Page 4637 - Week 15 - Thursday, 21 November 1991
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from $8.7m last year to $9.4m this year. Further, the Government intends to ask the new cultural council to examine the advisability of biennial or even triennial funding to recipients of major arts festival grants, rather than year-by-year funding. Our hope is to inject a greater degree of certainty into the activities of these valued organisations.
But this is only one of an array of issues which the Government proposes to refer to the cultural council. For instance, the select committee made recommendations about the possible establishment of a Territory library, art gallery and museum, with appropriate advisory boards. The committee made numerous recommendations concerning the literary arts, visual arts and crafts, the performing arts, community art, education and youth art, and development and promotion of arts and culture in the ACT. All these matters will be on the cultural council agenda, to be addressed in terms of strategic directions for the development of cultural activities and facilities.
Mr Speaker, this proposal is receiving a kick-start through the first of a series of special arts planning conferences being held in Canberra yesterday and today under the theme "Towards 2001 - Cultural Policy for the ACT". The conferences are being conducted by the Centre for Continuing Education at the ANU, on behalf of the ACT Arts Development Board - which now, of course, will be subsumed into the new cultural council.
These conferences will give the community an opportunity to discuss the nature and scope of cultural policy for the ACT and help to devise guidelines that will shape cultural policy over the next decade. Further, the conferences will consider ways in which the arts can be integrated into ACT planning and development and will outline ways to implement the plans. The Follett Government regards these conferences as an integral phase in the development of community consultation on the development of arts and culture in ACT. This community input will not cease with the conferences, of course. By means of the cultural council, community representatives will be able to continue providing advice to the highest levels of Government.
The word "culture" can mean many things to many people. No dictionary definition I have ever been able to dig up is entirely satisfactory. Perhaps, rather than defining it, "culture" might better be described as the way we as a community see ourselves, as what we most value in our society, as what makes us distinct. However we attempt to define or describe it, and generally we fall short of the ideal, we do know that culture affects every one of us in terms of expression and participation and creative development. I believe that the Follett Government is making a solid start in this process with the many
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