Vale Ruby

Ruby Langford Ginibi 
Writer and academic
(26 January 1934 – 1 October 2011

AUS/NETHERLANDS: The Namatjira Project - 2011

The Namatjira Project has announced preliminary dates and venues for its 2011 tour - see below.
If you didn't catch this during its all too brief Belvoir St (Sydney) season, book now!
International Community Arts Fesitval, Rotterdam, Holland.
30th March - 4th April
Creative development and showing in the Pilbara, WA.
18th July - 30th July

Melbourne season (announcing soon!)
10th August - 28th August

Drum Theatre at Dandenong Town Hall, Dandenong, VIC.
1 September - 4th September

Geelong Performing Arts Centre, Geelong, Victoria.
8th September - 10 September

Canberra Theatre Centre, Canberra, ACT.
14 September - 17th September

Illawarra Performing Arts Centre, Wollongong, NSW.
21 September - 24th September

Big hART and the Namatjira Project continues to nuture a close relationship with the Namatjira family, and will continue to work with them both in Alice Springs and on tour. For more info: hhttp://www.namatjira.bighart.org/

See our blog item from earlier this year: http://leflaneurblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/sydney-big-harts-namatjira.html

Vale Roberta

Roberta 'Bobbi' Sykes 
Writer and activist
1943 – 2010

Sydney: Big hART’s 'Namatjira'

Namatjira 

Upstairs Theatre at Belvoir Street 

until November 7

www.belvoir.com.au


This piece of 'community theatre', about the early 20th century Aboriginal painter Albert Namatjira, transcends the genre, delivering an intimate spectacle with heart, soul, humour and profundity in equal measure. It's effectively a 2-hander and Trevor Jamieson and Derek Wyatt are both compelling in their multiple roles. See it if you can. The Sydney season is nearly sold out but an extension and wider tour is likely.


More about the project:
http://www.namatjira.bighart.org


Flickr photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/namatjiraproject/5092303482/


Pictured: Trevor Jamieson
Courtesy Belvoir St Theatre

Vale Joan Sutherland

Joan Alston Sutherland
Singer
7 November 1926 – 10 October 2010

Vale, Ruby

     Ruby Hunter 1955 – 2010

Rachel Ward's Beautiful Kate

Beautiful Kate
Australia, 1hr 41min‎‎‎
Written and directed by Rachel Ward

This has been pretty much universally praised by the critics, while other commentators have characterised it as just another depressing Australian flick about suicide and despair. This latter response may arise from the casting of Ben Mendelsohn (Ned) and Bryan Brown (Bruce, Ned's father), with their strong associations with suburban angst and urban nastiness. Have no fear, despite being very angsty and very nasty, they are both excellent, giving arguably their best performances to date, and ably transcend the 'Oh not them again' factor. All the performances are exceptional, with a special mention for newcomer Sophie Lowe as Ned's twin sister Kate (the beautiful).

It's certainly a bleak and unforgiving movie in parts, but we found it to be quite a redemptive tale - an age-old one really, involving a 'prodigal' son's return, and dark family secrets finally brought into the open.

Director Rachel Ward based it on the by American Newton Thornburg's 1982 novel of the same name, transposing it from 70s Idaho to a remote outback community in South Australia's Flinders Ranges. Its form is a (mostly) well-constructed and dramatically successful dual narrative, with the contemporary-ish story (son returns after 20 years to visit dying and despised father) interwoven with flashbacks to the 1970s and 80s (the childhood and adolescence of the four siblings, two of whom are now dead).

It's the flashbacks (and the poster, UK version shown) that have evoked the Bill Henson comparisons, particularly the 'Dam Scene', and this was calculated. Ward, speaking to Andrew L. Urban (Urban Cinefile) has said "My aesthetic for the flashback narrative is inspired by Bill Henson’s work. Like Beautiful Kate he inhabits a world of teenage alienation and sexuality. A world lit by pole lights, car headlights or torches. I like the way he reveals only small poetic fragments, fragments of alabaster skin, of silhouetted breasts, of bruised lips, the glint of a tear. He too treads that fine line between beauty/romance and desolation/realism. There are a number of fairly explicit sexual scenes throughout. While I do not intend to enter Larry Clarke territory, I hope not be prudish. This film is sexually provocative.”

