Page 3324 - Week 11 - Thursday, 11 November 2021
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
are doing that and to review it in a really open and transparent manner. And I am really glad that that is going to take place. I am really, really excited to see the detailed policies that will come out under this and I am pleased to hear that they will be co-designed with the arts sector.
There are some really big visions in here, and I am still having a chat to people about them. There is the vision for the expo and the city of design. I think these are really big, new ideas and I am still getting my head around how they will fit in with what we have and how they will take us forward. But this is certainly the biggest leap forward we have seen since the 2015 arts policy, which was well and truly outdated and definitely needed to be updated.
One of the things that worry me, though—and it is one of the things that always worry me—is that I am still concerned that we are not responding to some of the long-term trends that have happened to the artists. And that has been accelerated by COVID. I am still concerned that we are not looking after the jobs in the right way that we need to for that sector.
I am really, really glad that we are investing in our facilities. I think that is important. I am hoping that we have enough funding in here to fix up the ageing arts infrastructure that we have. We have a lot that has been in disrepair for a long time and we definitely need to repair and upgrade that. I think it is great that we are carving out new ideas and places.
But there has been a bit of a tendency in Canberra to have really nice arts facilities that the artists cannot afford to use; the community groups cannot afford to rent them; and, if it is a studio, maybe the artists cannot afford the fees. So I am hoping that we do not fall into that same trap again with the new facilities that we are building. Every time I look at this I cannot get past the fact that we have got an arts budget with 60 per cent going to the buildings. I am never quite sure of the balance of that.
We have got a lot of progressive governments that are looking at some of these long-term jobs for artists and funding for programs in a way that we perhaps have not done before. I think it is probably not new—I think it is probably the way we did policy 20 and 30 years ago—and it is part of the recognition that some things are worth paying for. We understand that we pay for health and education, and once upon a time in this country we understood that we would pay for art and culture too because it is a public good, and public goods need to be funded.
There is a recent initiative that I really like that was launched on the Gold Coast, called ArtKeeper. It is obviously inspired by some other things. They have got a fixed-term contract for artists. It is a jobs-for-artists program. It is quite a small jobs-for-artists program but it is a really good new direction. I would love to see us move in that direction more.
We do have some of that in this arts policy. We have got 10 creative residencies. I think that is excellent. That is part of that long-term certainty, and that is a small part of what we took to the election, which was 100 jobs for artists. But I think we need to make sure that we do not lose sight of the need—that, if we want a rich ecosystem,
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video