To celebrate Platform Papers’ tenth anniversary, writer and theatre director Wesley Enoch takes a forensic overview of where the performing arts are going in Australia, why they are no longer seen as integral to a healthy and confident society. He finds the arts community ridden with mistrust, and fearful of those who speak out. Australia, he concludes, is in great need of cultural leadership; of a fresh force to challenge thinking and gather confidence. ‘With the growth of government-led cultural leadership we have seen the voices of the mob, the dissenters and the opposition slowly becoming tamed and included in a sort of official culture’, he says. ‘Government champions the arts more these days than artists do.’ For a solution he looks to the elders of his Indigenous community, where debate is strong and loyalties deep. They are the custodians of our values and our history.