Victorian creatives, have your say

Have your say on the Creative State consultation by Monday 26 August

For those of you based in Victoria, the State Government wants your thoughts on what the arts mean to you and what they should do to support the state’s arts, cultural and creative sector.

Have your say on the Creative State consultation by next Monday 26 August 2024.

The short version

The quickest way to have your say is to fill out the survey on the Engage Victoria website. You can make a difference in less than five minutes by answering a series of multiple-choice questions, with one option to share more of your thoughts (in less than 500 characters).

The slightly longer version

You can also upload your own written submission as an individual or on behalf of an organisation or group (ideally responding to the principles, priority areas and prompt questions outlined in Victoria’s next Creative State strategy Discussion Paper).

You are welcome to copy and paste anything you find useful from my own draft response (below). 

Draft written submission

As an arts practitioner and consultant who now calls Naarm/Melbourne home, I welcome the opportunity to feed into the new Creative State consultation.

Culture is not an industry

Before I respond to the consultation’s discussion paper, I encourage you to reconsider its framing.

The emergence of the ‘creative industries’ rhetoric in the late 1990s was a tactical attempt to unlock ‘jobs and growth’ funding from neoliberal governments. Several decades later, we now have access to a significant body of research that shows how lumping together artistic, cultural and vaguely-defined ‘making’ organisations and practices has, in the main, been unsuccessful, unhelpful and even counter-productive.

Far from the ‘creative state’ these policies hoped to evoke, this period has been characterised by dwindling public funding, an increasingly competitive, precarious and punitive economic environment, falling remuneration and job security, and rising education costs (paid to a diminishing number of less-respected providers).

“Despite their gamble on the rhetoric of creative industries, art and culture and now more marginalised in public policy in any time since the 1980s,” Australian academic Justin O’Connor wrote in Culture is not an industry: reclaiming art and culture for the common good (Manchester University Press, 2024).

“As governments, advocacy groups, academics, and international agencies have been talking up the glamour of the creative industries, upstairs, in Dorian Grey’s attic, “actually existing” creative industries looked very different. Studies of creative labour have been around for nearly two decades, stressing low pay, lack of pensions or health insurance, no paid holidays, precarity, self-exploitation and, indeed, exploitation. All the while, we followed the cheerleaders who told us how great this work was and how we will, eventually, make it. The pandemic nearly stripped away the last illusions,” he wrote.

We are now in the midst of a nationwide workforce and wellbeing crisis that has deepened our sector’s prevailing monoculture and lack of cultural safety. This grim landscape is also characterised by exhaustion, burnout and a new sense of perspective that has left many unwilling to put up with the poor practices of the past.

“The flawed ‘creative industries’ model has failed to deliver anything but poverty for working artists and writers,” Australian author Jennifer Mills wrote for Pay the Writers. “Built-in precarity and low pay make working in the arts a form of sacrifice, creating impossible barriers for people without other sources of income or support. Artists and writers are forced to adopt a small business, fee-for-service model, negotiating every contract individually. We have no minimum wage, no access to superannuation or sick leave, and no capacity to bargain collectively. Exploitation is rife and underpayment is the norm. This has devastating consequences for access to culture as well as for culture itself.”

Rather than continue to reinforce problematic ‘creative industry’ policy language, a bolder Creative State Strategy could reinvent itself by re-centering art and culture as a vital public service and measure its impact and return on investment in more than economic terms.

Principles and considerations

I applaud the draft principles and considerations outlined in Victoria’s next Creative State strategy Discussion Paper, and encourage their expansion to ensure each of Creative State’s eventual priority areas are conceived and measured through the lens of:

• First Peoples First / Pathway to Treaty

• Creative workforce (previously articulated as ‘health and wellbeing’)

• Equity, representation and access (previously articulated as ‘for every Victorian’ and ‘whole of state’)

• Addressing the climate emergency (previously articulated as ‘environmental impact’)

In the lead-up to Australia’s new National Cultural Policy, Revive, cultural think-tank A New Approach reminded us that cultural policy processes must “draw from Indigenous ways of knowing and experiencing, acknowledging the need for closer links between arts and culture and other aspects of our lives.”

Creative Australia (still known as the Australia Council for the Arts at the time) further articulated the importance of self-determination in achieving this goal: “This needs to be done the ‘right way’: with self-determined, First Nations-led approaches that support artists, communities, organisations and sustainable practice and ensure that recognition, rights and revenues flow back to the creators of the works.”

