Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Werriwa for her kind words. It was fantastic to visit her electorate, as it was to visit your electorate, Deputy Speaker McKenzie, and engage with incredible artists and other people who care about this sector. Soon after the Albanese government came to office, the Minister for the Arts began the consultation with the arts community that would lead to the development of Australia's new national cultural policy. It was my privilege to be part of those consultations as the Special Envoy for the Arts to talk with artists and arts workers across the country about the opportunities that inspire them and the issues that challenge them.

Today it's my great pleasure to speak in support of the third piece of the series of legislation that responds to the needs they identified and implements the reforms that we promised. The Creative Australia Amendment (Implementation of Revive) Bill 2024 will create two new bodies within Creative Australia that will allow it to better support First Nations creativity and provide stronger strategic leadership to the literature sector. These are significant steps.

I listened to the shadow minister, the member for Bradfield, earlier in this debate characterise these changes as meaningless bureaucratic rearrangements that will expand the arts bureaucracy and do nothing to improve the conditions of Australian artists. This rhetoric is unfortunately typical of some of those opposite. It betrays a contempt for artists' expertise. The previous government much preferred captain's picks to arms-length arts funding, so naturally they're uncomfortable with reform that empowers the arts community. This is about putting artists and arts workers at the centre of decision-making, where they should be.

The Liberals made the same cynical baseless objections to Music Australia, which has been operating since August. Let's take a look at its record since then. In less than 12 months, Music Australia has launched a quarterly export development fund for artists with three categories of international support. The first recipients will be announced this week. They have supported an additional 60-plus projects worth around $1.8 million through arts projects grants. They have supported an additional 32 international engagement projects worth around three-quarters of a million dollars. They have committed half a million dollars towards the Contemporary Music Touring Program. They have announced four service delivery partners: the Push, the Association of Artist Managers, the Australian Independent Record Labels Association and the Live Music Office live and local program. They have introduced the Music Australia international conference contribution fund, which to date has supported 38 artist managers and 20 labels to attend international events.

They have produced valuable research on the music industry, including Soundcheck: insights into Australia's music festival sector. They have begun economic analysis of the Australian music industry that will report on the music industry's contribution to the Australian economy, the direct contribution of the music industry to employment and the value of Australian music exports. They have convened sector discussion sessions on a whole range of key topics. They have done all this with just four staff, so let's have no more of this nonsense about jobs for bureaucrats, and let's focus on what this legislation before us will do in the same way our previous legislation is already supporting the music sector.

I want to talk first about First Nations Arts. We believe it's essential that First Nations people themselves determine the funding priorities and design the programs that support their creative expression. Throughout its history, Creative Australia has always ensured First Nations representation on the assessment panels that allocate funding for First Nations arts projects. While there has always been a space for Indigenous self-determination within Creative Australia, this legislation will enshrine cultural authority to an even greater extent.

The legislation will create a new autonomous body within Creative Australia named First Nations Arts. It will be Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who will decide the agenda, design programs and determine funding priorities. This new body will significantly increase the Australian government's investment in First Nations culture. It has been allocated $35.5 million over four years to support the creation of new works, including major works of scale. This support will allow new stories to be told and a new generation of creatives to find their voice.

In our consultations, we heard that too many demands are made of too few artists and arts workers. Unfortunately, this has led to talented people burning out and leaving the sector altogether. We simply cannot afford to lose that talent. More effort must be directed to nurturing the careers of First Nations people in the arts. More resources must be devoted to providing sustainable career pathways. More consideration must be given to the specific needs of First Nations people in the cultural sector. First Nations arts will help build the capacity of creative individuals and organisations across the arts and culture sector and develop the skills of the cultural workforce. The new body will develop a creative workforce development strategy, which will help address these needs. The arts can be a powerful force for reconciliation. It opens up a space in which we can build deeper understandings of culture and more empathetic connections with each other. The arts inspires us to imagine an Australia more at peace with itself, but it is essential that this engagement happen in a respectful and culturally appropriate way.

In our consultations, we heard that far too often arts projects are undertaken in ways that breach cultural protocols, appropriate Indigenous culture and do not provide the kind of cultural safety that First Nations people should be able to expect. To address this issue, the new body will develop and promote best practice cultural protocols and provide cultural safety training across arts and cultural organisations. I want to acknowledge the many First Nations artists, arts workers and organisations who contributed to the formulation of the National Cultural Policy and who've engaged so constructively in shaping this new body. While this new board will be dedicated to supporting First Nations cultural expression, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture will also continue to be funded through existing programs within Creative Australia in all of the art forms it supports.