Like Samson and Delilah, this film deals with things that many families would prefer not to think about, and it will be confronting to many, but Ward and her team have created a fine movie about things that matter. Go see.

A sense of place? The new City of Melbourne Identity

THE NEW CoM IDENTITY by LANDOR ASSOCIATES
has aroused torrents of invective, and Melbourne's design fraternity are up in arms. The debate still rages, not least in the comments area on AGDA's open blog, arising from Andrew Ashton and David Pidgeon's 'Open Letter to the Lord Mayor' (see below for text and link to forum).

Nous, les flâneurs, added this statement to the discussion:

There's a saying which goes - If it's Melbourne-based entity the designers have to be from Melbourne... if it's Sydney the designers have to be Australian. But in the really confident design capitals of the world, eg New York, Paris or Tokyo, they don't give a damn, as long as it's visionary. Think of architectural commissions... Pei, Rogers and Piano in Paris, Gehry in Bilbao, Hertzog and De Meuron in China. Sydney dared do it once with a Dane.

The problem really is that this new identity is not visionary, exacerbated by unfortunate mayoral comments, and the fact that Melbourne's internationally renowned studios weren't invited to pitch.

The ' design local' issue arises mainly because the new identity conveys no feel for Melbourne's unique soul and is widely seen as a missed opportunity to do something really good. It's not certain that local designers would have managed this, but surely more likely?

What were they THINKING? We give it a year, max. Maybe MCC could sell it on to a casino?

-----

An Open Letter to the Lord Mayor of Melbourne
24th July, 2009

The City of Melbourne’s rebranding has attracted a veritable storm of controversy, not least because of Lord Mayor Robert Doyle’s inaccurate and unfortunate comments about Victoria’s design industry. Below is an open letter to Robert Doyle, written by Andrew Ashton and David Pidgeon from AGDA Victoria, asking him to outwardly support and promote Victoria’s design industry. We urge those of you who are interested in supporting the industry to take the time to leave your name, studio name and location in the comments section below. We will then pass on the collated signatures and comments to Robert Doyle, Lynne Kosky and John Brumby.

24 July 2008

Th Right Hon the Lord Mayor of Melbourne,
Councillor Robert Doyle
City of Melbourne PO Box 1603 Melbourne VIC 3001

Dear Lord Mayor,

We are writing to you to express our concern over the recent release of the new brand mark for the City of Melbourne. It is of concern to us that the City of Melbourne seems to have ignored the stated Victorian Government policy of supporting and promoting the State’s design industry.

Mr Doyle, the pool of communication and brand design talent in Melbourne is unrivalled in this country and is arguably the most diverse in South East Asia. It is this fact that leaves us dismayed when trying to understand why you chose to appoint a Sydney based / American owned firm to complete a task that could have been just as successfully completed by any number of Victoria’s internationally acclaimed graphic designers.

As for the issue of the “daggy” incumbent design, we would have rather hoped that your significant experience in politics would have taught you to more deeply consider the implication of any public comment. It was frankly insulting to the original creator of the incumbent City of Melbourne brand Mr Richard Henderson of FHA Image Design. We all acknowledge that time waits for few styles and aesthetics but Mr Henderson’s work served the City very well for twenty years and such a glib, final assessment of this legacy does no marketing or design professionals any favours. It tends only to decrease the sophistication of community discussion around communication and brand design.

We urge you to consider and support fellow Victorian designers as you will find that many of these professional are in their own right symbols to the world of “how cool, intellectual, CREATIVE and urbane” Victorians are.

