in, but this notion of where the government or where the coalition is going at the moment and the difference between as you started setting that out those three Prime Ministers, each in their own approach, depict recognisably liberal or coalition values and at the moment the approach as we are seeing in the comments here, the approach to the arts, the ABC, community broadcasting, community courses, this seems to be an attempt to remove criticism and interrogation, and it's a very different notion of citizenship as well, isn't it, that takes up that broader question of who can come into this country and in the circumstances in which they can coming, takes us to treatment of asylum seekers and how we sympathise with others.  Just how disjointed disconnected is the current's government understanding on this because you have given in a good deal of thought.
‑ This is a good question.  In the sense what we are trying to do is unpack the why they think this way and who they think they are representing in the way they relate to the electorate on this issue.  And I think they, it's just the way the electrical map plays out.  The south‑east corner of the Australia, the most cosmopolitan, Melbourne and Sydney are very cosmopolitan, between those three jurisdictions you have a propensity to vote labour, a younger constituency, very diverse cities each of them, but I wouldn't call that your creative corner by the way, I don't want to narrow cast the arts community in terms of these three cities, but the way of ... cosmopolitan part of Australia doesn't turn up for them as election time.  Queensland does, South Australia and regional New South Wales does.  And the election before, even though Malcolm Turnbull was the Prime Minister, equalled and WA as I mentioned earlier voted for the coalition, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, in fact all of New South Wales when you totalled up all the seats voted labour and there was a big disconnect between the city and regions, the electrical map the way the coalition cease it, they obviously want to look after their base, and this is a base that, for instance higher unemployment than average, this is a base that's older than average, this is a base that's less diverse than average, the strategic conversations they want to have in their group isn't about raising their sort of artistic  and intellectual pursuits, it's about getting a job, about trying to hang on to their sense of what the country still is, even though they realise it's changing very, very quickly, so I think the complication for them in managing a diverse portfolio of interest and a diverse portfolio of needs within an electorate, it's a lot easier for them to set up these binary choices between jobs, between treaties, between jobs and environment and climate change, between lower education, needs of people who are on the margins versus people who can look after themselves in education, this sound very binary but that is the way they see the country.  It doesn't mean that labour is any more enlightened.  Labour view that part of the country as red neck, disconnected from where Australia is heading, and they don't know how to talk to each other.  We know that the two parties don't know how to build bridges between these two constituencies ... the margin in 2016 is a single seat.  So that's, as a starting point that's your complication.  So within that frame, we're in that very narrow frame of (unclear) you would almost need a Prime Minister and their cabinet to really value the arts to make it a priority notwithstanding the perception that is (unclear) for them, so it has to come from within, and I think just looking at the way they react to the calls for funding, to the calls for JobKeeper, to the calls for support during COVID, it's not a priority for them.  I don't think they would destroy the sector, but I think it's not a priority for them, and because of that they don't think of it as a priority, but being more important not something they feel, and it's not something they will think to prioritise. 
‑ Yeah, I think that feeling and thinking to prioritise is a huge factor here and there's so many disconnections between data and approaches here, there's so much data that shows that everyone in Australia engaging with the arts and aware they are, you mentioned earlier more people going to the N GV than the MCG, and then if we take a look at some of the more recent data and people starting to comment about that job outlook stuff which we will touch on in just a sec, let's look at the impact of the pandemic on the sector, because that starts to give us a sense of economically in terms of jobs and out looks that the scale and the scope of the arts and culture sector, but also some of the problematic classifications that can make it difficult for government to get that bigger grasp.  So George has some figures handy.
‑ I am going to keep these numbers as simple as possible.  I had a look at some numbers for you before we set up this conversation.  Arts and recreation is a very, very broad category, the borrow of statistics defines employment in an industry group, it lumps arts and recreation together.  Arts and recreation includes not just the performing arts which is the galleries, it also includes community sport.  So it's a strange classification, but there are a quarter of a million people loosely defined that were in this sector employed in February 2020.  We know from the real time payroll data that the bureau puts out every fortnight that there's been a stand down, people have their jobs stood down reduced to zero hours, some are out of jobs, some are in high bear nation, so about 50,000 out of the 250,000.  I have to cut and dies.  If we take sport out we've still lost a third of narrowly defined arts.  When the government looks at those tables it cease at the very top largest employer of men is construction, it sees retail as a very large employer ... whereas we are looking at a sub‑section of the (unclear) employers according to the ABC (unclear).  Now, these are jobs that are not easily saved because they rely on people.  They rely on the (unclear).  This is the tricky thing.  So let's get personal for a split‑second, the minute the lockdown happened in late March, six months worth of work disappeared, writers event values, presentations and the like.  That would be across the board.  A lot of people in the sector, let's talk about television for example are all on (unclear) contracts.  They may have a number of temporary contracts which adds up to a career, but they don't have a single employer that can apply for JobKeeper.  So very quickly for health reasons it has to be locked down, to support it, and this is where I go back to the data, to support it it's actually not a big deal because there's not that many people to support but if your government is thinking about your unemployment right (unclear) you're going to worry about the sector at the top where the half millions and the millions are employed and you can see the way they have negotiated the JobKeeper and you can see that the way their heads almost exploded once they had to think about the complexity in the performance space that they've frozen.  