Page 3520 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 22 October 2014
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So either we have an admission from the minister that she has no policies or criteria about what the arts grants should be seeking to achieve, or we simply have a minister totally devoid of any commitment or input on what significant government expenditure should achieve. Therefore, to say that the minister has no influence over that peer assessment is either nonsense or negligence. The peer assessment is not independent if the government sets policies and criteria, and she cannot distance herself from peer assessment in this way. It is a very feeble argument.
What do we get? The arts are very important. Mr Rattenbury was there at TEDx the other Saturday. A professor from the University of Canberra talked about the importance of the arts in the development of the young brain and how the arts provide stimulation to the three cores of activity in the brain and help produce greater neural transfer across the left-right divide. If we get it right, the arts are a stimulus to learning; they actually help literacy and numeracy.
In the formulation of policy about the arts for which the minister is responsible, in education, we have a suggestion from the Childers Group, which includes most of the people she read off that list. I speak to those people whose names the minister read from those lists. They are saying that it is time we had a strategy, and they understand the funding. But it is more than that. Let us just go to the estimates. That group, the Childers Group, said, “We want an arts officer from artsACT, from the arts community, embedded in education.” What did the minister say? “No; we’ve got arts people.” That was not their point. They wanted people out of the community assisting and growing those relationships. Again, where is the commitment from this Minister for the Arts to make it work?
I would recommend to all that when the TEDx talks are put up they should go and listen to what Anita Collins had to say about the development of arts in the early ages—zero to five and the zero to seven—and how it actually assists with literacy and numeracy. It is fascinating. Let us have an intellectual engagement about that one, minister. Of course, you were not there. There is this defence: “Mr Smyth didn’t speak to any of the other motions today.” Goodness me! If I had, we would not be having this debate, because it would have extended all of the other debates given that this is the last item on the notice paper. I am sure the minister would love not to be doing this debate today, but bad luck: here it is. We should have intellectual engagement.
If the group that want to put on Kill Climate Deniers want to do it, go and do it. Go for your life. That is your right. My question is: why would the government fund that? Let’s go to the context of the last debate. Imagine if a group came forward and put up a proposal for Kill Gays, Kill the Disabled or Kill Ethnic Groups. There would be outrage. But somehow it is acceptable to fund an organisation, however tricky. “We wrote this down and it was a trap for the unsuspecting politician.” But how acceptable is it, in the climate that we live in—this is what I said—to exhort anybody to kill anybody by publishing something called Kill Climate Deniers. If you had targeted any other of those groups or minorities, or another group in the community, there would be outrage, and there should be outrage.
It is not smart when you have to use the word “kill’. Shakespeare did not have to. An example was used about Shakespeare. Yes, Shakespeare’s plays are quite violent. The
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