Creative State’s continued commitment to First Nations-led practice presents an extraordinary opportunity to increase the visibility of First Nations culture and creators, learn from and embed First Nations ways of working, and begin to decolonise. To do so, it also needs to recognise that growing appetites and expectations around First Nations leadership means First Nations Elders, Board members, consultants and practitioners are being called on more often by more organisations (and are often either asked to share their time and wisdom for free).

As such, Creative State needs to reconsider inflexible governance and public funding models in order to pay First Nations and independent Board members, and support the creation of a centralised First Nations arts advisory resource and/or new funding to ensue this vital cultural labour doesn’t become something only well-resourced organisations are able to benefit from.

PRIORITY AREA 1: Sustainable creative careers

Victoria’s next Creative State strategy Discussion Paper acknowledges ‘the most important success factor in any industry is its people’ while listing sustainable creative careers as the fourth of its five discussion themes. While not necessarily an indication of priority, the depth of the crisis currently facing the state’s cultural workforce warrants top billing within this response.

Arts participation is often talked about as a human right, but less is said about the rights of the people making that art. Now more than ever, Creative State must directly address practitioners’ precarious and subsistence living conditions (which have worsened since the pandemic, even as we came to rely ever more heavily on their work).

Our ‘post’-pandemic workforce is far beyond burnout, with artists, arts workers, leaders and volunteer board members leaving the sector entirely (and not being replaced at anywhere near the same rate). Independent practitioners are finding it harder to make a living, including refusing and being refused work, and being censored, silenced and punished for making issues-based statements at previously unimaginable rates. Organisations, funders and donors are losing credibility and viability, with their fumbles and failures making mainstream news headlines and creating an increasingly unsafe and fearful culture that’s undermining the value and impact of all of our work.

Arts and culture have traditionally been ways we have brought people together and held space for new and challenging ideas, moved conversations forward, shifted paradigms, changed minds, and even saved lives. But with the people that make or engage in those processes more depleted, and the state of our sector more tenuous than many of us have ever known, Creative State will need to acknowledge the need for strategic and supported recovery, and include specific initiatives around how to hold and care for those who do the work of holding and caring for others.

This includes recognising artists and cultural workers as essential workers, with the same rights as those in other industries – be that through a minimum artist income scheme or other universal basic services, wage standards, job guarantees, fellowships, public employment opportunities, or other forms of income support.

“All public funding for arts and cultural projects should be contingent on fair pay for the people who make the work,” Mills suggests. “Alongside the current project-based model, arts funding should investigate and trial better ways of employing artists in more secure forms of work.”

We also need policy settings around creative education and training, protection of copyright and intellectual property (including new protections for digital creation and distribution), support for mobility and export, innovative business models, fit-for-purpose legislative, regulatory, tax and investment incentives, expanded collective bargaining rights, removal of tax on prizes and grants, and changes to superannuation and tax legislation to ensure artists receive superannuation on all their client income.

Without doing so, we risk homogenising the types of artists who can afford to work for so little return, and making creative practice something only the wealthy and privileged can afford.

PRIORITY AREA 2: Innovative and thriving creative organisations and businesses

Strong institutions require significant and stable investment. Unfortunately, overall investment in Australian arts and culture isn’t matching our growing population. By international standards, we rank in the bottom quarter of OECD countries (investing just 0.9% of GDP in arts and culture in 2019).

With almost everyone experiencing some level of brokenness or burnout at the moment, Victoria’s arts and cultural sector is being torn apart by austerity and precarity, poor governance, risk and crisis management practices, and even worse interpersonal behaviours.

All of which has raised awareness of and reduced tolerance for things we’ve always known. Including that, in the main, our organisations and sector are not accessible, equitable, representative or culturally safe (and are, in fact, becoming less so). And that these issues are systemic and deeply embedded, and reinforced by governance, business and funding models that rely on us to do too much with too little in ways that compromise people and outcomes.

Creative Victoria’s 2023 Creative Ventures funding program provided a case in point. Hugely oversubscribed (with a reported success rate of <0.05%), the program’s hefty application process required weeks of work from each of its 200+ hopeful applicants (of which only 11 were funded) – effectively immobilising the sector for two full months with excessive, unnecessary and mostly-unpaid labour before leaving organisations in financial suspense (and, in many cases, distress) for over six months of deliberations (more than doubling its original timeline).

