Cuba provides the overwhelming majority of medical assistance in Timor-Leste, with 305 health workers on two-year missions, comprising 230 doctors, 25 nurses, and 50 health technicians. Cuba is also building capacity for the future with 600 East Timorese medical and allied students being trained on full scholarships in several Cuban universities. First proposed at a Non-Aligned Movement meeting in Kuala Lumpur in 2003, a formal cooperating agreement between Timor-Leste and Cuba was finalised in January 2007. Under the program’s ‘doctor replacement policy’, East Timorese graduates will ultimately replace the Cuban contingent within seven to eight years. Alongside the Cuban doctors and scholarships for Timorese students, a third element of the program establishes a medical faculty at the National University of Timor Lorosa’e. This separate cohort of 105 students in Timor-Leste is being trained under a new program of general integrated health instruction, first pioneered by Cuban medical teams in Venezuela. Under this program, East Timorese medical students work under the tutorship of sixty Cuban doctors, accompanying them on their daily rounds in the communities where the students live. This day-to-day practical experience is integrated with formal university training, and conducted in cooperation with the World Health Organisation to ensure standards. More than half of these Timorese students are now in their second year.*

One specific objective of the cooperation agreement in Timor-Leste was the reduction of maternal and child mortality rates, especially in rural areas. A recent program evaluation found that in the areas where Cuban doctors work child mortality is now 27.5 per 1000, a figure more than 50 per cent lower than elsewhere in the country. Maternal mortality has also steeply declined in the areas where Cuban medical teams work. The overall aim of the scholarship program is to achieve a ratio of one doctor per 1500–2000 East Timorese by 2015, when the estimated population of Timor-Leste will be 1.5 million.

Other active programs in the Pacific region include Kiribati, which hosts a Cuban health team of twenty doctors, with more to come in 2009, and the Solomon Islands, which is recruiting Cuban doctors to reduce its present doctor/patient ratio of 1:10,000, and earlier this year received the first contingent of a future cohort of forty doctors. Other cooperation agreement programs exist with Tuvalu and Nauru.

Back in Cuba, alongside the 600 Timorese medical students are 64 Pacific Islander students comprising 25 Solomon Islanders, 20 i-Kiribati, 17 ni-Vanuatu and 2 Nauruans. Planning is also advanced for a contingent of Cuban doctors in Papua New Guinea, despite strong diplomatic pressure from former Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer in 2007, who warned through the Australian High Commission in Port Moresby that the presence of Cuban doctors could ‘destabilise security in the Pacific’. In a rare display of defiance against the regional power, this pressure was overtly resisted by PNG Prime Minister Somare, with his health minister replying publicly that ‘really, it’s our concern whether we bring Cuban doctors’. There are also reports of Fijian interest in a health cooperation
agreement with Cuba.

In total, more than 126,000 Cubans have completed health missions in 104 countries, including large scale missions after natural disasters in Asia, such as the post-Tsunami teams in Aceh and Sri Lanka, a contingent of 1000 doctors in Pakistani Kashmir after the earthquakes in 2005, and two field hospitals after the 2006 earthquakes in Java. There are currently some 37,000 Cuban health professionals working in 70 countries, and 25,000 medical and allied students from 123 countries studying in Cuba, including 100 from the United States. Cuba is also training 21,500 medical students ‘offshore’ in their home countries, with the vast majority of these in Venezuela, being taught by 9230 Cuban doctors, and smaller programs in Guinea-Bissau and Timor-Leste. It is therefore no exaggeration to describe the Cuban programs as a global health program. The Cuban health programs are well suited for the developing world and Pacific nations, with a strong focus on preventative and community medicine and specific programs on malaria, HIV/AIDS, cataracts, and other diseases prevalent in developing countries. It is also better suited to systems with poor medical facilities, as the preventative community heath focus is less critically reliant on advanced medical technology than systems in developed countries.

Perhaps the most remarkable program, from an Australian perspective, was the Cuban-run English literacy program in New Zealand, among Maori and Pacific Islander communities. The Cuban literacy program Yo Sí Puedo (Yes I Can) runs in twenty-eight countries, in several languages, including Portuguese and Tetum language literacy curricula operated by eleven Cuban teachers in Timor-Leste. In 2003, the rector of the University Te Wananga o Aotearoa in New Zealand, Rongo Wetere, requested the assistance of Cuban literacy educators to solve entrenched illiteracy among Maori communities. A pilot project using the Yo Sí Puedo method started in June 2003 in two Maori and one Pacific Islander communities — with more than 5000 participants. Despite considerable opposition from at least one National MP, the program had 3168 people in classes as of June 2008, of whom 2092 had become literate since the program’s commencement.

