Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

It's interesting hearing the complaint immediately. Now they're complaining: 'You didn't spend enough money.' In terms of that argument, you should check what the shadow said. One of the arguments that's been put, in terms of the reception of ReviveI'll go straight to it before I go to some of the detail—was it should have been more like the RISE program. If you know about the RISE program, this is the one that, when it decided which Australian stories it would fund, funded Guns N' Roses. It chose the Guns N' Roses tour so that people could sit there hearing Axl sing 'Sweet Child O' Mine' and think: 'There's an Australian story.' That was their approach.

What we have established now is a change to the traditional model of the Australia Council by establishing Creative Australia, bringing in creative partnerships—which previously, as a separate organisation, was separating philanthropy—but also bringing in a capacity for the organisation to deal with the commercial sector. Live Music Australia and contemporary music have forever been underfunded at a federal level. There has never been support, on the basis that it's a commercial sector that looks after itself. It is the same for writers and various areas of literature. But the people who work in those sectors are the same people who go in and out of the funded sectors. What those opposite don't seem to understand—some of them do; one of them doesn't—is that people working in the arts and entertainment industry are workers too and they have a right to fair remuneration. They also have a right to a safe workplace.

I'm particularly pleased that after the Me Too calls—particularly those leading to the Raising Their Voices report, which came out of some horrific stories from within the music industry—there'll now be a centre for arts and entertainment workplaces that'll able to have a bit of responsibility in saying: 'You deserve a safe workplace free from harassment and free from bullying,' because being an arts and entertainment worker is not being some sort of hobbyist. It's a real job, it's a $17 billion industry. The fact that they give us so much joy and the fact that they touch our hearts doesn't change the fact that they should have the respect of a livelihood and the respect of a safe workplace. With Revive, that now goes to the core of government policy.

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