Since it lost the federal election, the Liberal Party has had lots of advice -- much of it useless or self-interested. One of the more useless pieces of advice it has received is that the party should stop fighting the "culture wars".
If John Howard had been more successful at prosecuting the culture wars, he would still have lost the election. But at least he would have ensured that public debate in Australia was a little bit more diverse, lively and vigorous than it is.
In the weeks since the election, there has been a call for the opinion pages of the country's newspapers to be purged of non-left contributors, and for the Howard government appointees to the ABC board to resign or be sacked. So far, there's no sign of a ceasefire in the war.
On the Monday after Howard's loss, the normally thoughtful political commentator Brian Toohey wrote: "The Liberals also need to turn their backs on the ridiculous amount of time wasted in recent years on the so-called culture wars." And "the general public doesn't care about the culture wars. Nor is it obvious why a conservative government should intervene in cultural issues best left to civil society."
There are two reasons why a conservative government should intervene in cultural issues. First, the public does care about the culture wars. Second, the culture wars are not about culture. Of course, questions of cultural taste should be left as far as possible to individuals and civil society -- but this is not what the culture wars are about. The culture wars are about what governments do and what governments provide money for.
The kind of history taught to school students is a political issue that goes to the core of our concept as a nation. That's precisely why history is so controversial. There's a big difference between regarding Australia as "settled" or "invaded". For as long as the government determines and regulates what is taught in classrooms, curriculum will be the legitimate subject of political debate.
If the ABC was purely a creature of civil society, the quality of its broadcasting would be irrelevant. However, the ABC is not a creature of civil society. It is owned and operated by the government and funded by taxpayers. The ABC should be subject to examination in the same way as is any government department. Whether the purpose of the ABC is to provide a left-wing alternative to the allegedly conservative mainstream media is not the issue.
It was entirely appropriate that the board of the National Museum of Australia investigate the museum's exhibits. As a public institution, the museum has a responsibility to at least attempt some form of partisan balance. Lauding Gough Whitlam while ignoring Robert Menzies was not balance. And clearly it was inappropriate for the museum to give credence to the fantasy that Harold Holt was whisked away by a Chinese submarine. The board of the museum wasn't engaging in cultural warfare when it investigated these issues.
For the past 11 years, complaining about ministerial oversight of research grants has been a favourite activity of university professors. While professors should be entitled to spend their time researching anything they want, they shouldn't expect taxpayers to support them. "Academic freedom" is the right to free expression -- it is not the right to demand government money with no strings attached.
If John Howard really did set out to muzzle the universities, than he did a bad job of it. Invariably his opponents came from one of three sources: the ALP, the ACTU or the universities. Nor was the former prime minister any better at stimulating alternative voices within the tertiary sector. It is noteworthy that very few of the right's cultural warriors come from universities -- compared with the warriors of the left, many of whom are firmly ensconced in publicly funded academic sinecures. Sometimes the claim is made that humanities faculties of Australia's universities are dominated by left-wing academics because conservative academics simply don't exist. Unfortunately this is true. Anyone who verges even slightly from the accepted wisdom of university staffrooms -- which is that George Bush is an evil idiot, that globalisation is a plot by big business to impoverish the world's poor, and that terrorism is merely a political construct -- is unlikely to gain preferment.
When it comes to gaining promotion, conservative candidates need to be at least twice as good as their left-wing opposition. In the face of this, conservatives simply give up.
What's curious in the debate about the culture wars is why anyone would want the wars to stop. If dissent is one of the hallmarks of an active intellectual life in this country there should be calls for more disagreement, not less. So far this hasn't happened. In fact, the opposite has occurred. What are people afraid of?
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