Andrew Bolt: Artists blind to the Left’s bigotry

Australia Council has been taken over $32k from taxpayers and given the money to artists that are blind to the bigotry the Left.

I have a question before I tell of the strange luck of Natalie Allen and Sally Richardson. I’m puzzled, and need your help.

Any chance, you think, that I’d get an arts grant to dance around a table for an hour, pretending to be the innocent Cardinal George Pell being witch-hunted into jail?

No? Thought so.

But that’s what surprises me about Julia, a show co-created by Richardson that has Allen dancing around – and on – a table as she pretends to be Julia Gillard, being brought down as Prime Minister by misogynists when women face “sickening and unspeakable sexism”.

Ah, now it makes sense! Women as victims, even when they’ve been made Prime Minister. Check.

Conservatives as villains, with Tony Abbott smeared in the script as a sexist – “Apologise to the women of Australia!” Check.

Ker-ching! Here’s $32,180 from the Australia Council. Or, more correctly, here’s $32,180 taken from taxpayers who wouldn’t want to see that dance, given out by Left-leaning arts bureaucrats who think they should.

Performer Natalie Allen plays Julia Gillard.

They might argue that it’s for the greater good. To combat bigotry, which Richardson says includes here a “trial by an Australian public whipped up into a frenzy of ‘poisonous hatred’.”

But, er, that actually applies far more to Pell and even Abbott than to Gillard.

Of course, call out bigotry. But why are artists so blind to that of the Left?

Blind even to their own? For instance, Allen on the weekend said she “decided to dye my hair red (like Gillard’s) as a form of method action to feel like a redhead.”

Excuse me? What’s there to feel as a redhead that you wouldn’t feel if your hair was brown or black or blonde?

But Allen continues: “And I thought that if that looks bad, that’s OK.”

What? Being a redhead makes you look bad? Perhaps the Australia Council should cough up another grant to fight “poisonous hatred” against redheads.

But the bottom line: what different air we’d breath if all the funding for culture wasn’t hijacked by the Left – by the Australia Council, the ABC, the SBS, the Conversation, university arts faculties and outfits like the Australian Museum.

What if it wasn’t crazy to imagine government funding for a work attacking Pell’s persecutors, more vicious and destructive than any of Gillard’s critics?

Fantasy, of course. But why?