Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is with great pleasure that I rise after my colleagues to speak on this report on the impact of inauthentic art and craft in the style of First Nations people today. This report has been worked over for a couple of years, actually, by a range of committee members, but I have had the honour of being there throughout the course of the inquiry. I really want to thank my Labor colleagues—in particular, the deputy chair, Warren Snowdon, the member for Lingiari; my colleague and friend Madeleine King, member for Brand, who just spoke before me; and, of course, the chair, the member for Gilmore, who, when she was available, played a very active role at that time.

It was a really remarkable inquiry in many ways. In order to understand some of the context, we perhaps need to acknowledge the very strong community based campaign that was run. It was perhaps initially kickstarted by the Indigenous Art Code and the Fake Art Harms Culture campaign. It was a very strong community based campaign. It really highlighted the essence of the need for the inquiry. I'd like to start with a quote from Ms Marjorie Williams from Tangentyere Artists in Alice Springs. She tried to convey to the committee, as did so many artists, what that lived experience of the impact of inauthentic art was like. I quote Ms Williams:

When I see fake art I get a really bad feeling. How can they steal our culture and our style, which we learned from our elders? After many years of practising, we paint our Dreaming of our country. The river runs through and every land has Dreaming. Each Dreaming belongs to the people of that land. It's what we are. Fake art is destroying our identity and what we are. We are First Nations people and our arts and story must be protected for only us to share with our kids and the wider world.

I hope that goes some way to conveying what we're really talking about here. The flooding of the market with inauthentic art is not just a nuisance for people; it's not just flooding our souvenir stores with inappropriate product. It actually has a profoundly hurtful impact for First Nations people. We need to keep that front and centre when we read this report and when we think about the recommendations that are put here. Hopefully, if that is kept front and centre, there will be really good responses from government as a result of this inquiry. But we can never lose sight of the profoundly hurtful effect on First Nations peoples and their cultures of the denigration of the imagery, which, of course, has great cultural significance for First Nations peoples. So this is not just an inquiry about inauthentic art; it actually goes to the very core issues of identity and culture.

I also highlight the very significant economic impact that this has had for First Nations communities. It is deeply regrettable that one of the issues we discovered in the course of this inquiry is that there isn't any robust or accurate data around the size of markets and what the economic loss to First Nations communities might be through the flooding of markets with inauthentic product. We as policymakers certainly need to address that. There is a very good recommendation in the report that goes some way to ensuring that there is appropriate data in the future that would be made available so that we've got much stronger guidance for how we might implement some of these recommendations.

When you consider that First Nations peoples are among the most economically disadvantaged peoples in Australia, their lives and their communities could be transformed by earning a very sustainable living from their own culture. Indigenous art centres across Australia, many of which gave terrific evidence to the inquiry, are very, very responsive to the need to maintain some cultural integrity but also address the economic needs of people in those communities. There is an excellent recommendation in the report that goes to recognising the art centres and the role they play in providing safe places for people to work in, in the marketing of art and in giving sound advice around measures to best protect intellectual property within the constrained environment of the existing laws. As I said, the art centres certainly gave a lot of terrific evidence. It was quite clear, throughout the course of the inquiry, that really much of the problem is not at the high-end fine arts market—which is predominantly governed by the art centres, notwithstanding a few independent artists in that market—but at the lower end souvenir range, where there has been cultural theft. I don't think we should sugar-coat in any way the fact that it is a source of cultural theft.

We also took some very disturbing evidence around what is colloquially known as carpet bagging, which has happened in that higher end of the market too. It is just obscene that in Australia in 2019 there are people perhaps working against their will or having their artwork stolen in a number of different ways. That is an issue that every government should take very, very seriously. As I said, we took some very disturbing evidence around that issue, and I certainly expect that there will be ongoing inquiries in that regard.

But I would like to support my colleague the member for Brand and her calls just a moment ago for us to take a really serious look at the adequacy or otherwise of the existing intellectual property rights in Australia. Terri Janke, an Indigenous woman who has worked in this legal space for decades now, has written extensively in this area. She gave us for consideration a very good proposal around a national Indigenous art and cultural authority. I think she was not alone in giving that evidence. I think it is very worthy for the parliament to look seriously at that. It shouldn't be as difficult a job as it may be to make our intellectual property laws accommodate different sorts of concepts of ownership. To be able to consider the concept of collective communal ownership should not be beyond our wit.

We know that other nations have struggled with these questions, and there is no reason that Australia should not in fact be leading the world in terms of strong commitments around protection of intellectual and property rights for First Nations peoples.

I do hope that government, whoever that might be, takes seriously the recommendations in this report. There are certainly a large number of Indigenous artist communities and organisations out there relying on us to do a better job. The Indigenous Art Code absolutely needs to be adequately funded in order to do the task that it has been set. It is not just a matter of funding, though. It is a matter of deep commitment from policymakers in this nation to change laws that do not adequately account for First Nations cultures and communities.

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