Post-industrial working class culture
The ALP and cultural democracy
By Tony Moore
A key challenge for the Australian Labor Party (ALP) is how to encourage the move from an industrial to a post-industrial society without marginalising its traditional supporters, who not unreasonably expect Labor to safeguard their interests. Specifically, Labor needs policies that will enhance the participation of young people growing up in working class communities, not just in new economic opportunities, but as citizens in our national life.
Access to career paths in the new economy is vital, but equally important to citizenship is cultivating a cultural democracy in which all, and not just a privileged few, participate. Just as Mark Latham is urging Labor to tap into the economic aspiration in the outer suburbs and regions, so must Labor governments embrace the cultural energy and forms of the suburbs.
'Class, as a positive culture, a way of making sense of life, was rarely considered by Labor.'
To do this Labor must abandon its instinct to impose on people abstract schemes dreamed up by apparatchiks and marketeers, and instead observe and harness the reality of people's lives.
Older reformers on the Left often despair at the consumerist habits of young Australians, who seem addicted to the siren song of international (especially American) corporations pumping out pop songs, films and TV, fashion fads and computer games. These distractions have been seducing young people (and their parents) for much of the last century - and it's important to note that most of the pundits who rail against US cultural imperialism brainwashing our youth have an old Byrds or Beach Boys album in the closet.
The commonly prescribed remedy is a healthy dose of high or avant-garde culture, subsidised institutions like galleries, opera and writers festivals, and some classic British drama on the ABC.
But too much passive consumption, whether high or low, is no good for anyone. Luckily the old punk slogan 'Do It Yourself' is alive and well within youth subcultures, on the internet, in local hip hop and indie music, in zines, in home videos and in young people's play.
The challenge is for Labor to listen rather than lecture.
In the areas of arts and culture, Labor governments have traditionally sought to bring middle class cultural enlightenment to the 'disadvantaged', through the education system, through publicly funded media, and through arts grants that assist those deemed to have talent to become professional artists, film-makers, writers, performers.
The pervading ideology is the romantic idea of artists as a heroic caste separate from the rest of us, married to the liberal idea of social mobility for the best of the working class.
But this approach does little to connect grass roots cultural energy to a wider national culture.
Nor have Labor arts policies dealt with the growing division between the inaccessible and taxpayer subsidised elite arts practice of the lucky few and the commercial youth culture of the majority.
The challenge for the ALP's policy review process is to devise a cultural vision that cultivates and connects cultural production (including creative consumption) among young people; that makes a special effort to tap into the diverse cultural energies and visions and languages of working class youth, whether in the suburbs, inner cities or the bush.
These days that culture is ethnically diverse, a patchwork of lifestyle, subcultural, and global in outlook. The real cultural potential lies here - with a group that is rarely asked to step onto centre stage, but a group that is far more representative of mainstream Australia than the latest intake of NIDA students or auters graduating from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School.
The ALP has not had a big interest in elevating working class youth culture to the centre of public culture, in the same way that Blair and previous Labour governments have done in the UK.
Federal and state Labor governments in the 1980s and 1990s adopted a crude, monolithic concept of 'youth': shorn of social diversity and - strangely for a 'Labor' party - blind to class differences.
The boxes of various 'disadvantaged' categories were ticked - disabled, aboriginal, women, rural and isolated - but class, as a positive culture, a way of making sense of life, was rarely considered.