Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Macquarie and the government's special arts envoy for bringing on this motion. The creative economy—and I will talk about it in terms of economy first—makes up seven per cent of our total GDP. That means $1 of every $14 is generated in the culture and arts sector. It employs 2.7 per cent of our Australian population. That's 1.5 times the entire population of Tasmania. The arts supports our tourism industry—an industry only slightly less valuable to the Australian economy than agriculture. According to the figures from 2017, almost half of all tourists in Australia engaged with culture and the arts. Coming from the state of MONA, I can tell you that's absolutely true.

With that being said, the point of arts and culture isn't just to generate money. The arts entertains us, educates us and, most importantly, provides insight into who we are. Sometimes it makes us laugh; sometimes it makes us cry. At its best, it makes us ask the hard questions of ourselves. The arts provides us a shared Australian identity. It gives us national pride. Australia is the unique fusion of immigrants and of the oldest living continuous culture in the world. That's worth engaging with, and that's encapsulated in our arts sector.

It's for this reason I'm very proud to speak on the member for Macquarie's motion as a member of the Albanese Labor government. Our government is channelling $144.2 million into Australia's cultural sector, we've published Revive, and work is ongoing. $115.2 million is going towards the national arts training organisations. This sector group includes the Australian Ballet School, the Australian National Academy of Music and the Flying Fruit Fly Circus. Some of these organisations are the most prestigious not just in Australia but on the planet. They have trained directors, musicians, dancers and all manner of cultural roles. Thanks to the funding, they'll be doing it long into the future.

There's no easy way to say this, and I hope I don't bring the House down, but the fact is the coalition government—when it was around—tried to kill Bluey. The ABC is responsible for the majority of Australian children's programming, including Australia's favourite blue dog. But, under the former Liberal government, the ABC were subject to egregious cuts. The Albanese Labor government wants Australian children to watch programs that reflect them and their world. We want programs where kids can see people on TV that look and sound like them. To this end, we are providing $14.5 million to the Australian Children's Television Foundation. This ensures funding security for the ABC for the next five years and reinstates its indexation. We are cleaning up the mess of the former government in this area.

Last year, the Australian Labor government allocated $34 million to the National Film and Sound Archive. This year, we're adding on an extra $9.3 million. The member for Macquarie spoke beautifully about the importance of this archive. It covers everything from Australia's earliest films of the 1890s up to video games from the modern era, and it's not an easy task. Many of the films on file are nitrate based film, need to be kept in the cold and the dark and require very careful handling. The funding will go towards extending and improving their storage facilities. This means, as a nation, we can retain pieces of heritage like the first moving pictures of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, the first feature film and footage of our troops heading abroad in the First World War. We all remember the story before the last election of the National Gallery not even having enough money to keep leaks from the roof hitting the floor. It was just incredible. These repositories of the Australian story were just starved for funds under the former government.

The Australian government is also providing $5.2 million to support our orchestras in the territories. It is hard to believe that, over the 10 years of their government, the Liberals did not provide a single cent towards these orchestras. The magic of music and, particularly, classical music can just be such a driving force for change when kids hear classical music for the first time and hear it in their own communities. Almost half of all the music played by these orchestras is Australian in origin, with eight per cent by First Nations composers and 28 per cent by female composers. We've got a lot of work to do and a lot of mess to fix up, but we're well on the way to telling Australian stories, and that's what we do.

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