And I don't think this is deliberate, I think at some point, especially with a pandemic, you only get one of these every hundred years and there's no one alive today that remembers the Spanish flu and there's no one in a working age in any organisation advising government or employed marginally that remembers the last depression.  (Unclear) pretty old to remember the last depression and still be fit and able to work, so they've been confronted with the challenge that's off the charts in terms of its complexity.  That's why I go back to that first calling, if it's not something you feel deep within you are not going to be able to prioritise.  They don't come first because they're more important ...  construction, or if you have to shut down your mining sector and suddenly there's no income at all coming in from (unclear) your society, not just your economy, your society (unclear) the longer this crisis runs and the more they resist the ideas of going down to that next level of support, sectors that through no fault of their own have had to be shut down to manage a pandemic, the longer they leave constructive discussion in that area, the harder it is for me to view this as just the difficulty of the challenge, (unclear).  I'll just hop back a bit.  Apart from the arts, of course, the single sector that's lost amongst a number of jobs is restaurants and cafes and pubs.  They have lost the equivalent of the entire sport and recreation sector and they have lost a lot of their jobs, plus the 300,000 (unclear) and that is a big employer there.  The difference there is a lot of that work is casual, a lot of these people that have been stood down are probably reemployable.  People were arguing the toss about JobKeeper or dole for people working in a cafe.  I can see it both ways, if I was a government and wanted to try and lock down the society and protect as many jobs as I possibly could, I can see how I would say look, I don't want to over invest in that work, I'm not trying to sound like a cynic, but trying to prioritise.  If you take the same (unclear) restaurant cafes is let the dole take care of itself.  Rather than some sort of structural support means that every arts organisation as well as any sporting association is in high bear nation the proper way, people still attached to the organisation and are ready to go as soon as the doors open again, you would not be doing what you're doing now.  You would be intervening in a sort of government control kind of way, like a command economy.  You say I prioritise this sector, this sector has to survive, because if I don't go in there now all the people in the sector are going to fracture and disappear in all directs and never come back.  So conceptually as an economist whether you have 900,000 or 600,000 in restaurants, cafes and pubs is neither here nor there if the other 300,000 were employable.  If you go over a quarter of a million on the narrow definition of the arts recreation sports, we'll include sports in this as well, because it's quite an important thing, we need to be able to participate for the same reasons you need to be stimulated.  You need to go to comedy festival, gallery, all these things are part of a rich life.  So if you're a government and you say I can't let these people go anywhere else, (unclear).  As I say, literally the equivalent of treating casual worker at a coffee shop the same way as you do extremely high skilled (unclear). 
‑ And just to track back a bit of what you have just said, it points to the difference between feeling and acting and not understanding, the difference between seeing and making decisions based on those top level aggregates of large numbers in certain kinds of employment and this is something that I think some good work needs to go into in the aftermath of this, is the way that government understands the industry and the way that we're presenting ourselves as the industry.  So, for example, yeah, a lot of people working casually in hospitality have lost their jobs, a lot of those people are artists or production people or people working in, according to the ATO in terms of how people identify their primary, principal occupation, there's only one option on your tax return.  So we don't know how many artists there are in Australia that ask this question all the time.  According to the Australia council's making art work report there are about 50,000, according to the bureau of communications and arts research there are more than 600,000 people who work in a sector that they call, it's not the ABS statistic, it's the bureau of communications, or sorry the office of communications and the arts, and that figure with 600,000 people and the figure that's often used as we discussed before, there are problems with this, that 111.7 billion dollars figure as the total size of that sector, it actually omits a great proportion of the visual arts as we've discussed before, but it includes things like computer games, software development and so on.  So we've got a definitional problem, we've got a self-identifying problem, we've got a problem when it comes to the way that Centrelink and the ATO don't talk to each other for example so that artist can income average and receive benefits at different times, and then we've also got compounding all of this the decision to by the government to not support local government not support State Government not support universities at this time, and so I keep thinking about a report from the Australian institute, I don't know if you saw this George, their report from a couple of months ago or less that looked for principles for stimulus, so you want effective stimulus you focus on employment intensive industries where maybe people's averages income isn't average so they are going to spend the majority of what they get, they are a strong industry in enter depend cease, they will spend a dollar, and arts is one of the ones that will come out on top.  Different ways of making that judgment rather than those aggregates, I think there's been absolutely been a bit of a panic, okay we need to make a decision, let's look at the aggregates in front of us.
‑ Yeah.  And it's not even a sort of conscious decision to declare a sector expendable.  It's how a government prioritises in crisis.  Let's tease out this discussion about numbers.  I talked to the art sector the danger is in the double counting, in trying to make governments understand how important it is before you know it everybody, and believe it or not mining sector do this as well, big income generator, very, very small employer. 
‑ Yeah.  And being automated more and more, which is why ...
‑ What they do well unfortunately is the property sector.  The multipliers that they add to, the multipliers, really bunching anything and everything, before you know, in response to a GDP or something, which makes no sense.
‑ Exactly.
