Politics & Power Quote by Ann Macbeth

“All the arts are predominantly national” is a strategic claim dressed up as a cultural observation. Macbeth isn’t offering a neutral theory of aesthetics; she’s building a lever. By declaring art “predominantly national,” she turns funding from a discretionary grant into something closer to a civic obligation: if art is how a nation tells the truth about itself, then the state can’t plausibly outsource it to market whims or foreign tastes. The Australian Film Commission, in her framing, isn’t a patron being asked to take a chance. It’s a public instrument failing its mandate.

The bite comes from the “therefore.” It’s the language of bureaucracy weaponized against bureaucracy, a neat syllogism that forces administrators to either fund “us” or admit they don’t believe in national culture as a public good. The pronoun matters. “Us” draws a boundary around a local creative class that sees itself both as representative and embattled, competing not just for money but for legitimacy.

Then she drops the mask: “The battle gets more and more vicious each year.” That’s less melodrama than field report. Cultural funding is rarely a genteel salon; it’s a knife-fight conducted in application forms, committee rooms, and press coverage. Macbeth’s line hints at scarcity (shrinking resources, rising applicants) and at politics (taste-makers, gatekeepers, shifting national priorities). Taken together, the quote reads like an argument for cultural sovereignty under pressure: fund the local story, or watch it be crowded out by louder, richer, imported ones.