Submission to the Standing Committee on Australia's Creative

Submission to the Standing Committee on Australia’s Creative and Cultural Industries Parliament of Australia I write to contribute some core thinking in response to the above Inquiry. I have had a life in and around the arts, philanthropy and business, some highlights of which I include at the end of this submission. Across 50 years of professional involvement in the arts I have witnessed many government inquiries into the arts and cultural industries. Mostly their recommendations have been ignored. With a small number of notable exceptions from both sides, Australian politicians seem to have an inherent distrust of artists and creativity. They prefer to see business people on boards and in positions of authority in the arts as though this might somehow bring order into chaos. It does not and it should not. Creativity is not always orderly. The arts can be businesslike, but they are not like business. “A New Approach”, a program funded by several leading Australian foundations and working with the Australian Academy of Humanities, has tried to address this by creating an authoritative and impartial body to research the economic dimensions, employment numbers and social impact of Australia’s cultural and creative industries. The Commonwealth Government should have confidence in the numbers and economic impact arguments defined in the reports released to date by “A New Approach”. I do not intend to regurgitate these here, except to make the general point that they show a sector of Australian life and economy that is much larger and more important than is generally understood. Two luminous examples: • in any year, more people go through and experience an event or activity at Arts Centre Melbourne than the MCG. • The extraordinary impact of a cultural facility, MONA in Hobart, on the economy of Tasmania. The Bendigo Gallery in Central Victoria offers a 2 comparable but smaller example of significant economic impact in a regional area. When thinking about the creative and cultural industries, many Australian politicians have taken a very narrow view, thinking in organisational terms of “capital A” Arts and equating this with a narrow band of often elitist activities and interest. They do not accept the objective evidence of the widespread engagement with culture and the creative industries across all sectors of Australian society. They also frequently equate “artistic’ or creative people with erratic, chaotic and/or deviant behaviour. In fact, it is these creative minds in the arts and cultural industries, as in the sciences and medicine, that contribute so much to Australia’s spiritual and economic wellbeing. Innovation, the outcome of creativity, is the very lifeblood of the arts and science. There is, in fact, extraordinarily wide participation in the arts and creative industries across all levels of the Australia community. This has never been clearer than during the pandemic when people have been forced to return to core values such as reading, watching film and television, listening to music, creating inventive activities for children. Such activities are at the core of who we are. Those who work professionally in the creative industries – the writers, composers, designers, directors, and all kinds of performing, visual and digital artists - tell our stories and define the nation we are and the people we aspire to be. Those countries that treasure and support their artists generously – I think of France – have much stronger and more widely shared national narratives than Australia. Australians celebrate celebrity but not the power and reach of our culture. Why do conservative Australian governments shy away from formulating and promoting an ambitious cultural policy that addresses not just the needs of the cultural sector but, much more importantly, the limitless opportunities for the country and for every citizen? Is it the notion that there are no votes in such an approach? The hard evidence does not support this view. Is it thought that this is necessarily the province of the Left (noting that the last national cultural policy in Australia was Paul Keating’s pioneering Creative Nation in 1994, over 25 years ago)? 3 Australia needs, indeed Australians deserve, an ambitious and comprehensive national cultural policy to guide and enhance the kind of creative and dynamic society we should aspire to be. Among other things, a national cultural policy should: • Set short and long-term goals which are critical to the measurement of success (or otherwise); • Provide central recognition to Indigenous art and Indigenous stories which are something unique and special to this country. As one tiny example of this in practice, I would like to think that every student of the Australian Ballet School, would learn something of Australian Indigenous dance so that, in their subsequent careers as dancers, audiences could sense that they carried something especially Australian about their style, something that subtly differentiated them from, say, The Royal Ballet or the Kirov Ballet; • Prioritise Australian creativity through funding incentives for the telling of Australian stories through any medium – literature, film, television & digital delivery, music, theatre, dance etc. We are a relatively small population and it is not in our national interest to allow Australian culture to be swamped by the creative output of more populous and powerful countries. • Give artistic creativity, and especially music, much greater prominence in our primary and secondary education. We constantly read stories of the falling standards of Australian education compared to many other countries. So many Australian and international studies have proven the value of music education in producing improved educational outcomes in other subject areas and especially in maths, sciences and languages; • Celebrate the contribution of Australia’s culturally rich and diverse migrant communities. This vibrant diversity is an enormous resource and national strength. People can be passionate Australians while still loving 4 the culture and traditions of their country of origin – read Henry Handel Richardson or Martin Boyd and you will see the same pattern in English arrivals here in the 19th and early 20th Centuries; • Provide a framework for the relationship between, and the responsibilities of each of the three levels of government in Australia, giving greater clarity and certainty to all participants in the cultural and creative sectors; • Define the roles, objectives and scope of national cultural institutions, and their relationship to State counterparts. Greater sharing of resources and cultural product would enrich the cultural experience of all Australians wherever they live; • Give strong support to cultural programs in regional Australia. This is not only a matter of equity but also due recognition both of the extraordinary achievements of many artists and creative organisations across regional Australia, and also acknowledgement that the ‘degree of difficulty” in leading a creative life and building strong creative institutions is so much higher in regional and remote areas; • Aim to catch up with and, if possible, anticipate the fast-moving world of digital and other new technologies that are utterly changing the processes and products of creativity at mind boggling speeds (as they are across almost every field of endeavour from the mundane to the most sophisticated); • Seek to harness the extraordinary power of these new digital technologies in the delivery of creative practice across our nation and taking Australian creativity to the world. The pandemic has showed us all how quickly we can and must adapt to such changes which do not replace older forms but rather augment them; 5 • Reconcile and underwrite the ever-present and highly productive tensions between the cultivation of the highest excellence in creative endeavour and the necessity and benefits of wide community access and participation. It has always struck me as a national failing that Australians accept that these same tensions should exist and be generously supported in sport (I think of the expensive pursuit of Olympic medals and also of the kids at Auskick in the local park) whereas in cultural and creative pursuits, Australian governments often mouth both – the importance of excellence and of wide participation - but they do little to support either. Perhaps because it can be measured through winners – who won the game, who ran the fastest – excellence in sport is cheered and underwritten by the political class, whereas excellence in the arts is not highly valued. if an Australian writer wins the Booker Prize for Literature with a book that challenges the mind and stirs the heart, it thought to be elitist or that the judges were wrong. Politicians have been known to overrule the judges for a literary prize on purely ideological grounds. • Address grossly inadequate funding of the Australia Council. The Council is a critical part of the ecology of the cultural and creative industries that has been both underfunded and under siege over the last 20 years. I recognise that despite its high visibility, the Council is only one part of a much wider cultural sector. As an important federal agency, however, I believe that the Council should be based in Canberra. I cannot imagine the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts being based in New York rather than Washington DC just because, apart from the major national cultural facilities such as the Smithsonian, Washington is not a culture- rich city like New York. I recognise that this is an almost universally unpopular view across the Australian arts community, but I believe it would have diminished the political perception that the Councill was a remote and subversive force, and it might have prevented Senator Brandis’ “smash and grab” raid on the Council’s budget that did so much damage to the Government of the day and of course to the arts and artists the Council was established to serve. The Council’s “arm’s length” 6 funding principle does not always produce perfect outcomes, but it does provide integrity and transparency.

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