‑ These arguments, you can dead end yourself very, very quickly.  The other part to it is, to think about, and that is what COVID is forcing us to do, to decide what sort of society we want coming out of lockdown.  Because of these transactions and these challenges (unclear) as long as the long growth run ends this is what happens.  We start to figure out what is expendable and what is non‑negotiable.  And what is non‑negotiable, you have to think is the country that understands it.  And a country that can tell its stories, right, and this is a very, very difficult period at the moment, economics background, and I have written a couple of books about how the open model was second to none in Australia and how we survived the GFC and all that, but I find that idea that you'd keep applying economics through something like this just economics, is the wrong way, really wrong end of the telescope (unclear).
‑ So here is another way to think about it.  So think about the time and place we are in now.  We are at the tail end of a very, very long experiment in leading up to the individual, and the government transferring this across to the private, to the household sector, so we know the government now goes out of its way to pay us to consume privately, health insurance, education, this thinks we can look after ourselves.  A crisis like this comes and if you left it to an individual to manage it, we'd all be broke by now, which is why the government spent the money, but it's still spending the money in a minimal kind of way, because it's spending it in a way that props up the private part of the economy so it can kick up the recovery.  In the 70s, when we were kids, you were not even born yet, unemployment was going from 2% in 1973, 5% in 75 and (unclear) it never occurred to people then that you didn't want an art sector, in fact we know in terms of the culture is a very, very vibrant very Australia first, not just in film and in literature but in mid brow, low brow, television, count down, all this sort of stuff, people feel Australia was the first and best definition of Australia, that 70s version of Australia.  Can you imagine Whitlam or Fraser, or even Hawke and Keating deciding, and I don't want to hear from any of you, I want to go pick fruit.  We're going to redeploy you here, if you're sticking around to go to uni I don't want you to do an arts course, what the hell.  It makes no sense when you see how we handled the last crisis.  But that generation, if Menzies was still alive at that point he would have, even though he was retired at that point wouldn't have seen anything untoward in terms of the social safety net response.  You could go on the dole.  You could stay off the unemployment queues by going to uni and all these things would have been encouraged.  At the moment now it's right, shut down, you're doing this thing I don't understand, I've been a little more critical now, but this is what we're doing after we laid out the tracks of all the pressures we are under, now let's think about it in a cultural and strategic sense.  What you want after lockdown is a basically a whole lot of work that match the particular private transactions and I'll get you off the books as quickly as I possibly can, because I don't like carrying (unclear) as an economist I wouldn't justify that society.
‑ No, and this goes to the thinking and the vision that you've been developing in your past few books and TV series, really looking at the future, the nation that we're crating, what the long‑term view is, why is it that in the last few years that long‑term view has been collapsed, something that of course arts and culture gives us is the capacity to en  vision.  It's not just about critical thinking and creativity, it's about ethics and risk and so on, but it is able to foresee a future.  But it really feels in recent years though the political outlook, the political horizon has flattened to, has really collapsed to that next election.  So is it something, is it lost from the political agenda, have they forgotten how to do big infrastructure whether that's cultural or vision re? 
‑ I will glass half full it for you.  The global pandemic and the health response and the collaborative leadership we saw in national cabinet, the Prime Minister wasn't just dictating to the state, the states control health education and police, they could enforce social distancing, Scott Morrison loves the national cabinet, it works better than his own cabinet and better than his own back bench.  He's with people who can make decisions, test propositions and action them.
‑ And they are highly motivated as political leaders themselves to make decisions together.
‑ Reading their face right, so their kicks in at that point, infection going up, tracking literally at the same pace as Britain's and we are about a week or two away from blowout and we wouldn't have been able to handle it, because we know the way this virus runs and how infectious it is, there's a tipping point beyond which the health system can't cope with it and no amount of lockdown can stop it at that point.  And all you hear, because the streets are quiet, all you hear are ambulances.  So we have avoided that.  I would look at that as the beginning of the re‑opening of a much better policy discussion.  Nudging me in the direction of capacity for politics.  (Unclear) the decade we have just come out of, and it wasn't the first complacent (unclear) the beginning of the 21st Century, once we got out of the GST and then went into the mining boom, things got very complacent in that final term in John Howard's government.  A lot of texts been written, money coming in from the mining boom, that was around about the time that we were (unclear) every fortnight, front page story, nothing was happening, front page story.  Something did happen, front page story the next day, and then the next day, some days we'd let it go, but most times we'd talk about the poll rather than policy.  Policy gets announced and the poll numbers are no good people drop the policy.  We know that has been in the waters for quite a while now in the terms of the way politics is run.  That last decade we've just been through, today's the 10th anniversary of Julia Gillard's office, she became Prime Minister 10 years ago, and (unclear) we went Rudd, Gillard, Rudd, Abbott, Abbott won an election, by the way, more power to him.  Then we had another couple since.  And then the rest of the world finally noticed by the time Morrison got the job, then they realised that we were rolling a Prime Minister every two years, the other thing they realise self‑defence that we were lagged on climate change.  When they worked that out during the black Saturday fires, no one here would talk about climate change or talk to the rest of the world about climate change, the future had announced itself, paradise was being torched, this great country was (unclear).  So looking back on not just of the first decade, but especially the second decade, with the leadership changes, (unclear) with the refusal to deal with big challenges, things like climate change, you would hope that you wouldn't have another decade like the last one and coronavirus would be the trigger for a much more ‑ well, sane is not the right word ‑ but a much more meaningful conversation, because I think a lot of the problem in the previous decade was it didn't appear there were many problems to solve immediately, so politics can very, very distracted (unclear) big challenges.  So you could theoretically have these arguments but once you drop them, you have another one and another one and another one, and sooner or later you realise, the (unclear) it wasn't just hope that's gone. 