These Pacific region missions are an increasing part of Cuba’s global health and literacy programs, which are distinctive in their emphasis on ‘south–south’ cooperation between developing countries, and the durable numbers of doctors and future graduates involved. So significant have these programs become that in September this year the inaugural ‘Cuba–Pacific Islands Ministerial Meeting’ was held in Havana. The stated goals of this new forum are to ‘assist small island developing states in addressing the effects of climate change, and in strengthening co-operation in health, sports and education’.

The Cuban health and literacy programs in Timor-Leste are notable, as President Ramos-Horta has often reminded reporters since, as the only international aid missions not to leave the country during the 2006 political crisis. Malmierca Diaz, the Cuban ambassador to the United Nations, stated in his address to the 2006 Security Council meeting endorsing the new International Stabilisation Force (ISF) presence that there had been too much focus on security, and too little on ‘the urgent and serious structural, economic and social problems’ afflicting developing nations like Timor-Leste. For Antonio Pubillones, a Specialist in International Cooperation from the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Relations, the ‘doctor replacement policy’ — embodied in the scholarships program — demonstrates a genuine desire to build capacity in the long term, rather than create a situation of enforced dependence on Cuba. While the health agreements clearly stand to benefit Cuba in terms of goodwill, Cuban cooperation officials are notably averse to the language of ‘state-building’, and stress that the health cooperation programs are technical agreements imposing no conditions, with wider health policy issues the sole preserve of host governments.

Despite one prominent attempt by the deceased rebel leader Alfredo Reinado to ‘redbait’ the former FRETILIN government on the issue in 2006, the Cuban health program remains as strongly supported by President Ramos-Horta and the new AMP government as it was by the former FRETILIN administration. And while there is considerable scepticism, and occasional hostility, from the US and Australian governments, they have ultimately been unable to mount substantive criticisms of Cuban health programs in the face of endemic doctor shortages in the region. Certainly, the charge the Cuba is ‘buying votes’ in the United Nations is easy to refute, as there has never been significant international support for the US blockade of Cuba and, with the sole exception of the Federated States of Micronesia (a ‘sovereign state in free association with the US’), none at all in the Asia-Pacific region.

Rather, the motivation for Cuban health programs appears to follow a more complex political and humanitarian logic: first, of internal legitimacy within the Cuban state socialist system, with its historical focus on universal health provision and internationalism as measures of good ‘socialist’ citizenship; and second, as a means of developing ‘south–south’ modes of development cooperation, and reinforcing the Non-Aligned Movement with practical development initiatives — all of which have broad implications for a ‘north– south’ balance of power which Cuba no doubt views as constructive. While it is true that the massive health program in Venezuela has reciprocal benefits for Cuba in the form of subsided oil, this ‘special program’ is an exception. In most cases, the costs of Cuban health and literacy cooperation programs are substantially borne by the Cuban government. Host countries are generally required to find accommodation for doctors, while the Cuban government pays doctors’ salaries and the scholarships for students studying in Cuba. While regional governments continue to face chronic doctor shortages and failing health systems, the number of Cuban health cooperation agreements is likely to expand throughout Melanesia and the Pacific in the near future.

* This paragraph was changed on 16/3/09. It has been corrected in line with the author’s original text. Arena Magazine apologises for the error, made during editing.

Michael Leach works at Swinburne University of Technology, and is a regular visitor to Timor-Leste.

We are just about at the end of the process which placed heavy requirements on building design, and as recently reported, small-scale operators of nursing homes have been closing their doors in droves, unable to meet government requirements and make any kind of profit in the operations they have typically run. In their place, brand spanking new operators have been picking up the slack, offering four star accommodation and efficiency and, the government hopes, excellence in risk management, which includes the management of publicity debacles, the original trigger for Bishop’s policy realignments.

Of course, taking on this problem of risk management opened the door to the Liberal and National parties’ traditional allies — entrepreneurs more than willing to move into new areas of profitability — and an emerging neo-liberal culture of ‘small-state’ solutions: privatisation, commercial exploitation of the service sector and of familial roles, and large-scale corporatisation, with some degree of exposure to world financial markets. Think of ABC Learning’s cutesy teddy bear and higgledy-piggledy ABC block branding (obfuscating?) that multinational conglomerate and you will find some parallels in the branding of some new aged care facilities.

