If that is the context, what concerns me here comes from three separate stories, all of which broke this week. The first is the Liberal Party dinner hosted by Channel 9 in their studios. This was a $10,000 per head event on the Sunrise set, where guests from property, banking and mining could pay to hear Scott Morrison speak.

Last December, Joyce Carol Oates stoked yet another Twitter controversy when she suggested that diverse writers quit complaining about representation and simply get on with the job – starting their own publishing houses being one of her recommendations. And when I read this alongside a number of friends’ annual ‘best of’ reading lists that defiantly featured only writers of colour, I got the sense of antagonistic sides that were irreconcilable.

There has been recent noise around whiteness in the arts in Australia, Melbourne in particular, due in part to Andy Butler’s article ‘Safe White Spaces’. Some of us have been talking about this for some time, but now it feels different, on account of the voices being heard and the opinions being seriously considered. This might be the demographic reckoning that is starting to happen as a consequence of the end of the White Australia Policy.

On 30 September, The Australian ran a cover story titled ‘One island, eight grand finals and the Rioli legend’. It focused on Richmond Tigers player Daniel Rioli and his family of famous football-playing uncles and cousins who come from Pirlangimpi on Melville Island. Written by Chip Le Grand, it singled out one young player and made him highly visible on the game’s most important day of the year.

One way to read poetry in Australia is to see it as being in a constant state of conflict. For the most part, this is a cold war where poets argue with poets in very poetic ways – the outcry about Geoff Page’s Southerly blog probably counts as the outer limit of this activity, which manifests more often in email exchanges, reviews that are compliment sandwiches or gossipy asides. Sometimes this breaks out into the open, as we saw when John Kinsella took out a restraining order against Robert Adamson and Anthony Lawrence and which the Sydney Morning Herald covered in 2006.

For poetry that means taking seriously ideas like artists-in-residence and re-thinking the English department as a site of potential. Moreover, it means thinking through some of the ideological unconsciousness that exists in the English department as it is configured in Australia.

The term Creative Industries is also indebted to a particular aesthetic idea of what counts as art. If Foley wants to be minister for that department, perhaps we need a counter position in a Ministry of Uncreative Industries.