Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

COVID-19 and its impacts have caused many in our communities to contemplate what we as Australians value, how we describe a good life, a contributing life and a strong community. Australia is now entering what may be the worst recession since the Great Depression. Hundreds of jobs have disappeared, particularly for women and young people. The health danger has far from passed and the effects of the pandemic are going to be felt for years to come. These ongoing crises present profound challenges to governments at a time when inaction over many years on many of our vast challenges facing the nation had already eroded public trust.

Australia's future is going to be written by those who step up now to shape it. We have an opportunity to reconsider the way we measure the economy, the way we look at environment and social wellbeing, and talk about the role of culture in this. After major crises, Australia has been able to craft new national stories that reflect both the opportunities and the challenges of the era. We can do so again but we need policy leadership. We need the capacity to powerfully articulate what Australians might become and we need the imagination, the courage and the hard work to define new ideas to make it happen.

On 14 August in The Age, Andrew Stevens wrote an informative piece called 'What the world needs now is art.' Stevens wrote:

The executive director of the National Association for the Visual Arts, Esther Anatolitis, says artists and the creative industries are crucial to culture, the economy and social connectedness, and to envisioning and planning for the future. After all, artists, along with scientists, are the visionaries who offer us road-maps, practically and emotionally, to how things are likely to pan out.

Anatolitis says the ability to envision a complex set of possibilities is the basis of good government. "And it is of course the fundamental skill of the artist and anyone with a humanities degree who has been taught how to critically analyse risk and ethical implications, how to think outside the box. That is exactly what we need right now and into the future."

Anatolitis says she worries when she hears statements about "quiet Australians", a phrase regularly used by Prime Minister Scott Morrison …

because she wants to look to our government and hear a group of people who find Australians inspiring. She says, 'I want a nation of confident Australians, innovative Australians, ethical Australians.' So do I and so do my constituents in the electorate of Dunkley.

Yet in June this year the federal education minister foreshadowed a doubling of fees for humanities degrees. This was in the same week that the National Gallery of Australia announced it would slash future acquisitions from about 3,000 to about 100 annually and lose about one-tenth of its staff. We've seen arts organisations and galleries everywhere contemplating closure and we've seen artists and people working in cultural industries without work and without income. The government's idea of a package of support for the Australian arts is to bring American films to Australia to be filmed and to not have a department for the arts.

Compare that to the great Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating. In 1994 he established Creative Nation. It was the first Australian federal government to formally develop a cultural policy emphasising national identity and our broad culture. It also understood the economic potential of cultural activity and arts. Culture adds value. It makes an essential contribution to innovation, marketing and design. It's a badge of our industry. The level of creative activity substantially determines our ability to adapt to new economic imperatives. It is essential to our economic success. Paul Keating knew that in 1994, the federal Labor Party know that now and I know that now, but the government doesn't appear to know that now.

The story of who we are as a nation—the story of the faces, the voices, the experiences and the broad spectrum of Australians and Australian lives—cannot be told without a vibrant and diverse Australian culture and artistic sector. The wellbeing of our communities and the people in them can't be measured simply by the rise and fall of our GDP.

We're doing this in Dunkley. The McClelland sculpture gallery has an online initiative called Inspired Minds. It's an art and wellbeing series to explore how art and nature can foster positive mental health and wellbeing. It's in a unique bush setting. The series involves meditative aerial videos and an exploration of some of the amazing sculptures there. As the director at McClelland, Lisa Byrne, said, 'We believe that the combination of art, environment and meditation can provide positive relief and inspiration for our community.' The 2019 World Health Organization summary report demonstrated strong evidence for the role of arts in improving health and wellbeing. We want to inspire. That's what we're doing in Dunkley. That's what we need the federal government to do.