CENSORED! CANCELLED! BOYCOTT! The future of artistic freedom and democracy in Australia

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In the course of my travels, I've been recording nature soundscapes, with the aim of helping you, Australia, to relax. And in this particular overnight recording, there was this one duck that just kept screaming its guts out.
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**Natasha Mitchell** (0:37)
Today on Big Ideas, and hi Natasha Mitchell, joining you for ABC Radio National's daily live event show, how free should artists be to make risky work?
Who gets to decide what's risky or dangerous or difficult? And why does all that matter for Australia's future?

**Ben Eltham** (1:00)
We've seen concerted letter writing campaigns, we've seen pressure being applied behind the scenes to board members of cultural organisations.
The Premier of South Australia actually intervened with the Adelaide Writers Week. That's the kind of bad faith that I'm talking about.

**André Dao** (1:18)
You have the really insidious phenomenon of self-censorship and my worry, I guess, is when the self-censorship occurs before we've tested the limits of official censorship.

**Julianne Schultz** (1:33)
At a board level, we considered the risks that were involved in that, but we were also very committed to the freedom of expression argument and also to the need to try and provide insight into the tensions that are being felt. The purpose of inviting somebody to a Writers Festival is because of what they've written, rather than because of their political position on anything.

**Natasha Mitchell** (1:54)
These are fractious times for Australian artists and creatives. The war in the Middle East has been one major flashpoint for cancellations, censorship, controversy, the collapse of two high-profile Writers Festivals after political pressure and mass boycotts.
In a time of intense tribalism, of grief, anger, and perhaps intellectual and institutional timidity, sensitivity and concern, artists have become prime targets. And beyond that, making art, books, theatre, music, dance, visual works and more is already risky. It rarely pays the bills. But if artists can't take risks to help us all cross divides, or sit with disagreement, or difficult ideas, then who can? And at what cost to Australia's cultural life and our collective imagination?
Today, you're joining me at this event on the future of artistic freedom and democracy in Australia at Griffith University in Brisbane on Yagurra and Turrbal Country. With three heavyweights on Australian arts and culture, Julianne Schultz has served on the boards of multiple major Australian cultural organisations including the ABC, and currently the Sydney Writers Festival. She's Professor Emerita of Media and Culture at Griffith University Centre for Social and Cultural Research, and author of The Idea of Australia, A Search for the Soul of the Nation. Dr. André Dao's first novel, Anam, won the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction, and he's writing the Pascal Prize for Cultural Criticism. He's a post-doc fellow in international law at Melbourne Law School, and co-created the Asylum Seeker Oral History Project, Behind the Wire. Dr. Ben Eltham researches cultural policy as a lecturer in School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University, and a fellow of the Centre for Policy Development. He's worked as a freelance arts journalist, critic, producer, festival director, and a cultural policy consultant. Let's meet them now with an enthusiastic crowd at the Queensland College of Art and Design.
Excellent to be here at Griffith University. I want to get your sense, give us a bit of a litmus test of how you see artistic freedom in this country right now. I guess we can say that art has always been political. It has always been controversial. But is the present moment distinct, do you think? André?

**André Dao** (4:30)
I mean, I guess I'd start off by pointing out that artistic freedom is not disconnected from wider freedom and wider unfreedom. And in that sense, Australia, what we call Australia now, nation state of Australia, has always fostered really intense forms of unfreedom.
And the best traditions of what we could call Australian writing and art has responded to those forms of unfreedom. So, what is perhaps distinctive about this present moment, or perhaps we could think of what the stakes are in these various cancellations, rescinding of invites to represent Australia at things like the Venice Biennale. What I think is at stake is sort of the future itself, in a sense of who gets to own what we imagine the future to be.
There's a kind of disciplining of artists through these sorts of cancellations. And at the very same time, we have a very strong sense that the future belongs not to the people who write stories and make arts about what our collective future could be, but that the future belongs to a small handful of billionaires at the head of tech corporations. So I think that's sort of what is maybe distinctive about our present moment, that there's a battle over what the means of imagining the future will be.