It cannot be denied that in the early days of Bronwyn Bishop there was a class of shonky small-scale operator running substandard nursing homes catering to the poor and abandoned. But on that proper concern has grown not just a solution to a manifest problem, but a comprehensive structure of services oriented in a distinctive way. On the ground — beside the beds and in the sunrooms of nursing homes and hostels — against certain ‘instincts’ of caring (empathy, particularistic relationships and, dare one say, unconditional love) that many care staff and nurses might have, the counter-tendencies of efficiency, profit and risk management have insinuated themselves. Risk management alone conjures up, and indeed does refer to, the existence of a whole culture of caution and managerial intervention in what would otherwise be more spontaneously real relationships between elderly people and care staff who look after them.

Ten years ago some church-run facilities were busy introducing a then thought-to-be excellent model of care: small-scale — say, 36 beds — homelike and personalised circumstances in which regular (not overwhelmingly agency) staff were encouraged and were able, by virtue of the conditions, to give personal attention to people they considered meaningful individuals. Today, the 90-bed institution is the industry standard, as supported by government and prevalent across the sector, with constant mutterings that really only 140-bed institutions are profitable. In turn, to make sure that these large institutions still deliver something like homely care rather than merely efficient nursing, government must encourage large operators to mimic small-scale operations by ‘retrofitting’ homelike physical and psychological conditions, an add-on, which is all they can really be when the basic structure is technocratic and commodified.

In child care, Anne Manne has referred to a process of ‘McDonaldisation’ — US sociologist George Ritzer’s term for a process common across all the contemporary institutions, including education, where what you actually get is not much more than the empty sign of the thing you think you’re getting when the brand appeals to you. Quality, depth, good food, real care, an education: they are all sacrificed to the processes required to make a dollar, while your aspirations are actively managed against imagined lifestyle needs. The McDonaldisation thesis is the classic combination of the Marxist-inspired observation of commodification and the Weberian observation of forms of ‘bureaucracy’, or the science of managing processes to achieve efficiency: purposive rather than substantive rationality (a preoccupation with means rather than ends), although this comes with the bonus today of the magic wrought by the communications revolution and the receptivity of individuals to its messages — here, that care can be bought and that nothing is lost in the process.

The collapse of ABC Learning of course points to a somewhat different experience in terms of the transformation of care — largely a system of state-backed community care — into big business. Here there was no long-term plan and slow increment, but rather an in-yourface hand-over virtually of a whole sector to an entrepreneur without any background and, we might guess, no real interest in the thousands of small children placed in his ultimate care. He certainly had an interest in making money, as did the company’s board members, several of whom were ex-politicians, at various levels of government, of Liberal-National Party ilk. In the context of neo-liberalism’s rapid ascendancy under John Howard, any opposition was muted. Anyone pointing out that child care may not be conducive to full marketisation, or at all, was pretty much thought of as a crank or dinosaur.

It’s only now that an end-point has been reached that pro-state and/or ‘pro-care’ criticisms are being listened to, but even then not very avidly by government, it would seem. If the demise of ABC Learning has shown anything so far (just what set of solutions the government will ultimately put in place is yet to be announced) it is that the Rudd/Gillard government’s first reaction remains the privatisation of child care. Despite months of warning of trouble at ABC, and plenty of time in opposition to devise a preferred structure for child care provision better suited to the needs of children than Eddy Groves’ little red ego (remember the Ferrari), it waited for the collapse and then turned first to the private sector to buy up what of the empire remained financially viable. ‘Extreme capitalism’ may now be Rudd’s trademark critique of what has led to the financial collapse, but capitalism all the same is OK for children’s services, as it is increasingly in aged care. Under Rudd neoliberalism may have a kinder face, but there is certainly no basic revolution here in social thinking about the market or how people might otherwise organise their circumstances, or create new ones, to care for those they love.

Marketisation, and the turning of care into a technical problem to be solved at a system level, tends always to deny the social relational nature, and indeed the depth of the relation as it is carried in face-to-face and embodied relations, that comes into play in caring for another human being. We know that this embodied fullness is part of what makes the care of the very incapacitated an intolerable burden for many people. We know that this is both the joy and the burden of children! Everyone needs relief in circumstances they can’t manage personally; and it may also be of great benefit to the aged mother or the toddler to get a break from the pressure cooker situation of intense familial relations. The question is, what is the best arrangement for doing so, and can the market and its alliance with the science of management be depended upon for real care and concern for dependants?