Yours faithfully,
Andrew Ashton – Studio Pip and Co. Balaclava, Victoria / AGDA and AGI Member AGDA Victoria Treasurer

David Pidgeon – Design by Pidgeon East St KIlda, Victoria / AGDA and AGI Member AGDA Victoria Councillor

LINK TO THE ONGOING DEBATE (AGDA):
http://blogs.agda.com.au/suite7/view/post/an-open-letter-to-the-lord-mayor-of-melbourne

Samson and Delilah

Samson and Delilah
Australia, 2009
101 minutes
Director, Screenplay, Cinematography: Warwick Thornton

Winner, Caméra d'or 2009
Festival de Cannes 2009, Un Certain Regard

There are some films where it’s no consolation telling yourself “It’s just a movie”, because you know that they reveal an appalling truth, irrespective of the fact that these are actors playing parts. The Australian film Samson and Delilah, whose director Warwick Thornton took out the Camera D’Or for best first feature, is one such film.

From the first frames we seem to inhabit the skin of these Indigenous teenagers, and Thornton’s unflinching depiction of their physical and emotional world is all the more powerful for the almost total lack of dialogue between them – early on we surmise that Samson (Rowan McNamara) has speech problems and may be partially deaf – it is never spelled out, but would explain certain incidents. He only utters one word in the entire film (his name), and Delilah (Marissa Gibson) only really speaks to her aged grandmother, charismatically played by Mitjili Gibson.

I found the film quite harrowing, which is no doubt the desired effect, but I didn’t expect to be so completely absorbed into the world of these youngsters. The moment when Samson, having ‘lost’ Delilah for the second time, covers his head in a blanket and begins to quietly keen with grief, is a moment of utter human despair, and we feel ourselves there with him, in his haze of petrol fumes and hopelessness and loss. Thornton’s close-up photography and extraordinarily subtle direction of his two young principals, whose faces express what no dialogue could, conveys an almost unbearable tenderness, even as we recoil in horror at their plight.

Yet when the protagonists are in the ‘big town’ trying to get food and money to survive, Thornton skillfully distances his audience, turning us into uncaring supermarket workers, indifferent café dwellers, an arrogant gallerist, a suspicious priest (in a church with a black Madonna and Christ-child, a nice touch). Suddenly we see the characters we have been empathising with, through other eyes - as dangerous-looking Aboriginal kids, trouble best avoided. Thornton makes us ask the questions: Are we these cold-hearted people? The next time we see a brutalised Aboriginal youngster will we try to imagine how it came about? Or try to help?

This is skilful and potent film-making, and a towering achievement for a first-time director, but especially for one dealing with a subject many Australians would prefer not to think about. And there is truthfulness too in an, if not happy, then at least hopeful ending. It is not about being saved, but saving yourself, and love is probably all we’ve got.

Go see if you haven't already.

De Stijl or just stale? ... on museum architecture

Startling architectural juxtapositions can be beautiful and inspired. Consider the Piazza San Marco in Venice - the Basilica San Marco in white wedding-cake high Byzantine style, the Doges' Palace in terra-cotta Ottoman-Venetian gothic, the austerely 'Florentine' brick Campanile and the Napoleonic arcades all seem to hang together with a beautiful, crazed logic. Or perhaps we're just used to them because they're so old?

Well, what about Richard Rogers' Lloyd's Building, or 30 St Mary Axe (the gherkin) in London? Or Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao? The juxtapositions are startling, yet hugely successful. There are many other examples, and Utzon's Sydney Opera House could be considered one of them, although there is no juxtaposition... just a ship assail on a low-slung sandstone harbour. Zaha Hadid's ill-fated Cardiff Opera House, Gehry's Venice Public Library and Rogers and Piano's Centre Pompidou are further contemporary examples.

The reason these buildings are so successful is that each of them is utterly innovative and uniquely of their time. Can, or will, the same be said of the proposed new wing for Sydney's MCA by Sam Marshall? Phillip Cox has already has his spray, and reluctantly, LF agrees. It's not that we are advocating some sort of match-up with the MCA's existing facade, just that a Rietveldian assemblage of boxes is NOT INTERESTING ENOUGH!