‑ I hope so too, but it's hard to kind of, I think compounding that and we discussed this a little last week, looking at the media these three weeks is of course the real collapse of the media in Australia and in other parts of the world, we saw the collapse of (unclear) some time ago and the confusion of very stayed conservative boards to re‑think their media models, we have now had what looked like the death and hopefully the resurrection of AAP, the ongoing cuts to the ABC, we are seeing another 250 redundancies at the end of 7.45 am broadcast, of course the last 20, 30 years really since Keating a significantly reduced diversity of media ownership, so then when you look at poll reporting, of course a newspaper who also runs the polling is going to report on the polling that it has itself commissioned and then there's that vicious cycle with the change of leadership because leadership speculation does sell papers and encourage click throughs, what is going to break that, because I really can't see how we are going to get beyond that cycle to open up that longer term thinking both on the part of the media, bigger investigations and approaches but also on the part of politicians who we rely on to think in that meaningful way, I think that's such a good word George.  Meaningful governance.
‑ There's so many things you can't recreate in the 21st Century context, because the disruption of digital has brought not just the way media operates, but the (unclear) there's literally no news cycle now, you've got the structural problems, we know that the structural problem is you can't pay for the thing now through (unclear) advertising model because a lot of that now gone on‑line.  As (unclear) talking about newspaper and broadcast and on‑line, they don't have enough reporters on the ground to be able to ‑ long‑term thinking is not even what I'm describing here, just simply be able to report what the impact of public policy.
‑ Yes.
‑ I'll give you one example.  It helps sometimes to go through some personal work I have done.  When I first moved back to Melbourne for the 21st Century I was able to take a month off the roster to investigate the trade in water it seems like an obtuse topic by the time we had a deregulation of the darling basin, South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales, and water was being traded.  Now, to take a month off that story today, just something like that, that was very interesting for a national leadership, well, you'd take a year off to work out whether (unclear) obviously had a problem.
‑ Massive.
‑ If it's something that big, right, but you can only go with something that big, so that is a store about an individual, which obviously does have some cultural process implications.  But the more interesting issues is that 10 years from that water trial experiment, can you imagine getting a month off to do anything (unclear) 10 years later we finally introduced the carbon price which was for that single term (unclear) government I couldn't and my colleagues couldn't either, we couldn't convince anyone internally, ABC and Fairfax or news couldn't do it, to take a month off and go see how the carbon price was working in the world.  10 years later if you couldn't write that story how can you influence the political class to understand the policy.  If you can't go and show what the policy looks like on the ground, you can't help them improve it, because it's in contact with the real world but you can't show where it's working and not working, of course they talked about six other things since then, so part of this is on them, because they don't spend days weeks months through the implementation of public policy getting it right, because you're going to make mistakes (unclear) so there's sort of a co‑dependency in very, very short term thinking between media and poll six.  You can fix that by empowering the public service but at the same time the public service has been (unclear) it goes in a survival mode on behalf of ministers, so ministers drowning and minister wants a stack of briefing notes from the public service so they can handle the sort of (unclear) of the day, whereas you've probably need bigger proportion of your public service working in the unlikely event of a global pandemic what Wu do.  Right?  If Trump loses an election, how do we reposition ourselves for a world that wants to be progressive again.  Climate change is coming, what does it look like when we have to get off our back sides.
‑ This is really critical to the conversation we've been having across the last couple of months but also last week and today as we then bring it back to the arts because what you've just characterised of course is what makes it so very difficult for any issue in arts and culture in terms of either the industry or individuals or the economic impacts of COVID or any of the key issues to be investigated, to make news to have that be reflected back as something the public is genuinely interested in and have that filter up to decision makers.  The number of questions now for you about kind of threading that back to the media and what can change.  Mila is asking what the need I can't be doing in terms of (reads) I'm conscious not much is happening there and why no the.  And Gabriel Sullivan asks the rejoinder to that, which is what benefit is there for the mainstream need I can't to champion the arts.  I think that's really interesting, but of course in many ways we are accustomed to thinking of the media as being of the public interest, being a public service but of course it is a set of businesses who look at how they're going to stay a throat.  So two big questions for you George.
‑ They are very big questions.  In terms of how would the media advocate, I'm less interested in how the media advocate.  Let me explain how we think about these things.  The idea of us advocating for public good whilst they're particularly it sounds like a good idea it does take our jobs, it could be the arts one day so maybe I want to advocate for something you don't like, so I think the idea of having media focused on advocacy is a bit of a (unclear) to immediate.  I think mere understanding that there is a complexity in our community and that there's an argument for a bigger Australia, that there's an argument for a more cohesive Australia, that means giving voice to the people who don't have a voice at the moment.  Now, I don't mean just in terms of diversity, I mean if the media is for sport and the share market and celebrity, the missing bit is the culture, right, so rather than advocating for the culture, you have to report the culture, give the culture a voice.  And because most media operations now are multi flat formed so there is a possibility for (unclear) you've got more eyeballs on your digital page, you can start the (unclear) stuff with your main page that looks like culture.  And the other thing is, and this is something that media is struggling with at the moment, because it's in survival mode, it needs to partner.  And partner doesn't mean I'm going to partner with a casino, I'm going to get my readers a free lotto card in Saturday's paper, it means partnering with institutions that have (unclear) and it doesn't mean, the reason why I'm partnering with them is so I could then sell them something, the reason I'm partnering with them so I can connect, I can actually restore the thing the media used to do before the disruption, which is basically be tapped into as much of Australia as possible.  So it could then build what your mainstream looks like, because it had everybody involved, and I remember when I first started out at the northern sun, and this is obviously a different era ‑ ‑ ‑
‑ A couple of years ago.
