When Labor won the 2022 election, many saw it as an opportunity to reset arts policy in Australia.
After declaring an end to "the nine-year political attack on the arts and entertainment sector", incoming Arts Minister Tony Burke announced the development of a new National Cultural Policy, developed in consultation with artists and organisations, with the intention to deliver it before the end of the year.
"Cultural policy is more than some funding announcements for the arts. When you get it right, it affects our health policy, our education policy, our environment policy, foreign affairs, trade, veterans' affairs, tourism," Burke said in a speech to the Arts Industry Council of Australia in 2021.
"A nation with a strong cultural policy is a nation where we know ourselves, know each other and invite the world to better know us."
Esther Anatolitis, honorary associate professor at RMIT School of Art and founder of arts consultancy Test Pattern, says without a national arts strategy, funding decisions are often made ad hoc or according to ministerial discretion.
"If we had that approach to, say, health policy – I'm going to fund that hospital because I like it, not the other one – it would be an absolute disaster.
"[We need] a cohesive, strategic, national approach to supporting the creative people and the organisations and industries that drive Australia's creativity."
Matthew Deaner, CEO of Screen Producers Australia (SPA), says the change of government "was a breath of fresh air" that initiated a long-overdue strategic conversation about the role of arts and culture in Australia.
Deaner says a national cultural strategy is necessary to give the creative industries direction, and protect them from the vagaries of the market and changing technology.
Industry bodies such as SPA, Live Performance Australia (LPA) and the Australian Society of Authors (ASA) are calling for regulatory reform to protect the local sector, and increased financial support for artists and creators in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to LPA, COVID-19 cost the live entertainment industry $1.4 billion in 2020, with ticket sales revenue falling by 70 per cent. Job losses in the arts and entertainment sector also peaked in the first three months of the pandemic, declining 40 per cent between February and May 2020, according to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
On ABC RN's The Stage Show, Burke voiced his support for the arts sector, but was noncommittal about the issue of funding, saying his "hands are tied" in terms of what he can say ahead of the federal budget in October.
So, what can we expect from Australia's new National Cultural Policy? And what can the minister deliver in a federal budget tipped to be full of cuts?
A recent history of arts policy in Australia
In 1994, the Keating government released Australia's first formal cultural policy, Creative Nation, which allocated an additional $250 million to the arts and entertainment sector.
According to researcher Rebecca Hawkings, the policy had a "profound" effect on the nation, redefining 'culture' and recasting arts policy in economic terms.
"Creative Nation changed the way Australians saw themselves, and their place in the world," she wrote in The Conversation in 2014.
In 2013, then-arts minister Simon Crean launched the Gillard government's updated cultural policy, Creative Australia.
When the Coalition won the election later that year, it scrapped the plan.
Since then, Australia has lacked a formalised national cultural policy, and government investment in the arts has stagnated.
In 2015, then-arts minister George Brandis presided over cuts to the Australia Council of $105 million over four years, leaving many arts organisations, including literary journal Meanjin and Melbourne's Centre for Contemporary Photography, without funding. (The Coalition government later reinstated 80 per cent of the funding cut).
In 2019, then-prime minister Scott Morrison announced a public sector restructure that saw the arts portfolio abolished and federal arts funding decisions moved under the newly created Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications.
In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, devastating the arts and entertainment industry, the federal government offered support to the sector through the $200 million Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) fund, which provided funding to 541 projects and created more than 213,000 jobs across the industry.
While the 2022-23 federal budget included an additional (final) allocation of $20 million for the RISE fund, it also reduced overall arts funding for 2025-26 by $244.7 million — a 25 per cent reduction from 2021-22.
Creative Australia 2.0
In June, Burke signalled his intention to develop a new policy using the five pillars of the Gillard government's Creative Australia policy as its basis.
The government's stated priorities include improved cooperation between levels of government and between government departments, a national insurance scheme for live events, and the reinstatement of arms-length funding.
The Arts Minister launched a national consultation tour in July, conducting town hall-style meetings and inviting online submissions from artists and arts organisations.
"Artists get sick and tired of not being consulted, so this is a real opportunity for artists to have their say about what's important," Nyoongar/Yamatji curator Clothilde Bullen from the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) and the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) told The Stage Show.
Many in the industry are hoping for a change of direction from the Albanese government.
"We need our National Cultural Policy to articulate a bold, ambitious vision with a strategic framework for investment in culture and creativity for the next 10 years," says Evelyn Richardson, chief executive of Live Performance Australia.
"What the industry needs right now is government action and investment to stabilise, rebuild our skills base and offset increased production costs which, post-COVID, are 30 to 70 per cent higher across the board."
Under successive Coalition governments, Esther Anatolitis says, we saw "an unpredictable, idiosyncratic approach to arts and cultural policy".
Some art forms did well, but others – such as literature – suffered.
In 2014, the Abbott government redirected funding from the Australia Council to form the Book Council of Australia, a body designed to promote Australian literature and encourage reading.
However, the Book Council never made it past the proposal stage and "that money was never given back," Anatolitis tells ABC Arts.
Literature funding via the Australia Council has declined 40 per cent in the last decade, making it "the most poorly funded … art form in Australia at a federal level," she says.