It’s not that we haven’t had a mixed economy around various forms of care for centuries; and even the hideous penitentiaries of the 19th century — the archetype for modern institutions generally — went part way to marketising care, as do public hospitals and education systems when they employ and pay salaries to private individuals as a system’s labour force. But forms of state-based responsibility for care were not principally of or in a market; and at least in theory the chance for democratic intervention through political processes in the orientation of the institutions, together with mixed arrangements in a sphere that could be called civil society, were possible. In theory, these are checks against the market’s depredating tendencies toward treating people as things, and the attitude of risk management within managerial structures that tends to remove common sense caring from the repertoire of ‘professionals’.

In child care under the Whitlam government (the remnants of which remained when Howard came to power) local community groups and local governments formed cooperative arrangements for some forms of child care or tapped into age-old neighbourhood-type arrangements to employ local mothers and grandmothers in Family Day Care. The state played a key role in establishing the system, but it also tapped into a certain cultural vein at the time, which was about participation and local action and, overall, the idea that ‘small is beautiful’. Child care was not an entirely new arrangement — crèches and day centres had existed for a long time, but there were few, and in the context of women entering the workforce in larger numbers, especially middle-class women, mass child care came to require a broad-based approach to provision. From Balwyn to Sunshine in Melbourne, middle-class and working-class mothers and fathers together with other local women banded together, employed each other as well as trained staff, and in the main ran effective day care centres, with the support of informed community and local government workers with expertise in the area.

Part of the small is beautiful ethos was a reaction against all the modern institutions. In practice, ‘small is beautiful’ required hands-on involvement in the running of services, local political action and local investment, monetary and psychological, at the level of the neighbourhood. While nursing homes were run on a very different basis, with government partially funding nongovernment, often religious organisations, and small-scale private nursing homes operating locally, both the size of operations and their accessibility within communities were somewhat similar to that of child care. Close-to-home accessibility, embodied care and face-to-face recognition among a community of families using a facility were either explicit goals or a practical effect given the scale and type of care provided. Voluntary effort and communal identification were key aspects of this model.

This kind of model where parents are informed and practically concerned in the running of centres looking after their own children, or, for that matter, aged care facilities looking after one’s parents, must have benefits for everyone concerned — the child or elderly person, the mother/father/partner/son/daughter, and even the staff, who may more fully engage with the child or older person if the regimes of efficiency and risk management are allowed to dissipate in favour of an ethical shift that values the whole person. One wonders whether such participation and self-management would be as fully taken up today as it once, however briefly, was in the 1970s. Parents continue to be active on boards of management of some children’s services, including kindergartens and day care centres, but this is not the case in aged care, where commercialisation is extensive and where, even in the case of non-government services, the size and complexity of operations is at such a scale that it militates against non-professional involvement. Whether public participation in services would be welcome, and whether ordinary people would still wish to participate in the way they once did, is unclear.

The problem of the attitude of care being undervalued in modern western society is unlikely to have been solved by turning it into a source of profit making and object of managerial expertise. The question of how services see themselves as providers is crucial. If an overarching ethical attitude guides the care they provide, there may be something of a countervailing force against those depredating tendencies mentioned above. But even then, as in the case of non-profit organisations which have also been forced into large-scale service provision, the battle to remain true to one’s ideals is difficult. Perhaps this points to the proposition that a value or ideal is not sufficient in and of itself. In the face of the re-emergence of the large institution, we might better argue not merely for an ethic of care but see that any such ethic is socially constituted, and crucially underpinned by a realm of human-scale, face-toface and embodied relations.

Alison Caddick

* This piece of writing is dedicated to Lorraine Walters, who cared for my mother and many others beyond the requirements of efficiency, and whose presence added the intangible, but wholly tangible, element of love to the care provided in the modest nursing home she managed before her untimely death.

The Academy’s supporters made timid use of the freedom to imagine, propose and argue for ends. The minister’s announcement could have been taken as an opportunity to initiate public reflection on substantive questions about the meaning and situation of music and musical education and training today. The question of the need to supply an institution like the Academy with public funds would then have been asked within the context of an unfettered discussion about musical practices. Instead, a narrow patter of argument established itself to which every one of the quickly appearing newspaper editorials, op-ed pieces, letters to the editor, blog posts and letters to the minister conformed. This conformism was itself a sign that what was emerging was in the nature of a propaganda campaign.