To address such systemic issues, Creative State must not only significantly increase all forms of organisational funding from across State Government portfolios, but also commit to a complete overhaul of application processes and expectations.

Strategic programs that support organisations to radically reimagine their governance and duty of care are also necessary, as are terms of agreement for funded organisations and statutory authorities that require organisations to be led by the wisdom of the communities they service or represent (rather than allowing them to be unfairly influenced by wealthy donors or disproportionately loud interest groups).

PRIORITY AREA 3: A creative society for all Victorians

Victoria is home to incredibly diverse and creative communities, each with vibrant and valuable cultural practices and stories to tell. These communities, however, are not reflected within our arts and cultural monoculture – with Victoria’s cultural statutory authorities, public owned companies, and funded arts organisations not adequately mirroring the diversity of the communities and constituencies they serve and represent.

Existing initiatives to increase diversity still tend to approach this issue solely from an audience perspective, but current inequities will persist until we improve access and representation for all points of engagement – from audiences and participants, to artists and arts workers, leaders and members of our governing Boards.

The benefits of engagement in arts, culture and creativity are countless, well documented and cut across all State Government portfolio areas – as well as 97% of the Australian community (more than double the number of people who engage on a similar frequency with sport).

Creative State has the opportunity to recognise this significant contribution by implementing new mechanisms for genuine cross-government collaboration and by increasing investment to match its spending on sport or defence – with a particular focus on individual practitioners and small-to-medium organisations, which outperform larger organisations and statutory authorities in terms of innovation, representation and reach, broader representation of that state’s stories and cultural heritage, and better modelling of access and inclusion at all levels.

Creative State’s equity commitment is also an opportunity for the state to become a beacon of best practice and to use every tool at its disposal to actively redress the historical imbalance that has stopped underrepresented communities being able to participate in the state’s creative and cultural life.

This requires strategies and initiatives to address diversity, representation and universal access at all levels – from our staff and Boards, memberships, participants and artists, to the stories we tell and how we tell them.

PRIORITY AREA 4: Home grown, world class

Significant, increased investment in individual practitioners (Priority Area 1) and organisations (Priority Area 2) that represent and champion the state’s full diversity (Priority Area 3) will naturally lead to the creation of ambitious, high‑quality creative works and products.

Importantly, this equation cannot be reversed, with investment in shiny new infrastructure or projects that don’t sustain the people who make them essentially being set up to fail.

PRIORITY AREA 5: Creating in a changing world

We live in polycrisis times. In post Voice referendum “Australia”. In the midst of visible local and international legal and human rights abuses. In a decimated sector impacted by an ongoing pandemic, cost of living, climate and mental health crises, and more.

Put simply, there is too much to care about, too much of the time – which is why Creative State needs to be flexible enough to respond to issues as they arise, but robust enough to ensure the headlines of the day don’t distract from meaningful change on consistent, collective issues.

The opportunities and panic presented by increased digitisation and generative AI, for example, cannot overwhelm the digital inequality that was brought into sharp focus by COVID-19. Digital platforms may have made our work more accessible and affordable, but we still can’t assume users have the devices, bandwidth or knowledge to access them or that our teams have the skills and equipment they need to deliver our programs online.

More than two million Australians still aren’t online at all, and the ‘digital divide’ between those with the highest and lowest levels of income, education and employment is widening, not shrinking, over time. There’s a digital divide between organisations too, with those who already have digital infrastructure and expertise in place better equipped to address the emerging challenges presented by new technologies.

As such, Creative State needs to include support for organisations to explore the creative potential of new technologies (including through knowledge and resource sharing), as well as new copyright protections and digital literacy training to mitigate their more-damaging effects.

Similarly, with tolerance for ‘art-washing’ on a rapid decline, if Creative State genuinely hopes to centre First Nations culture, artistic integrity and freedom of expression alongside diversity, equity and the environment, it must also distance itself from ‘all funding is good funding’ rhetoric and not disadvantage organisations who approach fundraising from an ethical or environmental perspective.

With Victorian organisations leading poor practice in terms of censorship, cultural safety and conflicts of interest over the last year, Creative State also needs to reflect and protect Victoria’s diverse and changing population. Otherwise, no matter how many times we say “First Peoples First”. “inclusion good” or “racism bad” or tick another box on our Diversity Access and Inclusion Plans, we will continue to deepen existing deficits, not reduce them.

Hope this helps 😉

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