Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] Despite the hollow words coming from the government, the truth is that the arts and entertainment sector has been on its knees for years. With the coronavirus, artists, who were already in a difficult position, have seen their industry and their jobs made worse by this government's neglect and failure to look after those in our creative industries. I want to go through some of that failure and neglect, but let's first go through some of the systemic things that happened before the coronavirus.

First of all, we have seen cuts to the ABC—year in, year out, the federal government has reduced funding to the Australian national broadcaster. The federal government has systemically ripped funding away, which has meant jobs have been lost year after year, including at Southbank, in my electorate, where the ABC has one of its homes. We've also had cuts to the Australia Council. Year after year, the Australia Council is forced to try and fund more organisations with less funding, to try and produce more art with less funding and less support for the sector.

And if you want to look at how this government treats the arts: they, in all their wisdom, decided to remove and delete the arts as its own department. This government, under Scott Morrison, didn't even think the arts was worthy of its own department. Instead, they decided to hide it and bundled it in with the department of transport and infrastructure. The arts are not transport and infrastructure. The arts there are their own industry. They deserve their own department, and they deserve a priority they are not being given by this government.

In my electorate of Macnamara it is estimated that around one in 10 workers is working in the creative industries in some form. It is a remarkable achievement. It is one of the biggest industries locally. In Southbank we have the arts hub in Melbourne with some incredible theatres. We have the arts centre, the recital centre and the ABC—all the way through to St Kilda and everything in between. It is almost the home of the arts in Melbourne, and we couldn't be prouder. But all of these workers, the almost one in 10 in my electorate—from the major theatre companies, to our local independent and smaller theatre companies, to our musicians and visual artists—are being left behind by this government.

The previous speaker spoke about JobKeeper. The truth is that JobKeeper couldn't have been designed in a way that left out artists more. JobKeeper from this government has left out artists systematically. The very nature of the creative industries and creative work means that artists do project work, short-term project work, which means that most people aren't in the same employment for more than 12 months. Literally thousands and thousands of Australians have been left off JobKeeper by this government. The JobSeeker payment, which is heading back towards $40 a day, will be all that's left for many, many thousands of people in the arts sector because of this government's failure to keep their industry alive.

Despite having taken away the department of the arts, the Prime Minister, after basically announcing in March that the arts were going to be one of the hardest hit industries, took until July to announce a specific industry support package $250 million. For most of that—which is the concessional loans—the guidelines aren't even out yet. As for the RISE Fund, we know that the government is not going to spend a dollar until December. It's October. The pandemic has been going since the start of the year, and this government hasn't spent a dollar on the industry-specific payments for the arts. If you want to know what sector has been literally left behind at every single stage by this government—left off JobKeeper, deliberately designed in a way to leave off artists—it is the arts and entertainment sector. It is our artists.

I'll finish with this. I have a local filmmaker called Ben Steel, who made a brilliant film called Arts in Lockdown, and it captured the pain that artists are experiencing during lockdown. But the truth is that this government had been attacking the arts systematically since before the coronavirus, and this virus has only made things worse. We need a change of policy, and we need a change of government, for our artists.

See this speech in context