No apologies this week for the late posting of the newsletter. I’ve just finished my fourth Archibald Prize-related piece in a sequence that still has a way to run. As the last three articles had to be written in three days, while the Prize was announced, updating this site had to take second place to actual paid work for the newspaper.
I did manage to squeeze in a column on Hadyn Wilson’s Fake Truths at the State Library of NSW, which would otherwise have lingered at the back of the Archibald log jam. It’s an unusual, playful, cerebral show that some people will adore, although others will find it doesn’t agree with their taste or temperament. Personally, I’ve always been interested in the way Wilson’s mind works and the many twisting paths this has taken him down.
Speaking of twisting paths the film column looks at this year’s German Film Festival, which features a garish new bio pic of Rainer Werner Fassbinder – a great and notorious director. There’s nothing else in this year’s line-up that matches Oskar Roehler’s Enfant Terrible for extravagant decadence and vulgarity. For the most part, this year’s featured movies are models of tight plotting and complex psychological scenarios. If you’re looking for belly laughs, car chases or superheroes saving the planet, the German Film Festival may not be your bag. Ist das klar?
I’m also including another Archibald piece as a blog. This one is a first response to Peter Wegner’s win, wth a few reflections on the other prizes and the Archie 100 historical survey. Plus my usual complaints about the AGNSW, which never seems to be able to do anything well without spoiling it in some way.
In this the gallery bears a remarkable resemblance to the Federal government, which never stops boasting and skiting about its achievements, while the wheels keep wobbling. In a week when the Archibald Prize went to a portrait of a lively centenarian, Scummo’s gang has come under fire for its botching of the vaccination roll-out to aged care facilties. To put it in a nutshell: they haven’t got a clue. Why haven’t they got a clue? Presumably because old people are expendable, being merely a drain on resources – although the relevant ministers obviously wouldn’t put it like that.
Another problem is the mind-set that would seek to turn over responsibility for the entire aged care sector to for-profit private enterprise. The unsurprising result is that services have become hopelessly run down, staff that do difficult and unpleasant jobs are shamefully underpaid, patients are treated shabbily and live degraded lives. During the pandemic these old people have been isolated from friends and relatives, leaving many to die alone.
The government should be deeply ashamed of this and treat it as a crisis that needs to be urgently addressed. Instead, they are indulging in their favourite pastimes: denial and spin. When Peter Hartcher notes, in a devastating article in the Herald, that three-quarters of all Australians who have died of COVID-19, have been in aged care homes (that’s 685 from a total of 910), it should set off alarm bells with the government, with the Opposition, and with the general public.
I’m not going to repeat the details of Peter’s arguments, but what we’ve seen so far is extraordinary. Despite announcing aged care and disabled care as vaccination priorities, there has been little effort to put any sort of plan into action. Scummo and co. chose to go it alone rather than work with the states on this issue and are now trying to evade taking the blame. It’s the same pattern over and over. Those vital things that cost money are ignored in favour of short-term stunts and ingrained ideological obsessions, such as preserving coal-fired power stations. It hardly needs spelling out that the problems brushed aside today will return as bigger, more expensive problems in the future. So while the Coalition are laser-focused on taking a happy story to the next election, they are creating longterm economic and political issues for the future, regardless of who is in power.
When I see our Dear Leader sitting in a truck, wearing a baseball cap or a fluoro vest, smirking and blabbing inanely, I despair at the thought that this is what substitutes for policy today. If one wanted to be more conspiratorial it would appear there is a plan to allow the vaccination and quarantine programs to proceed in slow motion, against all expert advice, to allow for a triumphant emergence from the pandemic just before the next election.
It would be great if Peter Wegner’s Archibald victory had the side-effect of getting us to think more about the respect due to old age, and the way we are becoming progressively less compassionate as a society. Not every old person is a vital as Guy Warren, but no politician should be allowed (by the public) to be as shallow and venal as the PM.