Tim Hansen - Arts and Culture advocate

04/08/2025

Where are the cool robots? I was promised cool robots! 🤖

When I was a kid, I was so excited for the future. And why wouldn't I be? Growing up on a diet of "Back to the Future" and "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" and so forth, I was promised hoverboards and time travelling phone booths and lots of cool robots.

Alas I've yet to get my hoverboard, time-travel might have to be confined to an App instead of a phone booth, but yes, our future is full of robots!

Unfortunately those robots now run universities.

These university robots are good at some things. For example, they're very good at seeing the numbers on a spreadsheet going the wrong way. But they're not good at figuring out what to do about that, except running the tired old program that's been around since Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and John Howard, which is "DELETE HUMANITIES TO CONSERVE PROFIT MARGINS."

I mean, I guess in the short-term it works. Without all those pesky, useless artists, musicians, historians, lexicographers, anthropologists, archeologists, and linguists expecting to be respected for devoting their lives to passing on human knowledge to the next generation (and remunerated for their efforts) cluttering up the place, a university can expect a nice bump in profits for a year or two.

But then, since no one wants to go to a university (or anywhere, I'd argue) that's inhabited solely by robots, student numbers drop off, and they're back to where they started. The old robots become obsolete and replaced with new robots, who come in and start the cycle all over again. Delete, delete, delete.

I don't like these robots very much. Because one thing I did not imagine when I was a kid, was I'd live in a world that treated things like music as a luxury for the wealthy. Humans love music. Robots don't.

If you are human, I'd like to direct your attention to the robotic decision on the table to shut down the National School of Music in Canberra, at The Australian National University. This school has been a cornerstone in cultivating generation after generation of music educators and artists for 60 years. Alas, due to several decades of robots trying to budget cut their way out of decline, instead of, I dunno, doing their human job and revitalising this invaluable institution, they've decided the best thing to do is just shut it down and hope that no human beings care.

I care. Very much. If you care too, there are simple yet powerful steps you can take to draw a line in the sand. (Robots hate sand, it gets in their circuitry and clogs things up).

1. Write to Federal Arts Minister Tony Burke and add your voice to the legion of concerned humans about the systematic erosion of our humanity in universities. [email protected]

2. MEAA is collating responses to support the battle at the coal face within ANU, so you can copy your email and send it to them, for extra impact. [email protected]

3. If you are a musician, entertainer or a journalist, join MEAA. Unions are a historically proven way to create a united front against dehumanising robotic decisions.

Institutions like the ANU School of Music take lifetimes to build, and one board meeting to destroy. And our children are the ones who will lose out.

The future is ours to shape, fellow humans ❤️

23/07/2025

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23/07/2025

The Australian National University plans to close the national School of Music once and for all.

Universities are not businesses.

This is ideological.

Join your union - MEAA - to fight against this never-ending stupidity.

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01/07/2025

It's an honour to be presenting at this year's Music in Me summit for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

28/01/2025

Last year the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney was forced to commence charging entry, for the first time in 24 years. As this article in The Conversation points out (link in comments), it's yet another sign that our Cultural Industries are in trouble.

Upon making this announcement, there were the usual tiresome commentary from social media's peanut gallery - it's a total waste of money, who would go to the MCA anyway, modern art is garbage, blah blah blah... (not to go too far off on a tangent but despite my best efforts I struggle to understand why some people get so mad that art, art organisations, and artists exist, so if anyone would like to enlighten me, feel free to do so).

I believe for a society to be healthy and its communities to be happy, we need art. Nothing revelatory there, sure. But the important detail to the broad assertion that "we need art" is that no one piece of art will be for everybody. However each member of society deserves to have access to art that is for them.

I like visual art. I like contemporary art. But I don't love it. It doesn't light my world on fire, and I've completely forgotten most of it.

But amidst all of that, I've seen a handful of things that struck me to my core, that I've never forgotten, and have become important milestones in a lifetime of understanding... well, life, the universe, everything. It helps me feel more connected to the community I live in.

That is the whole point of art.

I go to the MCA maybe once every few years. Will the fact that institutions like the MCA have to start charging for what was once free deeply impact my day to day life? No. But these sorts of changes - museums charging entry, performing arts organisations downscaling operations, arts education programs being quietly shut down, artists leaving the industry altogether or moving overseas - should be a cause for concern for anyone who values a society that is inclusive and egalitarian.