"The policy needs to redress the imbalance [between sectors]."
First Nations first
A founding principle of the new policy framework is "First Nations first" – the recognition of the crucial place Indigenous stories occupy in Australian arts and culture.
Burke says the primacy of Indigenous culture is widely recognised in the arts community.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander storytelling takes place across art forms, Bullen told The Stage Show: "We, as Aboriginal people, are used to looking at arts and culture in a holistic way."
However, the non-Indigenous art world has a history of "siloing artistic and cultural output". It's what the Western canon does, she says – "it de-contextualises".
As a result, multidisciplinary artists, including First Nations practitioners, have fallen through the gaps in arts policy, Bullen says – something she hopes a new, more holistic approach will address.
"Embedding First Nations voices at the heart of cultural policy shifts … the lens through which we view arts and culture — not as siloed mediums but as an all-encompassing cultural narrative."
The artist as worker
"Ten years ago, we got it wrong because we only talked about the artist as creator … We also need to talk about the artist as worker," says Burke.
During pandemic lockdowns, he says, "in many ways creators were not treated like they were workers. Too many people … thought we were talking about people doing a hobby; that workers weren't real workers; that businesses weren't real businesses".
Recasting the artist as a worker as well as creator in the context of a formal policy is "largely new work" that the government is undertaking, Burke says.
Fair remuneration is a priority issue for the Australian Society of Authors (ASA), which found in a recent survey that 81 per cent of respondents earn less than $15,000 a year from their creative practice.
In its submission, ASA calls for direct investment in authors in the form of a Commonwealth fellowship and grants program with a focus on culturally and geographically diverse writing, minimum wage guarantees, and the inclusion of digital formats in Australia's lending rights schemes, which currently don't pay authors when someone borrows their ebook from a library.
ASA also supports the introduction of a "living wage" pilot scheme modelled on the Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) scheme recently rolled out in Ireland.
While Labor hasn't publicly considered introducing universal basic income for artists, the Greens' arts policy includes a pilot program called The Artists Wage, which would pay 10,000 artists and arts workers $772.60 per week for one year.
"It would be great to see policy that really prizes and values artists and make sure that artists can work and be remunerated fairly and have that work recognised," says Anatolitis.
Seeing Australian stories on screen
Telling Australian stories in all their diversity is another cornerstone of Labor's proposed cultural policy.
"I'd love to think we could get to the point one day where we're a net exporter of culture and stories and all the different forms of works of art," Burke told ABC Hobart in July.
However, local film and television production has faltered in recent years due to regulatory changes and the impact of the pandemic.
In April 2020, the federal government suspended Australian content quotas on commercial free-to-air and subscription television in an "unprecedented" move that shocked the sector, says Matthew Deaner from Screen Producers Australia.
While the government reinstated some quotas, there is no requirement for networks to produce Australian children's programming.
As a result, production studios creating content for young people – such as Blue Rocket Productions, whose credits include local hits like Little J & Big Cuz and Keeko – suddenly found themselves without work.
Deaner says children's programming on commercial networks is increasingly dominated by international shows.
"The only commissioning entity that's making an ongoing commitment to children's content in any meaningful way is the ABC."
He wants to see content quotas reviewed across free-to-air and subscription television, and extended to streaming services.
SPA and the Greens are among those calling for streaming companies such as Netflix and Disney+ to invest 20 per cent of local revenue into creating Australian content.
Burke says the government will introduce streaming quotas, "but how we do that, at what level we do it, what sort of sub-quotas we have for children's and the like [remains undecided]".
Increased support for the screen industry's independent operators (aka small-to-medium enterprises, or SMEs) is another SPA priority.
Deaner says too much attention has been paid to landing large Hollywood productions in Australia at the expense of supporting local SMEs, particularly during the pandemic.
While a big-budget international film like Thor: Love and Thunder employs local people, "it doesn't provide sustenance for the whole ecology," he says.
Yes, the sector needs jobs – but sustainable jobs, Deaner says.
"When you have a strong SME culture in the creative industries, you've got the ability to offer stability in employment."
The bottom line
Amid an inflationary economic climate, Treasurer Jim Chalmers has already flagged that the October federal budget won't be a cash splash.
So far, Labor's major arts funding commitments extend to $80 million for a new First Nations museum in Alice Springs and the reinstatement of $83.7 million cut from the ABC.
While Burke says he "railed against the Brandis cuts," he has not offered any firm answers on funding.
Instead, the minister has framed the objective of his consultation tour as long-term policy design.
"Money is part of the story, but not the whole story," he says.
Some issues, such as the mounting problem of fake Indigenous art, workplace safety, and streaming quotas, require regulatory change rather than funding promises.
The idea that policy comes first has support from the industry.
"We're not looking for money," says Deaner, who wants to see the industry capitalise on investment opportunities created by the regulation of streaming services.
Anatolitis says she is "not expecting a budget in October to shower the arts – or any other sector – with lots of money, as wonderful as that would be".
She has been "heartened" by the government's assurance that the national cultural policy represents a long-term commitment rather than a set-and-forget conversation.
"The funding has to follow the policy … The important thing is getting the policy right," she says.