Propaganda relates to the ideal of public argumentation as sophistry does to truth-seeking. The propagandist is not interested in the public good but in furthering an individual or group agenda. Her argument is aimed not at revealing truth but solely at securing support for a goal or an established institution, which is why it can be shown to be not so much false as chimerical. It not only lacks any interest in the truth, it also hinders its emergence. In other words, it functions as ideology, as part of the discursive support of which our bad world stands in perennial need.

It is not my contention that those who rallied to the ‘Save ANAM’ standard intended to further the work of ideology. On the contrary, I am sure that their interest in music stems from their sense of the truth that music potentially embodies. I expect that they would associate a defence of the Academy — even the propagandistic one which they might say was forced upon them by the state of the public sphere — with the public good. But it was a mistake to conceive of the task as a single battle on which everything turned, as if the minister had broken a peace on 22 October and all that was needed was to restore it so that everything could return to normal. In battle every advantage must be pressed, every weakness in one’s own side covered. The truth is different. Seeking to uncover the true situation of music today would mean criticising it where it has failed to be true, including in musical education, including at the Academy, whereas a dogmatic identification of music with truth, and the Academy with music, is no proof that the Academy is not already a part of the recruitment of music against truth. At present the campaign soldiers still hope to reverse the decision. But they will have won a pyrrhic victory if, while saving the Academy, they help to integrate music into the apparatus humanity is busy perfecting as the instrument of its own domination.

As such, this kind of collective self-identification is publicly inadmissible, since it would play into the hands of the very enemies it imagines for itself. But though it was suppressed from proper public discussion it can nevertheless be understood as motivating the arguments advanced against the decision. The motifs appeared in inverted form: the public campaign did not object to sport, but respectfully submitted that music be granted a role like that of sport, and be valued as highly; nor did it denounce the Philistines, but attempted instead to appropriate their Philistine logic and make it speak for music.

Almost no letter omitted a comparison between the Academy and the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS). The comparison was used to argue that just as esteem for sport and its virtues belong (it was supposed) to what it means to be Australian, so should esteem for music and excellence in musical performance be made a part of our national identity. We Australians should, it was urged, take pride in our musicians, our ‘artists and storytellers’, and therefore resist any decision that could result in or strengthen the tendency for them to seek training and employment overseas, thus weakening our orchestras. We should, Dean argued, and The Age repeated in its editorial, listen to the principal conductor of the prestigious Berlin Philharmonic when he praises the Academy as the ‘envy of anywhere in the world’. The implication everywhere being that objects of national pride and identity formation should also be objects of government largesse, like the enviably well-endowed AIS.

Indeed the argument — actually less an argument than an exhortation — can be explained as the equal and opposite reaction to the felt exclusion of music from Australian identity. The reason for rejecting it is that it acquiesces in an ideology of collective identity. Notwithstanding appeals to racial or linguistic homogeneity as a basis for collective identity, collective identities are not natural and tangible but artefactual and ideational. They are imagined, fought over — and then fought with. To define and then exclude or exile outsiders in the name of a collective identity, for example of what it means to be Australian, and to demand and glorify sacrifices in its name, is not to abuse that identity but to fulfil it. Where none are driven away and none are sacrificed the supposedly natural need to belong ceases to exist.

The object of the protestors’ envy, sport, is big business. That business has been able to consolidate the myth that what it means to be Australian includes a love of sport. Even if they did not intend it, by urging that a love of music be the subject of a similar myth, the protestors who spoke of national pride gave expression to the wish that music too (their particular kind of music) become big business or, in other words, a means to the accumulation of capital. Now governments, despite the rhetoric of ‘change’ that the bearers of the social democratic tradition employ, today agree in seeing their main task as ensuring the continued accumulation of capital — in the language of euphemism, which excuses itself with the supposed imperative to speak (down) to the popular understanding, but which is actually a barrier to real understanding, this becomes ‘managing the economy’. Music is already a means to the accumulation of capital, and even ‘classical music’ does its part. In what appears to be the judgement of the government, the Academy in its present form does not promote that end as well as it might if it were, say, incorporated into one of our universities, which are now a long way down the road to becoming capital accumulators. The government’s approach is not just Philistine; it amounts to what the Old Testament denounces as idolatry. It wants to organise the whole of social life around worship of what is a product of human hands, namely capital, whereas real dignity could be found only in the hands themselves and the persons, all of us, whose hands they are. But instead of criticising the logic of such politics the propaganda campaign assumed its ascendancy, and reinforced it by employing it.

