Page 4176 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 18 November 2015
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Employment
There were 6,456 persons employed in the arts and cultural sector in the ACT in 2011. This was equivalent to 3.1% of ACT employment.
At last, after many years of being urged to do this, we have a baseline from which to establish whether or not the arts are doing well in the ACT. Arts Nation: An Overview of Australian Arts, 2015 Edition from the Australia Council for the Arts tells a very different story. Now, remember, cultural activity, arts and culture adds 1.3 per cent to the total value added by industry. For the rest of Australia, cultural activity is estimated to make up around four per cent of Australia’s GDP. For the ACT it is 1.3 per cent; for the rest of Australia it is four per cent. We are lagging. If somebody can tell me that those figures refer to different things I am happy to take that and get more accurate figures. But from what I could find it would appear that we are running at about a third of what one would expect from the rest of the Australian economy. Under “Economic contribution” it says:
Australia’s copyright industries have arts and cultural activity at their core.
On page 2 of the government’s economic overview of the arts it lists the hierarchy of creative industries, which of course are the artistic and cultural activities. They are all listed there, and that is a good thing. According to the Australia Council, they generate over $93 billion in economic activity. They extended it beyond the arts to arts and culture and it is $93 billion, or 6.6 per cent of GDP, remembering that in the ACT it is 1.3 per cent. They say that in Australia the arts and culture sector is 6.6 per cent of GDP. At that rate we are running at about 20 per cent of the contribution that the rest of the economy gets. They go on to say that it employs eight per cent of the nation’s workforce. Arts Nation from the arts council says that arts and cultural industries employ eight per cent of the workforce. In the ACT, it is 3.1 per cent—so three-eighths of what would have been expected. It goes on to say:
In addition to the core areas of arts activity, the cultural ecosystem includes film, television, radio, print media, design, museums, libraries, archives and environmental and other cultural heritage.
Again, that is contained in the diagram on page 2 of the overview of the arts in the ACT. It goes on to say:
The cultural sector contributes 4.0 percent of Australia’s GDP, similar to levels in the United States, Canada and Spain.
So we have got this comparison where we clearly lag because we do not aspire to anything beyond arts funding in the arts framework. That is the reality. How do we know that? Because I asked the minister and the head of the arts at a hearing and they could not tell me what the 2012 arts framework had delivered for the ACT. All they could say was—and I refer members to Hansard—“No, we cannot table a formal development of a policy. We can table implementations of directions that are set out within the framework.” Not one single policy came from the arts framework. Indeed, when the truth came out it was apparent that all that had changed was the way they funded the arts. The arts policy framework principally is the driver of our arts funding.
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