Brandis's stated objection to the current regime is that it has been "limited almost exclusively to projects favoured by the Australia Council" (a self-evident tautology that has drawn much scorn). The new fund will be able to support a "wider range of arts companies and practitioners, while at the same time respecting the preferences and tastes of Australia's audiences". The council operates at arm's-length from government, through processes based on peer review. By implication, the minister is criticising the council's decisions for being too narrowly focused and for ignoring the popular mainstream. A spokesman for Brandis later explained that the new body would support projects across three priority areas: endowments to leverage private sector support for the arts; international touring that will build Australia's reputation as a cultural and artistic force; and "strategic" projects supporting a "wide range of arts activities, tours and performance" providing access to "high-quality arts and culture for metropolitan and regional audiences".

In further justification, Brandis pointed out that funding levels for major performing arts companies would be maintained and that the Australia Council would still receive the bulk of government arts funding. He also expressed satisfaction that the overall arts budget had been quarantined from further major cuts (though the council is still subject to a significant "efficiency dividend" of $7.23 million over four years). Indeed, Brandis's new national program could be viewed, cynically, as a way of helping to protect the arts budget from the government's razor gang. It offers a concession to Coalition hard-heads who want to see the hostile arts community cut down to size but it avoids surrendering all the savings to the budget bottom line.

Public reaction to the proposal ranged from tight-lipped acknowledgment, from Australia Council chairman Rupert Myer, through to outrage from many of the council's supporters and beneficiaries. While some heads of major performing companies, such as Opera Australia chief executive Craig Hassall, expressed relief that their funding had been maintained, most comment was highly critical.

A group of authors dubbing themselves "Australians for artistic freedom", including Thomas Keneally, Christos Tsiolkas, J. M. Coetzee, Robert Manne and many others, signed a petition urging Brandis to reverse his proposed cuts to the arts budget. The Australia Council, they said, had already shown itself open to diversity and support of regional initiatives, making an alternative funding agency unnecessary. In addition, the new National Program, by allowing some funding decisions to be made at the discretion of the minister of the day, amounted to a potential threat to freedom of artistic expression.

According to the familiar pattern of the culture wars, however, such a petition from the usual suspects will have little impact on Brandis. It will merely confirm to him he has hit the enemy where it hurts. Whether the new program will confirm the critics' worst fears remains to be seen. Much will depend on the funding guidelines and processes, which are yet to be announced. As a possible model, Brandis referred to the Anzac Arts and Culture Fund, which his department had administered as part of the government's Anzac centenary celebrations. That fund was under the control of a five-person board, including two former politicians (one Coalition, one Labor), a former Australian Defence Force chief and two department secretaries, who made recommendations to the minister. On this analogy, we can expect a hand-picked board that will represent supposedly neglected interests, such as popular writing and regional Australia, but without being too flagrantly partisan. Peter FitzSimons, perhaps, rather than David Flint. We should also look out for "lieutenant's picks", as the minister finds funds for a few pet projects.

Brandis is not finished with the Australia Council yet. A number of positions become vacant mid-year, which will give him an opportunity to try to put his own stamp on the council. As shadow minister, he was highly critical of Labor's appointments to the council, which he described as "a bitter disappointment" to those living outside Sydney and Melbourne. No doubt his recommended appointments will raise a few hackles.

Will Brandis's influence provoke a major sea change in the distribution of taxpayer-funded support for the arts? Or will the pattern of recipients remain much the same as it has been? In recent years, Coalition governments have had limited success in curbing the perceived political bias in well-established, publicly funded, cultural organisations. The Howard government, for example, went after the ABC, particularly news and current affairs, which it accused of left-leaning prejudice. The government stripped the ABC board of its staff representative and stacked the board with high-profile, right-wing, cultural warriors such as Janet Albrechtsen and Judith Sloan.

A decade on, ABC news and current affairs seem much as before. ABC journalists are careful to aim for formal "balance", giving equal time to all sides of an issue. But on the litmus-test issues of progressive politics, such as support for asylum seekers, climate change, indigenous rights and gay marriage, there can be little doubt where most of their sympathies lie. In confirmation of this tendency, the ABC's supporters continue to defend it as a necessary counterbalance to the right-wing bias in the Murdoch press and talkback radio. Conservative governments can starve the ABC by cutting its resources but they cannot shift its mindset.

The same applies to universities, where progressive values are firmly entrenched, at least in certain faculties, such as arts and social sciences (less so in business and engineering). Education Minister Christopher Pyne, another doughty cultural warrior, recently picked a fight with campus progressives through his provocative offer to the University of Western Australia to fund a centre with controversial Danish researcher Bjorn Lomborg as director. Lomborg's views (which were carefully analysed by Markus Mannheim and Andrew Podger in recent issues of the Informant) are sharply at odds with dominant academic thinking on both climate change and international aid. In the event, protests from the university's staff and students forced the vice-chancellor to withdraw his acceptance of the offer.

For a university to accept funds conditional on the appointment of a named individual is always problematic, given standard conventions of academic independence in hiring and firing. But this hurdle can be circumvented if the university chooses to do so. The main objection to Lomborg's centre (provocatively given the Orwellian title of "consensus centre") appears to have focused on his questionable views about how to deal with climate change (by coping with it rather than by preventing it). These views offend against the progressive orthodoxies policed by campus activists with the power to hold university administrators to ransom. Another university may yet rescue Lomborg's centre but the University of WA experience will serve as a warning.

In the meantime, government ministers can score a few propaganda points against the university. Like Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, they can reflect, with confected surprise and sadness, that universities are meant to be institutions of free inquiry. If they know their John Stuart Mill, that can repeat his insight that "living truth", if left unchallenged, turns into "dead dogma". More generally, they can feel less compunction about further squeezing university budgets. But they will not seriously dent the power of the progressive consensus in universities or the reluctance of university administrators to champion academic freedom ahead of political correctness.

One can sympathise with the frustration felt by conservative ministers. Throughout their political careers, they have been engaged in bitter battles with the progressive left over the latter's ascendancy in key, taxpayer-funded cultural institutions. When they find themselves in government and controlling the public purse, they naturally seek to correct this bias and to redirect these institutions into a more congenial stance. However, they make little significant headway against arm's-length governance structures dominated by independent professionals and peer review.

Certainly, Coalition governments can vent their resentment by cutting funds and upsetting their enemies. They can also register a few minor tactical successes, as Brandis is doing with the arts portfolio. But the larger strategy of transforming the progressive bias in publicly funded cultural institutions appears doomed.

Richard Mulgan is an emeritus professor with the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. richard.mulgan@anu.edu.au