Because those sorts of changes signal a shift in the values of those who govern us. Endless trimming to arts budgets will one day make the whole industry unsustainable. Access to art, either as an audience, or a creator, will become elite. Social attitudes towards creative thinkers will become dismissive and ultimately hostile. General social disenfranchisement will become entrenched and more widespread. And if those who govern us think we're okay with it, they'll keep doing it.

So perhaps tiny things like the MCA charging entry fees are an absolute non-event in your life. However I would suggest that this is the latest, tiny, virtual non-event in a death-of-a-thousand cuts type situation that will lead to a very different society than one that I would argue most of us would want.

Perhaps it's time we insisted to those that govern us its time to do something meaningful about it.

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19/09/2024

You know what I miss about facebook? A nice long rant. Who's in?

The NSW Government does something incredible and throws the Music Festival Industry a $500k lifeline ❤️

It's common knowledge that since the pandemic (remember that?) music festivals, as well as music venues, theatre companies, and other performing arts organisations have struggled. Badly. Not "struggled to make a nice comfy profit" struggled, but "struggled to find affordable venues to rehearse and perform in, to afford to market their performances to their audiences, to pay their artists and admin teams that make the work."

Conventional neo-liberal wisdom would be, well if the market won't pay you for it, then too-bad so-sad, don't let the door hit you on the way out.

But the arts has NEVER worked like that. As long as there have been artists, there has been artistic support. Historically it was wealthy patrons, like the Medicis or the Rockerfellers. Today governments in most developed nations understand that investment in culture reaps enormous economic and diplomatic rewards both domestically and internationally. (An aside, did you know that one of South Korea's biggest national exports is culture? The industry makes $48 BILLION FREAKIN' DOLLARS A YEAR. That's walking around money).

Alas, in Australia there has always been an ideological hostility towards any form of government support for the arts. My theories on why this is are for another post another time, but it is immensely refreshing to see a government approach an industry like music festivals in the same way as any other industry - one that provides employment and delicious tax revenue - instead of the low-key malicious glee you get from some pundits when yet another facet to the arts industry collapses due to government apathy.

HOWEVER... as wonderful as it is, there is a key problem with this funding. It only applies to festivals that have over 15,000 patrons.

Herein lies another big problem with our approach to funding the arts in Australia: we always support the big end of town. The Opera Houses, the State Theatre and Dance Companies, and the big name, massive music festivals. Please don't misunderstand me: this isn't sour grapes, those companies and festivals do amazing things and are an absolutely vital component to our national performing arts industry.

But the problem is if you only ever focus on the tip of the pyramid, the whole thing becomes unsustainable. Where's the ecosystem? You need healthy small to medium arts organisations dotted all over the country to encourage innovation, develop artistic talent, and a healthy, curious audience to support the great big companies.

So awesome work NSW Government. But to make this lifeline a sustainable, long-term fix, we need serious investment in the small-players across the country, otherwise we'll just be back here again in a few years time.

NSW festivals with more than 15,000 people will receive emergency funding under new package to revive the ailing industry.

19/08/2024

This is bloody INCREDIBLE news: the McPhillamy's gold mine project will probably not be going ahead.

The whole thing was a travesty from the very beginning. A company based in Perth, with majority overseas shareholders, was going to dig up acres of prime agricultural land DIRECTLY on top of natural springs that feed the Belubula river.

The river that runs through Blayney, Carcoar (where I live), Canowindra, before joining the Lachlan river at Gooloogong.

A river, it turns out, has cultural significance for the Wiradjuri people of this area.

The company planned to literally plug up the springs with concrete, and then build the tailings dam - the toxic slush that you get when you extract tiny flecks of gold out of rocks - directly on top of the plugged up springs.

Anyone with an ounce of sense could see this was sheer madness. Two other gold mines in this area, Cadia in Orange and Dargues in Braidwood, have had ongoing problems with pollutants entering waterways or incidences of toxic dust in the air increasing because mining companies will say ANYTHING to get what they want. And once they're there, they're there to stay.

To say I'm relieved is an understatement.

TO BE CLEAR: I am not opposed to mining. What I am opposed to is decades of the erosion of regulations around mining from the NSW government, and the paltry fines dished out to mining companies when they inevitably screw up and pollute.

Having said that, it is high time Australians in general got a bit more clever about how we employ people and build industry rather than just digging s**t out of the ground over and over and over again.

The federal environment minister has accepted an application by Wiradjuri elders to protect the headwaters and a section of the Belubula River where the McPhillamys Gold Project mine's tailings dam was to be constructed.