The second board being established through this bill is Writing Australia, a direct response to the patient, reasoned and persistent calls from the literature sector. For a decade, the sector has voiced its concern about a lack of policy leadership from government and about chronic underinvestment. These concerns came through clearly in our consultations. Writing Australia will provide the additional investment and a strategic leadership that the sector has been asking for. This support is greatly needed. Compared to other art forms, literature has been structurally underfunded for many years.

Writing Australia will deliver the funding that will allow authors, illustrators and publishers to create new works. It will promote Australian literature and expand markets for it at home and overseas. It will invest in organisations that support the sector, and it will deliver national industry initiatives to expand the industry. It will provide a common table for writers, publishers and other stakeholders to meet around to discuss the sector's common challenges and opportunities. Writing Australia will become a policy engine for the sector, building partnerships and expertise that will support both writers and audiences.

Australia has so much to gain from a thriving literature culture. Research has established clear wellbeing benefits from reading. Reading slows the heart rate. Twenty per cent of regular readers say that it reduces their stress, and 43 per cent say it improves their sleep. Regular reading deepens our empathy with others and enriches our understanding of the world around us. Nineteen per cent of readers say that reading reduces loneliness. By investing in writing and reading, we're investing in the vitality of our culture and the wellbeing of the Australian people, so the $19.3 million over four years to Writing Australia by the Albanese government is a really good investment.

Deputy Speaker, you may recall that, while he was arts minister, George Brandis spent $20,000 having a personal library and bespoke bookshelves installed in his office. Personally, what trouble me more than George Brandis's bookshelves are the countless shelves of great Australian books that were never written because of the cuts he made to arts funding in this country. Without any warning and without any justification, he raided $105 million from the Australia Council budget and directed that money to a slush fund to be spent according to his own preferences. In doing this, he broke the decades-long consensus that arts funding decisions must be made free from political interference. Worse than that, he attacked the livelihoods of some of the most talented and insightful creative Australians of our time. His cuts hit individual artists and small to medium organisations the hardest.

While Brandis quarantined the largest performing arts organisations from his cuts, no such protection was given to literature. More than any other art form, the literature sector is made up of individual practitioners, but individuals were forbidden from applying for support from his fund. These decisions created profound and unnecessary hardship in the literature community, but something that struck me throughout that period was the solidarity and resilience that the literature community demonstrated. This helped the sector through that storm.

I am continually impressed by how those within Australia's literature sector support each other, and I want to acknowledge the advocacy of the many individuals and organisations whose insights have informed the national cultural policy. They planted the seed of an idea that will soon emerge as Writing Australia. To organisations like the Australian Society of Authors, Books Create Australia, the Australian Publishers Association and the Australian Library and Information Association, thank you for everything that you have done to allow us to better understand the literature sector's needs and to bring us to this moment.

These reforms build on the legacy of previous Labor governments. We on this side of the parliament understand that it is not the place of government to dictate taste. It's the responsibility of government to create the conditions that will allow Australian creativity to flourish. Freedom of creative expression is a basic principle of democracy. It's a principle that the Labor Party has always fought for and always will fight for. It was the Whitlam government that created the literature board of the Australia Council for the Arts in 1973. The board was created to replace the Commonwealth Literary Fund, whose funds were allocated by political leaders, not by subject matter experts. Released of political interference, the board enabled the creation of some of Australia's most powerful and incisive literary works of the 20th century, and it provided more financial support to Australian writers than had ever been offered before. In its first two years, the literature board of the Australia Council for the Arts provided more literary fellowships than its predecessor had in the previous three decades.

Most writers don't seek fame or fortune. Most of the writers I talk to tell me that all they want is the time, space and freedom to create. Helen Garner once said:

Every page of writing is the result of a thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will.

It's true to say that writing is intensive, deeply personal and very often a solitary endeavour, but I hope that the writers of Australia feel that they are not entirely on their own and that they have a government firmly by their side and an audience that appreciates the contribution that they make to the vitality of our society. I hope that Australian writers can see, in the reforms that we're enacting and in the investments we're making, a vote of confidence in the work that they do. I say this with a sense of humility, because ultimately their work will outlast us all.

Last week I visited the State Library of New South Wales, and as I entered the foyer I saw these words inscribed into the stone above me:

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

These words reminded me that future generations will turn to the literature of our time to better understand who we were, what we valued and what moved us. Literature is a channel of communication between generations. For that reason, I'm proud to be part of a government that judges these investments worthy of being made and these reforms worthy of being enacted.

In our natural cultural policy we propose the most ambitious reform to Creative Australia in its five-decade history. This legislation will complete the transformation of the organisation that the policy prescribed. The legislation will ensure that our new investments will be made according to the literature community's own priorities and that decisions will be based on their expertise. The legislation will enshrine the principle of First Nations self-determination. I commend the bill to the House.

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