But in this fragmented world we need information, analysis and debate; and thankfully some good journalists still find their way through the system to write as they want. We need writers to read the books for us, to draw attention, to make connections — not to impose their opinion but to arouse our interest, to question our perceptions. And we need critics like Robert Hughes, John Ralston Saul, Robert Manne and Stephanie Dowrick to stir us and reassure us of our common humanity. The bestseller lists every week demonstrate that need. But we have come a long way from Matthew Arnold’s definition of criticism — if we ever believed it: ‘a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.’ We have even forgotten the proper meaning of ‘disinterested’. In this competitive world of resolution by confrontation, the only places where an argument can be played out passionately without an imperative to act upon the resolution are in books, plays and films.

We all know of the dangers inherent in too-narrow media ownership; but less has been said about the control over the imagination which is also imposed. Whole sections of our arts have allowed themselves to be appropriated by commercial interests, undermining their capacity to threaten the ideology of economics which is the measure today of achievement. The arts are by their nature impractical. In partnership with industry they can be put to practical use.

So, of what practical use are our arts and our artists? Can they help employment? Solve the Wik debate? Diminish greenhouse gases? Achieve industrial harmony? The answer is yes. Because they listen and observe. Because they make connections. Because they create fictions which reveal a truth. Because they challenge the accepted. Because they integrate the disparate. And lastly because they exercise the imagination. It takes imagination to forsee the consequences of our actions; it takes imagination to hear patiently the unwelcome facts, to see the other person’s point of view; it takes imagination to embrace the abstract; to conceive of alternative ways of thinking, ways of living, ways of believing; to mend the fragmentation of modern life; to reduce the complex to the simple; to know when to hold one’s peace; it takes imagination to engage in a disinterested debate. We are crying out for government to use their imagination.

At the top now we Australians are deeply divided: the country is in open revolt against the city; miners from conservationists; whites from Aborigines; Caucasians from Asians; the employed from the unemployed. Racism is a predictable response to our sense of powerlessness, our need to have someone outside ourselves to blame. People at the grass roots, however, know that reconciliation is essential to survival. Individual pastoral leases have made their own treaties; communities are forming action groups to address their own relationships; Aboriginal communities, in the past alienated from each other by tribal allegiances, are more and more united; and producing spokespeople of such magnanimity that our white leaders are simply outclassed. By the time the government succeeds in passing its ten-point Wik legislation — if it ever does — the many disparate communities of this great country will have already made their own reconciliations.

Which brings me back to my first point about the uses of imagination. You may think that you are a practical person; that the creative world of fiction has no impact on your life. But you would be wrong. The news you read or hear, and particularly the news you see on television, is edited, dramatised, made palatable; and its selection is determined not by public need but by the quality of visuals. An issue has no substance until it exists as an image. It is not ‘real’ until it has been dramatised — that is, imagined, become the product of someone else’s imagination. Language in the daily press is constantly manipulated, usually to appropriate power to the speaker or the writer. It is no coincidence that in the wash-up of union amalgamation the Australian Journalists’ Association was married to Actors’ Equity.

It is important that we understand when we are being manipulated. That we learn to be our own critics. If we cannot use the powers that language offers, then we are vulnerable to every kind of exploitation. This is where the imaginative, critical mind — as opposed to the ‘expert’ mind with its vested interest — can help us. Teach us to discriminate. Show us, for example, how many different meanings the word ‘ownership’ has in different hands; how to distinguish between ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’; between ‘service’ and ‘industry’; between ‘learning’ and ‘realising’; between ‘simplicity’ and ‘simplistic’; between ‘education’ and ‘training’. Regrettably, our declining education system, in which curiosity is being defined as ‘wastage’ of university resources and vocational training is replacing learning, is depriving us of the discriminating mind.

We talk a lot about pragmatism, which we call practical politics. We are exhorted to deal with the real world. But it is not the real world that is determining our opinions today — and probably never was, since the days of the troubadours. We need to know how to deduce, how to imagine, in order to interpret for ourselves. Scepticism is no more a protection than ideology.

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