Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Arts) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In recent days, we've heard comments from the Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety and the Arts claiming that the government has been doing enough and—referring to the arts sector—claiming that the JobKeeper package is somehow comprehensive. Today anyone who looked at the papers would have seen an open letter from a series of leading musicians. A whole lot of the publicity has gone to names like Jimmy Barnes and Tina Arena, but it goes right through to artists like Thelma Plum and Alex Lahey, and they all say the same thing: for people who work gig to gig, event to event or festival to festival, whether they're the person holding the spotlight or the person in the spotlight, under this pandemic, their jobs have been shut down and they are ineligible for JobKeeper. They are workers and should be treated as such.

In the same way some 14,348 Australians have been part of the Great Australian Binge, where they put down the streaming material that they enjoy—the great Australian dramas. They have said, 'The government needs to act to support the arts and entertainment sector.' These individuals are workers. Today, on the official parliamentary webpage, we now have from Chloe Dallimore, the leader of Actors Equity, a petition calling on the government finally to act. They are workers and they need to be looked after.