‑ A couple of years ago in the mid‑80s, that paper, didn't matter where you went in that paper, every part of Victorian life in those days was covered.  And that should almost be the first principle all the way through.  I think the difficulty within the existing environment is that structural challenges you don't have enough bodies to be able to produce this (unclear) across the board and that's why you need to think about partnering.
‑ Tell us why.  I'm interested in what you mean by partnering, when I look back on the last kind of heyday of the print media and newspapers making some good money, we had a range of partnerships, particularly here in Melbourne in the 2000s, at the time when I was running Melbourne fringe, it was the age Melbourne fringe festival and Melbourne writers festival, there was substantial corporate sponsor ships as well as a range partnerships around, let's give us access to the artists, how can those kind of partnerships work and what should people in our group today be approaching local media, particularly in regional places to propose partnerships.
‑ Funnily enough I can give you the concept but I can't give you the detail of how it would work.  How it would work is just to think about your community, think about your audience and the story you're telling and make it your business to tell somebody in the media that you're aware of, or even if you're not aware of, make it your business to tell them that this should be of interest to you, it may be in the short term just a sponsorship of an event.  Again, this goes back to the principle of (unclear) whilst they like working from home I don't think they appreciate the absence of contact with other human beings, to swap the business cards, to get in your contact book.  So the idea of a community organisation, if you're thinking small and thinking regional or local paper, even though a lot of them are getting knocked over at the moment, if you could make it your business to get to know the media in your area and make it their business why they need your audience, that first round of engagement, a lot of organisations don't even think along these lines because media seems too remote for them.  But at the same time you are expecting them to acknowledge you.  So why aren't we in there?  One of the reasons why you may not be in there is it didn't occur to them obviously.  It's a bit like the government's attitude at the moment, not necessarily deliberate, but after you've made yourself aware to them, most media organisations say thank you.
‑ And they are glad to be in touch.  A really important point, we are going to focus our entire next week's session on how to be a media spokesperson.  We're going to have the artist Abdul Abdullah and (unclear) talk to us about a situation that happened late last year where Abdul's work was the subject of a political attack in Queensland by a coordinated approach between a local counsellor who was hoping to run for mayor and George Christiansen.  We have some interesting conversations last week.
‑ I'll have to tune in.
‑ It's going to be a corker.  We are rapidly approaching the hour, and I want to see if people have final questions for George.  But George to wrap up, I want to ask you about one of the really important aspects of George's work is looking at Australia demographically and culturally, looking at the Australia that even about the way politicians, whatever party might might look at it but diverse Australia which for some reason tends to be ignored or imagined way by governments, who would prefer an older whiter Australia.  What do our demographic trends tell us about some of the reasons why it's more and more important for government to be looking at culture when it comes to identity in our (unclear) especially around those questions we've also discussed a little bit in the last few weeks around special cohesion and the broader sense what it means to be Australian today.
‑ One of the reasons, the first reason you want the government to reprioritise, or to make the arts a priority is that they need to be able to hear from as many voices as possible that are shooting for the prize which is to be able to write or to tell or to show or imagine a cohesive 21st Century national narrative.  And you want to think mechanically, like a (unclear) contracting out to the arts community (unclear) so I am trying to get into the head of a politician who just thinks politics and then incentive eyes to think on behalf of the nation.  It's interesting that we crossed the threshold of majority (unclear) before the lockdown.  So the lockdown that we're in at the moment, has bound the country, close to 30% born overseas, another 21% (unclear) Esther, at least one migrant parent.  First and second generation Australia is the (unclear).  Another 3 from indigenous, you get the 54.  There's obviously a lot of whites in the first and second generation, because you've got white migration but essentially new Australia and first peoples is 54% of the population.  That means 46% of the population, even though they get to decide elections, this third generation are older.  Now, that part of Australia, I've got a lot of empathy for that part of Australia because they think their country is changing too quickly and understand instinct to try and hang on to what we were.  The problem with Australia as we define ourselves when we became a federation in 1901 we defined ourselves by who we didn't want to be.  The white Australia said we want to be white, but it was set against the idea of what shouldn't be Australian.  We didn't want to be Asian or black.  We didn't count indigenous Australians at the time we wanted to (unclear) obviously we are not that Australia anymore.  We can't be that Australia (unclear) because the majority of Australia is something else again, so to be able to unify that story, to be able to write a cohesive story on behalf of the (unclear) I would tend to argue I would want to hear from the indigenous because they are in a better position to (unclear) that story, because they've been here all along and the idea of a welcome to the country is not a bad unifying story because in essence we've been (unclear) hard to think this way because politically you never trust a politician who spoke to you this way because the other side will go, he's come up with this, I'm duty bound as a member of the other side to oppose it, so you can't get cohesion at that point which is why if I was this government I'd be encouraging people on that particular dream of unifying, I wouldn't be funding them with you can't criticise the government and (unclear) that's not what you do because you don't know what it is.  As the Chinese said for different reasons (unclear) but you'd want to let a thousand (unclear).  Consider it ‑ one of the reasons I'm talking mechanically, I know some of the audience doesn't think this way, but we're talking about how you communicate with government who think in binary terms.  This is what it's like in business, this is what happens in medicine, you have to try (unclear) coronavirus, you have to try a lot of things.  You can't, you know what you're looking for but you don't know what it looks like, so if you say it needs to look like this, you never get there.  And this is part of the creative journey, there's a lot of risk, a lot of uncertainty in the creative journey, but I'd much rather be in that country than the country that we're sort of leaning towards, which is risk averse, which is trying to reimpose a multiculturalism on a very complex society and is also doing what (unclear) the future. 