Above: MCA proposed new wing: 2 views, courtesy MCA


Gerrit Rietveld, Schröder House, 1924

LF hasn't studied the interior plans, and we're persuaded it will be a lovely series of spaces inside, but Cox is right - this is a missed opportunity to do something innovative and daring, to create an entirely new architectural conversation between the orderly deco rhythms of the Maritime Services Building and a new wing. What we have with Marshall's facade is not a 'Rubik's Cube' (as it has been instantly dubbed by the press) - A genuine Rubik's cube (in those garish colours perhaps?) might actually be quite interesting. Marshall's unsettling jumble of intersecting rectangles owes everything to 20th Dutch 'de Stijl', and nothing to the surrounding sandstone vernacular, or its maritime setting. Deliberate, obviously, but willful in its refusal to have a decent conversation with its neighbours. And the there's that ghastly clocktower from the cheap, faux-historic shopping centre behind, raised above the edifice like a sore thumb. This is suburban 'try-hard' architecture upped to a monumental scale, and we don't think it works. Please re-consider. Maybe get Zaha Hadid to do a couple of concept drawings after a stroll around the precinct? Or Mr Murcutt perhaps?

Or Richard Johnson, whose firm Johnson Pilton Walker designed the new national Portrait Gallery, below. Low-slung, single storied, yet quietly distinctive, it sits near the half-decent legal catheral of the High Court, and Colin Madigan's flawed concrèt brut NGA, itself in the throes of building a promising new wing by the able Andrew Andersons, which will fix the disastrous entrance and add light and space.



Above: Street Facade and Interior (lobby) detail, NPG Canberra, courtesy Johnson Pilton Walker

It's not just the NPA's street facade, with its distinctively cantilevered concrete blade, that works. The spaces inside are lucid, humane and allow us to follow an instinctive journey around the collection. The finishes, in a variety of materials, have a restraint and simplicity - polished terrazzo, blackbutt (?) floors, unadorned concrete, simple diffusing blinds... we recognise this style from Johnson's serene Asian extension at AGNSW - a translucent lantern. It's like an architectural version of the best mod-oz cuisine - Asian inspired, yet imbued with a uniquely Australian modesty.

More soon on the collection.

Vale, Dot

Dorothy Porter 1954 - 2008

The oppression we had to have

Thoughts on the election of Barack Obama, and Kevin Rudd's Australian Labour Government, one year on.

“Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation”
- James Madison, 4th US President 1809-17

Until a year ago it seemed that John Howard might go on for another decade, prosecuting an unwise war against the clear wishes of the majority, refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol or say ‘Sorry’ To Indigenous Australians, among many other signature ideological positions that had embarrassed Australian internationally for a decade. Yet, since the ‘correction’, no-one seriously questions Kevin Rudd’s remedial policies as anything other than the good and proper actions of a responsible government. The election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States was, until September this year, an impossible dream. Now the world can hardly wait for January 20 2009, when it takes effect.

The parallels between Australian and the USA are striking, and commentators have variously hailed the Obama victory as the end of the Reagan era, the demise of the Neocons as a political force, the realization of Martin Luther King’s dream, or The Age of Aquarius finally getting underway after a shaky start. Regarding the last, apparently it’s just before breakfast. And all because an intelligent, well-educated, charismatic black man has been elected President. Or, in Australia’s case, a swotty bloke with reasonable positions on almost everything.

Yet if we look at the elected leaders of most Western, Latin American and Asian democracies since WW2, it’s apparent that the trend has long been towards centrist, consensus politics. The hard-right exceptions prove the rule… Nixon, Thatcher, Reagan, George W Bush and, in Australia, John Howard.
But Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Jerry Ford (the Accidental President), Jimmy Carter, Bush Senior and Clinton could all be described as reasonable men governing from the political centre, and pursuing a broad consensus foreign policy. Even Nixon, for all his avarice and dishonesty, ended the war in Vietnam and reached out to China, and Reagan succeeded in ending the Cold War, albeit with a military build-up that eventually sent the Soviet Union broke.

In Australia you could broadly characterise Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating as centrists – if Whitlam’s policies seemed radical at the time, they are mostly uncontroversial now. In the UK John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the current Tory leader are broadly of the same political stripe, along with every postwar Prime Minister of Canada, Japan, most of Europe and the Balkans, including most former Soviet vassals.

