A HORSE WITH NO NAME: ARTS AND CULTURAL POLICY IN

When the Howard government came to office, Australia was flush with two decades of significant policy developments for the arts and culture sector. Yet rather than building on recent initiatives, the Howard government had a policy vacuum for this sector. Belatedly, it took an interest and recent policy strategies have resulted in major policy changes that have the potential to repudiate the contours of Australian cultural policy. This paper speculates as to whether this is political expediency or sinister subterfuge.1 Australia has often been depicted as a cultural desert that only recently emerged from a bleak landscape and embraced cultural and creative practice as an important aspect of nation building. David Throsby, writing an overview for the Australian Year Book’s 2000 edition (2001), for example, characterises three periods of Australian cultural policy: • 1900-1967 when explicit policy was virtually non-existent; • 1968-1990 when there was a period of rapid expansion of arts and cultura