Page 4188 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 18 November 2015
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You must have missed this, Mr Rattenbury, so I will say it again: according to the Australia Council for the Arts, copyright industries that have arts and cultural activity at their core employ eight per cent of the nation’s workforce. And it is not just in Australia. The cultural sector contributes four per cent of Australia’s GDP, similar to levels in the United States, Canada and Spain. In the city that is home to the Australian story, that has Australia’s cultural collecting institutions, that has some great authors, artists and dancers—Canberra leads the country in contemporary dance and contemporary glass blowing, which is why, when we were last in government we funded and started the work on the glassworks, because we know how important it is—why are we at a third of the national average? And why, in the framework—the old one, 2012, and the new one, 2015—is there no plan to deliver an increase in the number of people working, their output and their value to our economy?
Mr Rattenbury, you might then get better funding for arts workers. But there is no drive here. That is why we have kept it simple. That is why we have said, “Yes, minister, we want a list, because you’re not very good at delivering. You didn’t deliver in the 2012-15 framework, and we’ve got no confidence that you can deliver in the future.”
I will say it again; I will keep it simple. If you repeat it, somebody might hear it. The 2012 document states:
The Framework provides a structure within which arts policy and the goals and outcomes associated with policy will be developed …
It never happened. The minister cannot recite them. She could not give them to the estimates or the annual reports committees, and it never happened. In the new document it says the same thing. It says:
Sitting alongside these strategic documents will be a number of operational plans which are to be developed by artsACT on issues such as: research and data; cultural infrastructure; communications; community arts and cultural development; and funding.
That is why we are asking for a list. It is an aide-memoire for the minister, who has been deficient in delivering in the past, and I suspect will be deficient in the future. You would have thought that, six months on from the delivery of this, the minister could come back here and say to us, “We have been able to deliver this.” But six months on, there is nothing. That, Mr Rattenbury, and that, members, is why we are moving this motion today. The motion is simple. It says, “Develop a consultation schedule with all arts communities in the ACT.” If there is a bit more consultation on the plan, some of these plans might be developed. It says, “Develop a consolidated list of actionable initiatives in support of her policy, with accompanying budgets, performance targets and time frames,” and that it should be given to us in February.
You would have thought, Madam Deputy Speaker, that eight months after you had delivered the framework, you might be able to tell us what you are going to do, when you are going to do it, how much it will cost and what we get from it. It is very simple. We will not be supporting the amendment because, yet again, Mr Rattenbury is working with the Labor government to let the minister off the hook. This is too
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