‑ Yes.  You just put your finger on exactly the kind of Australia.  What's that?  Have we had a technical problem? 
‑ Just a small technical problem, sorry about that.
‑ George.
‑ I can hear you. 
‑ I can still hear you.  It might have just been a little hiccup glitch.  George was just saying the kind of future that we want to be able to create, one that does embrace risk and confidence and adventure us thinking and we would think that good governments should be going out of their way to be fostering exactly that.  George, it has been so fantastic to have you join us.  It's really really great to just get a sense of Australia most broadly, to get a sense of where this area of policy does and doesn't fit in, the places where it kind of should be fitting in and the ways that we can be engaging with the media to make sure that (unclear) and broader visioning is heard.  So big big thank you to George. 
‑ Thank you Esther.  Thank you to everyone who tuned in. 
‑ Yes, everyone, thank you.  Let's thank George, we're going to stick around till half past.  But please whatever clapping way is possible, as we do in our different ways of filling that screen with ‑ there we go, we have attempts at emojis and also lots of thanks.  Great food for thought.  There you go.  Someone has managed to get the emoji in there.  Excellent.  George, thank you, and love to everyone and have a great evening.
‑ Thanks again. 
‑ All right.  George is going to find that button and leave us which he's just done.  Isn't it always great to hear from someone who can give us that big kind of of explaining of a very broad long‑term sense what arts and culture has meant, not just to this government, but to different liberal governments over the period.  I really appreciated his point that if we were to revive Robert Menzies he would be looking around Australia very confused, at the moment, because that sense of fostering national pride for what that might mean to each of us to arts and culture is supremely important.  Let's unpack some of what George said and then let's start to talk about our progress towards art down the little and the different actions for us to be talking for the next few weeks.  I have just missed a call from the minister's adviser, I hope that's going to be good news, I heard rumours there's going to be an announcement but I will give her a call later.  Who's got some questions that we didn't get to put to George, so we can unpack a little bit of what he was saying, just enter those in the chat there, I'm going to look back to see some of the other questions that people contributed, and lots of points in the chat about how a much bigger transformation is needed.  Miriam makes the point media is one the pillars (unclear) these things are not always commercial propositions we need transformations of values.  It sounds like supermarkets and property developers are the only ones not in survival mode.  It has been interesting to see that retail has been of course thriving at this time and not just every day essentials or hoarding retail.  George was saying earlier he's worried that we will have a bit of a second lockdown vibe in Victoria and people might start getting into that panic buying behaviour again.  Who's got some questions on anything that struck you as something we do need to talk a little bit more about.  I can see a couple of people typing at the moment.  While people are typing, I will talk about what's happening over the next few weeks.  I've been trying to upload a version of the next kit which is available, will soon be available on the NAVA website, they've been putting the finishing touches on today and that's got a few activities in it that are about stuff that you can do individually but (unclear) in terms of a standing media but also pitching stories and pitching yourself as well, getting to know media sources, sorry, getting to know media colleagues, becoming a source, so getting into that relationship where, as George was saying, in the context of partnering, having this relationship, this ongoing conversation where you are letting a journalist or radio producer, whoever is local to you, letting them know what the key issues are from your point of view, perhaps giving them the heads up on a few intriguing things, but also getting to know what the pressures are from their point of view, and it takes us back to what make ail a was saying last week about the difficulty of sometimes pitching something as news when she knows that it's going to be a big story, and I'm certainly worried after today's announcements of just how much more difficult that is going to be, and those of us who have been following friends and colleagues who are journalists on‑line today, yeah, have been really concerned about the range of the challenges that people are facing right now.  So Josie has asked how do we do that with policy decision makers who value things in terms of dollar value.  Sarah is pointing out of course there are a lot of organisations who are building relationships with the media and the question for her why like always government don't seem to be listening and journalists can't get storeys through.  We have had some great analysis from George about some of the big difficulties in that, you know, there are fewer people doing that pitching who are then able to be ‑ you know, there are a few people doing that investigative work, fewer people being able to get those stories out there.  Now, I've just had a go at uploading the updated handbook.  Can you see that now on your screen, because I've just been having some difficulties, Caroline Phillips, you are absolutely right, and also I'm a little bit worried about this, everyone, I've just been starting to get some error messages that my Internet connection is unstable, which hopefully I won't be offended by, I'm sure it's a very stable genius Internet connection but I'm very much hoping that it's going to hold up for the next 20 minutes, because so far the Internet gods have been smiling on me.  Can you see now on the screen through my unstable connection the cover of our understanding the media section.  You can?  That's excellent.  So we go through and talk about what arts down a hill and the advocacy program is.  We've talked in the last weeks about what some of the key issues are and what advocacy is maintaining those ongoing conversations.  We had a good look and a bit of a laugh at my very brief history of arts policy in Australia.  Again this kit is available for NAVA members only.  It will be on our website tomorrow, and this one in particular, looking at a very brief history of arts policy in Australia, is a very handy one page primer before you're talking to an MP.  