In ‘The Cultural Policy Debate Revisited’, Stuart Cunningham simplifies some of my views and misrepresents others. In presenting an earlier version of this paper at the Australian Cultural Studies Conference in Toowoomba last December, Cunningham adopted the postmodern procedure of replying to my reply before I had given it. He quotes me, for example, as saying that a preoccupation with policy could lead to ‘bureaucratically informed complacency’; but this statement comes from my abstract rather than the paper itself, which in the end developed somewhat differently because the conference organizers asked me to rework it as a reply to Cunningham. I do maintain that policy preoccupations, when they dominate the framework of political theory, can lead to complacency; but I do not hold that this is always and necessarily the outcome. It is not that action in bureaucracies is complacent in its own terms, but that bureaucracies form only some of the sites in which to struggle for social and political change. 

In my Toowoomba paper I discussed the contradictions, problems and (limited) achievements of policy involvement in and for Australian feminism, an example that complicates the versions of the bureaucracy presented by Cunningham and others. I referred to the work of Hester Eisenstein, Anna Yeatman and others, whose analyses of the Australian femocracy interest me partly because of my former existence as a (minor) femocrat. I am therefore surprised that Cunningham kindly directs me to some of this work in his paper. The crucial question here is whether femocrats (for example) are responsible to the government as employer, or to their ‘constituency’ in the women’s liberation movement; how do they negotiate the available possibilities and make new ones? But in this conflict the balance of power ultimately rests with government. Femocrats and other reformist bureaucrats are often limited, and sometimes blocked, by institutional organization and historical circumstance—by the politics of their particular situations. Some of these contradictions have been pointed out recently by Helen Meekosha and Jan Pettman (mainly in relation to the femocracy) and Tim Rowse (in relation to the Aboriginal bureaucracy).¹