If the USA and Australia have merely ‘corrected’ back to the centre with the election of reasonable and humane technocrats, they now resemble most other democracies, and have much in common with a generation of European and Asian leaders who support multilateral solutions, good-neighbourliness and diplomacy over bombastic unilateralism. The real aberrations have been John W. Howard (JWH) and George W. Bush (GWB), those brothers in arms, the nagging exceptions to the centrist thesis for most of the last decade.

If it’s true that people get the government they deserve, then Australians apparently deserved, for a decade spanning the millennium, a hard-right ideologue, dog-whistler, wedge-meister and dirty fighter who governed in the interests of his own supporter base – essentially the entrepreneurial class. There are some credits of course (gun control, East Timor) but Australia’s longest sustained economic boom was just their dumb luck… a result of the Hawke/Keating reforms and a worldwide economic growth bubble, now popped. The rich got a lot richer, and the trickle-down effect was enough to keep many voters employed, happy, and spending big on their mortgages and credit cards.

The USA has followed a similar trajectory. Clinton/Gore got the economy competitive again, and back in the black. They governed from the political centre, built multilateral approaches to security, terrorism, Israel/Palestine, the Middle East, climate change, trade. It was promising, for all Clinton’s shortcomings as a man, and there was every reason to expect a continuation under stolid Al Gore. And yet, with a ‘stolen’ election and no popular mandate, the USA took its hardest turn to the right since Reagan. The effect was immediate – relations with China, Russia and the Middle east soured almost overnight, and Palestine, where the Intifada had been quiescent, erupted again. Was 9/11, obviously long in the planning, fast-forwarded in response? We’ll never know if it would have happened under Gore, but we can suppose that the response would have been more measured, and wiser counsel would have prevailed.

Instead a cabal of arch-conservatives … Perle, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and of course the arch wedge strategist himself, Karl Rove, got their way on policy. And their political vehicle was a not very bright man – untraveled, unread, deaf to the lessons of history and his great forbears in office. It was a perfect match – “The haves, and the have mores”, to quote Bush himself.

The strategy was a simple, and much like John Howard’s approach – make the people afraid, then pick the issues that will divide them one against the other – abortion, intelligent design, gay marriage, prayer in schools, immigration, dole bludging, unions, ‘handouts’ for minorities, to name the most common ones. Obviously it helps if there is evidence of a real threat, and 9/11 and the Bali bombings were certainly real threats, easily conflated in the public mind with Iraq, Muslims, boat people (or criminal Mexicans), so that “defending our way of life” became a catch-all for any number of bad policies. We were sold a vision of the world designed to make us insular and compliant, and persuaded that civil liberties should be curtailed, compassion towards genuine refugees suspended, multiculturalism discredited, and Aboriginal reconciliation abandoned. And over it all hung the threat of a return to 17% interest rates under those dreaded bogeymen, the ‘Union Bosses’.

And it worked, surprisingly well, and for a surprisingly long time, in both Australia and the USA. So, why did the people turn when they did?

One might argue that in Australia GWH had become not just ‘out of touch’ with average voters, but had been seriously out of whack with the underlying centrist trend in Australian politics from the beginning. The unexpected capture of the Senate in 2004, and the consequent legislative arrogance, alerted (and alarmed) the electorate. George Megalogenis’s incisive demographic analysis of the 2007 vote (Labour Market Sees Red, The Weekend Australian Dec 1-2, 2007) quoted Paul Keating as saying “Every now and than the conservative parties of Australia decide to bare their fangs with the full ideological bite … They never really change, it is just sometimes they decide to disguise themselves. I think John Howard just ran out of disguises”. Or to put it another way, the dog-whistle suddenly became clearly audible, and voters grew tired of being taken for fools. I suggest the turning point was the Haneeff affair, but others see it as cumulative, from Tampa and ‘kids overboard’ through AWB, David Hicks, ‘blame-the-states’ and the whole sad litany of wedge issues that worked brilliantly for a while, then just suddenly just stopped doing so, to the evident annoyance of their architects. And now a similar change has rolled through the USA, for very similar reasons. The final straw was of course the financial meltdown – the one thing that conservatives are supposed to be good at is the economy, and credit is the opium of the people. When that fell over, it was all over.

