Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm very glad to speak in support of the Australia Council Amendment (Creative Australia) Bill 2023. I welcome the timeliness, substance and responsiveness of the Minister for the Arts in his delivery of a new national cultural policy, which was well overdue. This bill is one of the first steps in the implementation of that policy. The policy is called Revive. It is appropriately titled, but it should be a matter of sober and even in some ways sad reflection that we have called it Revive, because it tells you something about where arts, culture and creative industries are at in this country. They are not in a good place. That's a terrible shame. It's a loss for all of us.

It was lovely hearing the member for Indi talk about all of the various art activities and organisations and arts workers in her community. I think we could all tell that story. In fact, I think it would be a good thing for people who represent the 151 electorates around the nation to spend some time actually trying to itemise and understand by category the different kinds of cultural and arts organisations—if they don't already know—because it is, unfortunately, still an under-regarded part of life in Australia. I think it is part of a kind of an anti-intellectual streak, which is perhaps the unfortunate consequence of having an egalitarian culture where we tend to lean into sport and other kinds of physical endeavours. There has been a bit of a tendency throughout time to think that arts and culture are perhaps not down to earth enough. They are seen as something you do as an added extra and you do as an indulgence and they are seen as something that people do as a matter of personal predilection. Rather, arts and culture are actually one of the most important things about being human and certainly one of the most important things about human communities in so many ways.

We rush too quickly to try to economically justify arts, culture and creative industries and their workers. That tells us something else about our tendencies. Unless we can find a way of saying that they have economic importance, we feel like we can't make a convincing argument as to why they are important more generally. That's stupid. I think most of us know that the most important things in our lives aren't the things that can be quantified or have economic value. You can take health as an example. It doesn't matter how many assets you have or how much money you have, if you don't have your health you have nothing.

Equally, if we didn't have all of the rich forms of cultural activities in our lives, what would we have? What would be the point of a material life, or a material life alone, if it weren't for music, dance, stories and of course these days film and gaming even? These are the things that really give life meaning and help us understand our past and look to our future. They connect us. They are intrinsic to our identity and help us shape the best form of our future selves. Arts, culture and creative industries are actually the most dynamic drivers of all of those things. Frankly, if someone on reflection doesn't recognise those as the most important things, I'd be very surprised.

As I said, this bill is the first instalment of a long project—the Revive project. It transfers the functions of Creative Partnerships Australia to the Australia Council, which will be known as Creative Australia in the future. It shifts $15.2 million in funding across from 2023-24 for three years, and then there will be $5 million in annual funding that's applied to the Creative Partnerships piece. That's indexed and is ongoing from 2026-27. But, as the minister has explained, it's the first step in trying to give arts and cultural workers and enterprises a fair go, and it's the first step in repairing a lot of damage that's happened in recent times.

That damage began before the pandemic. It's another thing that I think we have to be wary of—a sort of lazy thinking that looks at some of the circumstances we faced and says, 'Well, that was the pandemic.' Some people, perhaps those on the other side, will say, 'A trillion dollars worth of debt—that was the pandemic.' But the debt had doubled before the pandemic, and a third of it was added after that.

The same is true for what has happened to the arts and cultural sector. It really kicked off around the time of the awful 2014 budget. The then minister pulled $100 million out of the Australia Council, literally defunding 65 arts organisations overnight. It said, 'You've previously been a recipient of four-year funding under the Australia Council. That's gone. Goodbye and good night.' That was incredibly harmful. The defunding and the demonisation of two of our greatest cultural institutions, the ABC and SBS, had a terrible impact as well, particularly on screen producers, and I say that as someone who has a very strong screen production industry in my electorate of Fremantle. So that happened before the pandemic.

And then, during the pandemic, when we were controlling infection in the early days, the need to socially isolate and not gather together, and not being able to move around Australia to the same degree, had an impact that couldn't be avoided, because it was part of the health response. But there were things that could have been avoided. Some things could have been avoided if not for the ineptitude in the construction of JobKeeper. It should have been foreseen that there were people who worked in arts and cultural enterprises who were likely to be left out because of the way JobKeeper was set up, and that proved to be the case.

So you had this—I was going to say double whammy, but you could say it was a triple whammy. The first part is that, unfortunately, arts and cultural workers aren't properly paid in this country. There are plenty of people who you can say aren't properly paid. It's a failure of our economic system sometimes, and it's a failure of the market when you have people doing vital work on the front line in health care and aged care and areas like that who are not properly paid. It's no less of a tragedy that people who apply their heart and soul, all of their great skill and expertise, to the production of cultural artefacts are substantially underpaid. It has ever been thus in Australia, and we need to do something about it. That is the first whammy. The second whammy that followed was the COVID restrictions and the impacts of COVID which couldn't be avoided.