In defence of the Academy, it was said that it prepares young musicians for professional careers; that it ‘feeds’ them (an unwittingly apt metaphor) into Australia’s most prestigious orchestras; that it does this well, judged by the number of Academy alumni leading woodwind sections across the country; that it has mitigated the tendency for young players to go overseas. These points amount to the claim that the Academy is an integral part of the system that produces cultural goods, and that to take it away would be to invest less or less well in that system and so reduce the aggregate marketable value of the goods produced. Such claims are to little avail against the determination of governments that have confidence in their own economic rationality. But the essential point is that by identifying the Academy’s right to exist with its value as a supplier of labour inputs into the production process, the propagandists abandoned all hope for music, which they profess to love. Music exists, they have effectively confirmed for us, not to be listened to but in order to realise its marketable value. With friends like that, music has no need of Philistines. Their propaganda made bad use of true facts. The fact that music hardly exists except as an appendage to the machinery ought not to be cited in justification of music and its institutions, but in order to denounce the world that prevents music resounding for its own sake, and thus for ours.

To be conscious of listening to classical music is to comport oneself towards music in a way that has only been conceivable since music started to be industrially exploited and organised to meet the needs of the self-reproduction of capital. Capital cannot accumulate through the agency of the cultural industries without doing things that change the uses to which music is put and create new ways of listening to it — even while it is insisted that people are just being given what they already want. The cultural industries divide the tastes of listeners the better to conquer them. It is the notion of taste that enables a purchaser in the cultural supermarket to believe that her purchase resonates harmoniously with her own inner being, even while this harmony is established in advance by selection mechanisms and the myriad industrially organised yet decentralised forms of promotion, of which advertising is the most obvious, and philosophies of aesthetics the most refined. To the classical music fan who luxuriates in its rare, transcendent qualities and its alleged immunity from commercialisation (which is so conducive to its commercial success), the term classical music suggests the natural inequality of tastes. But since it designates nothing but a market niche, it in fact implies precisely the equality of all tastes as such, and the qualitative indistinction of all music: different musics being so much fodder for different tastes, so much product to be shifted. To fail to question the term is to pass up the opportunity to remind everyone what, other than fodder for capital or fodder for tastes, music can be. Whatever that turned out to include, accounts of it would be the only real justifications for musical education; they would be the accounts of the human end against which the efficiency of an institution would have to be judged.

The prestige-value of classical music as a taste is promoted in order to sell classical music and to make it sell other things. The strategy counts on finding buyers who are willing to believe in the superiority of a taste in classical music. The defenders of the Academy feared the accusation that in defending classical music they were asserting its superiority over other musics, thus supporting the ideology of the natural superiority of the aristocrats of taste and, on that basis, the state’s continued subvention of their Saturday nights at the concert hall — a fear which drove them into the arms of utilitarian calculations in the currencies of capital and national identity. And yet this accusation could not have been truthfully made if they had explicitly criticised the term classical music, the ideologies that attach to it, and the cultural industries that give it its meaning, in order then to ask what a free music might mean to the human animals who so sorely need one.

It is true that such an accusation would most likely have been made nonetheless. The issues involved here are hard to write about, and presuppose careful reflection on the part of the reader. Not all readers take care. Anyone who shows readers the respect of attributing to them the faculty of reflection thereby makes themselves a target of ridicule, especially of that peddled by salaried anti-intellectuals. Propaganda very likely seemed necessary, the only thing likely to work. But to ‘work’ here means, at best, to force the reversal of the decision. Translated into Latin, the ‘Save ANAM’ campaign banner would have read: fiat ANAM, et pereat musica. Saving ANAM in that way would seem to benefit its staff and its present and future students in a very immediate and tangible way. But if that were the only benefit, then that would confirm any accusation that its defenders were pursuing narrow group interests. The Academy’s supporters, preoccupied with mirages, have yet to do more than hint at any other real public benefit. And then again, the immediate benefit is a mirage too. With the seal of approval of its staff and students, the Academy, once restored to the normalised state of emergency that reigned on 21 October, is to be the place where they become the foot-soldiers of the classical music industry.

Marc Hiatt sings in a Melbourne choir.