In Australia and now the USA, it seems that this was an ‘oppression we had to have’. Perhaps we needed to see how easily bad leaders can hoodwink us with fear. Not only have we got a decent Prime Minister out of it, but also, finally, a half-decent opposition leader. And Obama looks to be a genuine consensus-builder and healer – something the USA and the world badly needs.

So are we squarely back on the centrist track, or will the pendulum inevitably swing back, and how soon? The architects of the United States constitution were worldly men, and highly cynical about the motives of those in power, so they designed a fairly robust system, which has been vindicated by the election of Obama. But in what dark places will the Neocons dwell until the next time, and can they conspire to ensure that Obama fails, so that Americans turn, afear’d again, towards the next jingoistic hawk of the hard right – Sarah Palin anyone? Will the discredited Australian ideological right heed the lesson? Malcolm Turnbull understands better then most to succeed again the Coalition must recapture the middle ground, and that people want consensus and co-operation. There really isn’t much policy difference between him and Rudd, but the chances of genuine bi-partisanship seem as distant as ever. Barrack Obama will no doubt appoint a number of Republicans to his cabinet, as Democrats do, and is serious about moving beyond the old 'Red State/Blue State' divide, but with our outmoded adversarial system that just can’t happen in Australia. A really bold move would be to break with tradition and appoint Turnbull to the cabinet’s economic advisory group. It would ensure a genuinely non-partisan approach to economic management – we face grave economic times after all – and perhaps Turnbull would stop saying idiotic, opportunist things that he plainly doesn’t believe.

And, finally, we should enshrine a Bill of Rights in the Australian constitution, and by so doing ensure our broad social contract is never again hijacked by megalomaniacs and ideologues of any persuasion. We are one of the few Western democracies without such an instument, and it is reassuring to hear that the Attorney General is serious about, if not full-on constitutional change, then a Charter of Rights which Parliament will be obliged to consider when passing legislation.

'Course we can.

The state of design?

Sydney Design 07
11th International Design festival
Powerhouse Museum and other venues Sydney-wide
from August 4
Full program: www.sydneydesign.com.au

Sydney Design kicked off on rainy Friday evening, and the black-clad ones were out in force to hear the often acerbic (unpierced)-tongued architecture writer Elizabeth Farrelly deliver that rare thing – a genuinely funny and interesting launch speech. Praise the Lord. The exhibitions and events program is extensive and Sydney-wide, but it’s a great opportunity to revisit the often-underrated Powerhouse, whose permanent exhibitions are constantly evolving and which has a strong emphasis on interactivity and engagement. Take the kids, they won’t be bored.

The PH deserves credit for driving Sydney Design, working between the major disciplines, and fostering links with other galleries and design orgs, and its distinctive event communications are beginning to achieve the media critical mass needed to penetrate public lethargy and create a sense of excitement and ownership among Sydneysiders, many of whom have discovered design in a big way in the last decade.

This process has a way to go of course. Think of Milan’s Salon del Mobile. While some Milanese probably groan and leave for their coastal villas, it is an event that has come to almost define and envelop the city, spawns an immense fringe, brings billions into the economy, and does much to reinforce not just Italian design, but design in general, with Milan as the centre of the universe. Venice has done it with art. For several centuries in fact.

For a city of 4.5 million Sydney Design ain’t bad, but Melbourne is doing better, having established the National Design Centre at Fed Square, and Victoria even has a Minister for Design. The results were manifested in the Melbourne Design Festival last month. Obviously Melbourne’s city centre (and laneways), with its concentration of galleries, showrooms and ateliers, lends itself better to generating a sense of involvement and excitement, and the NDC’s position in Fed Square situates it at the heart of Melbourne life. It’s also interesting that while the Labour state government is an enthusiastic advocate for design, the original vision (including Fed Square itself) we must grudgingly admit, was Jeff Kennett’s. No equivalent bipartisan vision is evident in NSW.