We also talked about what is Australia's arts policy, an activity in selecting a recent policy  change or funding cut and asking on what basis and what are the principles.  We heard from Jackie Bailey at the BYP group and look at some global comparisons in terms of how our policy sits, and what it means in that broader context, particularly looking at what the COVID response has been.  And then last week, and I touched on this, and it is now in the kit, that question of why is it so hard for art stories to make news, and I mentioned last week, and it's now in the kit, the seven news values that people are taught in journalism school that something will make news if it's a bit unusual, different to the norm, it's current, it's got some connection to what people are already thinking and talking about, there's some conflict involved, so it's going to capture people's interests, it's got impact, perhaps because it's so severe it's so major, it's going to affect people's lives, prominence, perhaps there is a celebrity or a politician or someone who's got a profile already as part of the story, proximity, it's either happening near you or in the same country, the same news across the world is not going to make it on to our headlines and someone here, and timeliness, the fact that it has just happened, it's reaching you as quickly as it possibly can, and when we look at those values, and ask ourselves a question, you know we've just covered a lot of these questions this evening, and indeed last week, what kinds of stories get into the news section, why don't we see more detailed investigative journalism, how have media landscapes changed, but when we look at the seven values, George touched on this a few times this evening in referring to sport, we can instantly see why sport regularly makes news and art stories don't.  Sport has got a narrative that people can follow.  There's conflict obviously between the teams and stories often told as though it's about battles and so on.  It's going to have some currency and proximity because you've probably, many people are invested in following their team.  It's got stats that can be used and certainly this is why political polling is used so often in news stories as George was saying.  The easiest thing in the world is to grab polls, make it a story of the personalities who are having this jostle for leadership and then (unclear) the story kind of comes through.  And so that is something that makes it difficult when we're pitching for stories, but if those are the kinds of, and I'm sure you have all seen stories that you recognise as aligning with some of these kinds of values, what are some art stories that you've seen recently that are absolutely news and have filtered, actually made it through this set of news values filters, what are some art stories that you've seen lately, particularly around COVID that you've thought, great that that's been covered, and I can understand why that's made news.  Has anyone got an example of a recent news story in the arts that you've been really pleased to see actually make news?  And Sarah is talking about Jane Goodall who wrote the politics of the common good [chk] beyond money as the only indicator of value.  A story that might be worked up there.  Sarah, there are a lot of researchers who look at exactly that, different kinds of cultural value, people like Justin O'Connor, Ben Elfin, the team at Deakin, the team at uni SA, QUT centre of excellence, creative industries, Monash of course and thank you Louise to that link.  That is such a great example that story, an arts degree has long been the butt of predictable jokes but there's the other side where even the ABC feels they need to temper this with you're probably going to find this funny and cliched but it's quite serious, so there's a stereotype here we have a pander to, so it's very frustrating, when you want to dispel a stereotype the last thing you want to do is refer to the stereotype.  You actually want to move beyond.  An understanding of these kinds of questions can help us to really think about how we pitch and how we connect.  Gabriel says hi Esther.  Hi.  I can see she's typing some more and I will keep looking in that direction to see the question as I flip to the next page, in how do we engage with the media section of the handbook.  So a few pointers here about becoming a source, knowing the angle and reframing the question, which then leads to group activity which I really encourage you to get into together.  So becoming a source, and George touched on this earlier, getting to know editors and producers of your local media and consistently offering them useful background so that you can be approached as a valuable go to person.  Knowing the angle.  When you're being interviewed for a story, being aware that the journalist or the presenter has already decided on their angle before they've pursued you.  So last week, I think it was last week, someone had that great question about, you see choreographers or dancers interviewed, they always ask the question of was this something you wanted to do when you were little and what did you want to be, and education background and what was it like at school, because of course the journalist is thinking about their audience who will be interested in how tremendous this person has had such a successful arts career, how did that happen for them.  And so it is often, yeah, really important to be prepared to answer to the extent that you're comfortable, some personal questions to make it possible for people to relate to what you do, to relate to, not just your practice, but you became an artist, how it's possible to sustain a career as an artist.  I think we would be a better country, if we had more stories in the media about just what it takes to maintain a practice, what it means in terms of meaning, meaningfulness as George was saying earlier, and the values with which we live our lives.  And also when you're being interviewed, particularly when it's not live to air, feel comfortable to ask what their angle is, or what the focus of the story will be.  There's nothing worse than being quoted in a story which is very different to what you imagined that it was going to be like.  I've had an experience like this recently where a journalist interviewed me many weeks ahead of a story coming out and then I was quoted in The Australian alongside people who were saying that you know I think the diverse voices that we need to be hearing from are just to shut up and stop telling middle white Australia that they're doing everything wrong, and I thought oh, my God, I was horrified to be quoted alongside that person, and certainly didn't share that story anywhere.  