But then there was the response of government which left literally tens of thousands of arts and cultural workers out in the cold. That did completely unjustified harm to people and arts enterprises at the time. Some of that harm will be lasting because there are people—particularly, I would say, younger and mid-career artists—who were essentially forced to say, 'I'm going to give this up. I've got a gift'—a writer, a poet, a dancer, a playwright, a musician—'and I'm on the path of trying to make that work, which is hard enough. But now, in these circumstances, I have to give that up. I have to go and become something else in order to survive.' It'll take us some time to really measure that harm.

I think it's a terrible shame because, in many instances of crisis, it's arts and culture workers who are often the first to step up to be part of the response. I certainly reflected with some bitterness, when I saw how arts and cultural workers were being treated in the course of the pandemic, on what happened after the summer 2019 bushfires occurred on the east coast, which were awful—awful. One of the first things that happened in the early part of 2019 is that musicians in my community joined with the Fremantle Arts Centre, a great cultural organisation, and put on two concerts to raise money to send to the eastern states. In the end, I think it was about $100,000 that was raised over those two concerts. Musicians performed for free and the promoter made their contribution free of charge, and all those things were done simply to maximise the fundraising that could then be directed to people who'd suffered awfully through those bushfires. It was called From WA, With Love. It was amazing to be there. It felt like it was exactly what you'd expect to see from the Australian community at its best: coming together, doing something creative and celebratory—but also sombre and reflective, considering the circumstances—and raising funds and saying to another community in another part of Australia, 'We're with you; we feel and understand your pain, and we want to make a contribution to your wellbeing.'

Unfortunately, when COVID came along, the same didn't happen in reverse. It happened at a local level. I know of plenty of people who made an effort, to the extent that they could, the moment we were able to go to a gig again. In Western Australia, we were fortunate in our response in that we probably had longer periods of time where we weren't subjected to lockdowns, and the moment that it was possible to go out and support live arts and culture, the community did that. They did it not just to help out arts and cultural workers and enterprises at a time of need, but, as I said before, because the experience of the pandemic made us realise how important those parts of our lives are. So that's certainly something that I reflect on.

More broadly, when we talk about the importance of a future made in Australia, and when we say that we should make things here as a matter of self-sufficiency—and, I think, as a matter of pride in our productive capacity and in the things that are distinctively Australian—then, of course, making things in Australia has to include making stories, songs, dance performances, screen products, movies, drama, children's television and games and all those things. They should be made in Australia—and not just, as we might say in other areas, as a matter of self-sufficiency. Frankly, as to some things that we make—it could be a pencil, and it's great if we can make pencils in Australia, but I dare say we don't—does it really matter if someone else makes them better and cheaper than us? Probably not. Does it matter if we don't make songs and stories and dance performances, and TV drama and children's drama in Australia? Absolutely it does, because that is core to who we are. We cannot protect, enhance and evolve our identity, and we cannot understand ourselves and our past and shape our future, if we don't have strong arts and cultural production in every area.

So in addition to that, I could say: creativity is king—or queen; or I should say, it is gold. One thing that almost every piece of innovation and every meaningful kind of productivity will have to involve in the future is creativity. The people who are the best at what creativity involves as a human productive process are, of course, artists, and we don't use enough of that. We don't actually say to ourselves, in lots of areas of life, 'Let's get creative and let's involve the creatives.' We'd be better off if we did.

Needless to say, our arts and cultural and creative industries are critical to innovation. They are also critical to some other areas of economic life in Australia—particularly our two biggest service exports: education and tourism. All of the surveys show that, when students in other parts of the world are considering a study destination, one of the things they look for is the broader cultural experience that they're likely to have. So there's no doubt that, when we put our best foot forward artistically and culturally, we do a lot for our international education sector. The same goes for tourism. It's incredibly significant that we've managed to get to the point where we have two service exports in our top six export earners. Post COVID, they should become stronger again. You're not going to make international education or tourism stronger without having a strong arts and cultural sector.

We believe very strongly that Australia should be a place that makes things. As I said, we should make songs, stories, plays, screen drama, documentaries—all kinds of performance and all kinds of visual arts. It's essential to who we are, and it is among the best things that we get to experience. The people who produce it are among the most important people in our society. They're not valued enough; we should value them more. We've begun on that path with Revive, but there's a lot more to do, and I welcome this bill.

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