If Sydney is ever to move into the big league as a ‘design city’ the State Government needs to better support the City Of Sydney’s efforts and to put some substantial resources behind this. Forever putting out transport fires (not literally I hope), constantly on the defensive over planning and infrastructure, obsessively focussed on bringing in the big events we probably DON’T need (eg APEC), our government seems to have no conception of how to harness the existing ingenuity and vitality of its creative and design communities, and leverage this into economic benefit for the city and the state. In fact I'm not sure they even see the opportunity.

Perhaps there’s a case for umbrella-ing even more design events into a Design Month in August? It’s a time of year when people are paying attention and resigned to being indoors. Last Saturday’s Saturday Indesign, (a biannual initiative supported by Raj Nandan's Indesign publishing group since the demise of Designers Saturday) is an industry day focussed on commercial showroom visits, and effectively already part of it. The biannual (?) Sydney Esquisse, which has never managed to achieve its own critical mass, the Object Gallery sponsored St Margarets Architecture and Design Festival (September again?), and various initiatives by Marrickville Council (where many artists and designers actually live and work because of more affordable rents) could be too. Then there are the various design awards run by the DIA, AGDA, and Inside magazine. Individual organisations can’t do it all alone. It need an overarching organization, to say nothing of policy vision and funding at state government level.

Shoot me down if you think this is a naïve and utopian vision. Perhaps spreading disparate events across the year is better? But while I'm making rash suggestions, what about Elizabeth Farrelly in the NSW upper house as Minsiter for Design? Her meetings with Frank Sartor would certainly be interesting.

A toute a l'heure.

A Bill of Rights for Australia

Kevin Rudd has been much criticised by left and right for ‘me too-ism’ on the economy, the NT intervention and The Haneef Affair, and the government is making much of this, while simultaneously objecting to Labour’s differences on such issues as IR, Iraq and Climate Change. It’s time this debate grew up.

The fact is that Australia, like most developed democracies, is moving towards a centrist, consensus style of government, and Rudd is that kind of politician. We most resemble countries like Canada, Switzerland, Sweden and the UK, both in terms of our political culture and our egalitarian values. The vast majority of Australians agree on the kind of society we want to live in, and what kinds of services governments should be providing.

For example: affordable universal health care; good public education; sustainable environmental management; an independent judiciary; respect for human rights; justice for Indigenous Australians; a fair go in the workplace balanced with a dynamic economy; efficient transport and infrastructure; effective defence forces; multilateral-based foreign policy; good-neighbourliness… and so on. One could haggle about the emphasis, but these are surely the common political values that have sustained Australia’s social contract since Federation, and allowed Australians to travel the world with pride in their country’s reputation.

Because these values are not enshrined in a bill of rights, we rely on a continuation of the tradition of political consensus. The problem arises when a Government, whether of the left or the right, uses its mandate to impose a narrow political ideology on the people, even in the face of widespread opposition, for example the invasion of Iraq, climate change scepticism, and arguably recent workplace laws. There are no doubt examples on the left, but our (self-avowed) most conservative leader since Menzies has imposed his personal ideology on Australian society to an unprecedented degree. He has seen his constituency as essentially business, both large and small, and his style of government has been largely inspired by the wedge-and-divide strategies of the Republican-governed USA. George Bush once smugly described his political base as “The Haves… and the Have-Mores”, and he wasn’t kidding. The world’s richest nation fails to deliver affordable health-care to a quarter of its citizens, has some of the worst education outcomes in the developed world, and its foreign policy continues to guarantee the recruitment of a new generation of jihadists.

Mr Howard fails similarly to govern for all the people. He’s way out of kilter with the underlying centrist trend in politics, and it’s time for him to go gracefully. The next decades will be defined by consensus-builders like Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull. Australians don’t need or want leaders to define our values, or to impose their personal morals on us. We need good technocrats – an executive that will effectively implement our commonly-agreed values, do it cost-effectively, govern for all of us, and be chucked out pronto if they don’t. Which is why a Bill of Rights should be incorporated into the constitution.