Denison and arts #4 Graeme Devlin from Rise Up Australia

 Graeme Devlin from Rise Up Australia Party has six daughters and has always had ballet, drama and music in the household. He sees art and culture as "lubrication for our society" and while Rise Up Australia support freedom of speech, he believes a line needs to be drawn somewhere and "art is art and smut is smut".
Listen to the full interview here.

Graeme notes that ‘arts and culture’ is a very wide spectrum that can even involve agriculture but  he presumes that it means the ways of living transmitted from generation to generation.
"The Australian culture is one we want to preserve. I like it and most of us live it happily. Over the years of course our culture has been modified a lot, some of our ethnic editions with people who have joined us. I see this as a lubrication of our society, it gives colour. Without it, it would be pretty black and white."The word comes to me; 'jackboots' but we don’t really want that. I personally don’t find it as a major item because we know that employment and things must come first, it gives us colour in our lives and makes us interesting people."

At the time of the interview, Rise Up Australia had not had any round table discussions regarding arts policy.

Graeme expounds freedom of speech. "Our leader has had ia time when he was taken before the racial vilification court in Victoria for exposing some of the words in the Koran.
"We want to see truth as truth and opinion as opinion and maintaining freedom of speech."While Rise Up would like to see freedom of speech, censorship is a different matter. They would like to avoid gratuitous violence and socially degenerating themes.
"Truth is truth, of course, but smut it smut.
"When I was young, you couldn’t imagine Spencer Tracey saying thle F word”

The Christian scriptures are the basic guideline for Rise Up Australia. "A lot of people may not like to hear that, I think our society has turned away from basic Christian principles. Henry Parkes, one of our founding fathers said that we were preeminately a Christian nation when they were founding  the nation and designing the constitution, but we have come a long way and we should start to turn back, it is time.

Graeme was not prepared for the question about community health and he finds arts and culture as a lubricant within society.
"Our plan is to provide good roots for the nation and everybody gets a fair go and business wi'l just spring up naturally, we won’t have to force jobs."
  While Graeme Is not familiar with Tasmanian authors, he is currently reading the constutuion to “find out what we’re on about.”

"Most of my reading is information reading, ifI have a problem I look up how to fix it. Arts in my life is not one of the prominent areas though I don’t disregard it. Being a slow reader I have to wisely choose what I read because it takes so much time, but as you can imagine I read the holy scriptures a fair bit.

The full interview can be heard here.