They don’t call him ‘Can-Do’ Newman without reason. Yesterday afternoon, a mere ten days after his landslide win in the recent state election, Queensland Premier Campbell Newman announced that his department would scrap the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. The program, which had run for thirteen years from 1999 to 2011, would be discontinued in order to save $244,475 and sundry operational costs. The swiftness and severity of the move was stunning, but the substance of the decision is by no means surprising. Newman and the Liberal National Party ran on a platform of fiscal prudence, eliminating government waste, and easing cost-of-living pressures on ‘ordinary Queenslanders’. His campaign quite explicitly focused on the concerns of middle-class, white, heterosexual Queenslanders over and above ‘special interest groups’. In such a climate, swingeing cuts to arts programs are to be expected. But nobody expected Newman to make such a dramatic gesture as entirely eliminating one of Queensland’s highest-profile arts programs. In so doing, Queensland has now become the only Australian state without a Premier’s Literary Award or its equivalent.

The Premier’s Literary Award may have been first arts program on the chopping block in order to settle an old score. Last year, the then-LNP arts spokesperson Scott Emerson publicly questioned the merit of the awards after David Hicks’ memoir Guantanamo: My Journey was shortlisted for the non-fiction prize. Then-Premier Anna Bligh responded by vigorously defending the awards and suggesting that Emerson was “reducing himself to a book burner”. That the awards were instituted by Bligh’s political mentor, Peter Beattie, can’t have helped their standing within the LNP, either. The awards have been tainted by their association with Labor; for Newman to cut them now sends a strong message that future arts policy in Queensland will not respect old arrangements.