Recently a journalist got in touch just today, and had a series of questions that he put in advance in writing and one of them was extremely problematic and I let him know immediately when we spoke on the phone, and I said that I wouldn't participate in an interview if he was going to be pursuing that angle, and thankfully he said that he would not, and so we proceeded.  So yeah, always important to ask when a journalist does that, but if it's live to air, you know you can always reframe a question, when you are asked a question that you don't want to answer, you can reframe that, you can ‑ and this does take practise, if you're not used to doing live interviews, an important thing is to go in already prepared with, what is it that you want to say, is it as simple as you've got a show that you want to promote, or at that particular issue, they take you somewhere in a personal direction, they ask you something very specific you don't want to talk about, you can simply deflect and say, you know, I get asked that question a lot, but what I'd like to talk today is blah ‑ the good thing is time is very limited, the journalist won't have time to go back to the question a,nd what you articulate will be the main thing.  (Unclear) she always thought John Gorton established  (unclear) so the Commonwealth literary fund and the Commonwealth art advisory board, those of course pre‑date the Australia council, and the very first thing that happened in arts funding in Australian history was in 1912, and in fact it's a little bit ahead of that before the Commonwealth advisory board was established, there was a literary fund and that was the very first arts funding Australia was for Australian writers and it's a very nationalistic approach, we need Australian stories to be told here and overseas, and so that was the first funding, but the appointment of an advisory board was where we first started to have a policy focus and so Gorton comes on a bit later.  And it was the halt government that announced the Australia council, the establishment of the Australia council in November 1967 and the Whitlam government enacted it given it took some years to develop.  So there is a bit of ping pong that happens here, where someone sets something up, and by the time the government changes and so on, and yeah, so that continues except that in more recent years as George pointed out with those leadership changes, those timelines of leadership changed have collapsed right down and so it's hard to look at the long‑term in particular and this sort of thing starts to happen and have quite distract I have approaches.  Now, next week we are going to look at ‑ we're going to hear from, as I say Abdul Abdullah and Jane Morey about how to be a media spokesperson and hopefully the week after that a Q and A with a politician, but what we're leading towards is arts down the hill and the steps that we will all take.  In the few minutes that we have left, tell me now who has been so far using this kit to contact politicians and in particular around some COVID‑19 stuff.  There's a lot that NAVA and others have been advocating for because we of course are going to really turn up the volume on this as we head into August in particular as we start doing our political engagement session as well.  So I'm going to be really counting on everyone to be very active when those weeks approach, so that we've really got a lot of us well distributed across the country on a really substantial advocacy push.  Thank you to those people who need to be heading off.  So have a look at the kit, if you are a NAVA member again, a NAVA membership starts at 750 a month.  The link was posted earlier and I'm going to post it again.  You'll also get a sense of just the bigger, broader advantages of NAVA membership in terms of supporting your practice, building the sector in its capacity and of course amplifying the voice of artists which is very much the focus of this program.  So yes, let me know in the chat there whether you have been getting in touch with MPs, and I think in particular, two MPs, that it will be really important with all of us to get in touch with is of course (unclear) Joan Alexander who have presented who are keen to be sharing your thoughts and experiences.  Great Adam, that's fantastic.  Especially as we suspect that some kind of package will be announced tomorrow.  It's going to be so important that we're all ready with some kind of response, and this is one that is really really difficult thinking about how we want to respond at this time, because of course we don't always have ‑ we're not necessarily in whatever is announced tomorrow, we're not necessarily going to have an announcement that is going to be of assistance to everyone.  Miriam the answer to your question is on the screen right now.  And this will be on the website tomorrow for download.  So going through some of the things that we've been hearing from people who have been advising us about how to engage with MPs, if the package that's announced tomorrow is not perfect and doesn't achieve everything that we need, how are people going to respond?  I'd be very keen for your thoughts in the minute or two we have left, because it's a really difficult diabolical question.  On the one hand we might feel frustrated and disappointed, on the other hand we've got to keep in mind that arts minister Paul Fletcher has been working for probably a couple of months on trying to get his parliamentary colleagues, particularly the Prime Minister to understand the value of arts and culture and the value of the industry, so that they can support it.  And so if we come across, of course there will be criticism of it, and that's really important.  But if we come across as though whatever the package is not of value to us, then those politicians who we need to sway might think, oh, we invested those hundreds of millions of dollars for nothing.  So I am asking everyone, particularly if you're on social media, that when that announcement gets made tomorrow, think about how to respond, how to tag in an MP or the Prime Minister, how to connect this to the current conversations we've been having, how to connect this to what they value as JA and Maria was saying to Australia, so if there is an announcement tomorrow, if they are actually going to invest, that that investment is valued and that the relationships can continue.  So that's my advice for us as we look at the whatever is announced tomorrow.  And very much looking forward to next week and presenting a conversation between Abdul Abdullah and Jane Morey how to be a spokesperson, particularly because Abdul was really thrown in the deep end, and he didn't have a very nice time, no one would, I'm pretty impressed with how he got through, and Jane Morey again who is a publicist.  Thank you to everyone and I will see everyone at the same time next week.  Bye everyone.