Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I think we're done! I want to thank everybody from each side of the House and the crossbench who's contributed to the debate. In particular, I want to acknowledge the Prime Minister. Every post-war Labor leader has had cultural policy as part of the key legacies of their government in some way, but no Labor leader has brought it forward so early in a term as Prime Minister Albanese has done. That's because of his genuine commitment over his whole life to Australian storytellers and his resistance his whole life to the different attempts of culture wars to go after our storytellers, as we've seen too often.

I also want to pay tribute to the member for Macquarie, who is the Special Envoy for the Arts. A whole lot of the work with Revive was through a very intense and fast consultation process. To get an entire policy document like that together involved a lot of consultation and meetings. About half of those meetings were convened by me, but the member for Macquarie, as the arts envoy, very much took the lead in the other half. We would not have Revive without her work.

I want to also pay tribute to the many public servants. There have been different attempts in this debate by some to somehow denigrate 'bureaucrats'. It's a pretty noble term, 'public servant'—the concept of serving the public. And that's what those individuals did in making sure they met some time frames that were put forward by the government. They had every right to say, 'This is an impossible time frame,' because I said we'd get it done in six months; in fairness, it took seven. But we got there. What's happening now with this legislation will ricochet through communities around the whole of Australia. The evidence of that was seen in the different speeches given by people talking about the arts and the significance of it in their own electorates, including: members of the opposition, the members for Bradfield, Sturt, Casey, Nicholls and Lyne; members from the crossbench, including the member for Wentworth; and government members, the members for Macquarie, Lyons, Swan, Lalor, Werriwa and Wills.

Effectively what this legislation will do—presuming the Senate is kind enough to get through it in the same way we have—is give us a new organisation, Creative Australia, with the Brandis cuts returned and the funding that was meant to be there a decade ago finally possible again. We get a works-of-scale fund so that not only are they able to do the work for small and medium companies but they're able to start the investments that deliver the big works of the future. We get one organisation that brings the commercial, the government funded and the philanthropic funded together into the same body, instead of what it was for too long, which was that the Australia Council dealt with government funding, creative partnerships dealt with philanthropic funding and we just left the commercial world to look after itself—as though it wasn't the same workforce and as though it wasn't the same audience.

We then go one step further in the new organisation with Music Australia, acknowledging that, when most of us in this room were growing up, if you looked at the charts a good number were always Australian bands. There were a whole lot more venues back then. You'd listen to the radio and no matter what station you were on Australian music was absolutely part of the soundtrack to our lives. That, in so many ways, has slipped, and it's not because we don't have great artists. The artists now, if you go to a festival, are at least as good as and probably better than a whole lot of what we might have grown up with.

But we have the challenge now that the ways of making money that used to be there aren't there in the same way anymore. The number of venues isn't available, and opportunities for commercial success through album sales just don't happen in the same way they used to. So, we need a body that is able to make the fast decisions that need to be made to really enrich the contemporary music sector. We can no longer have a view that contemporary music isn't part of what federal government has to take an interest in. Now it'll be there, and with Music Australia it'll be right at the core.

But it's also the case, with Creative Workplaces being established, that we need to acknowledge the different institutions we have for safe workplaces with reasonable remuneration haven't been delivered for the creative sector. They're different sorts of workplaces. They're itinerant workplaces. The method of engagement is often not an employment relationship. But to think that the storytellers we rely on to tell often difficult and challenging stories have been experiencing that in the very workplaces where they're doing that storytelling needs to be dealt with, and Creative Workplaces will do just that.

I want to thank the many artists who, in difficult times, spoke up, in particular in what's known globally as the Me Too movement—coming forward and telling stories, sometimes knowing that in doing the telling they risked being ostracised and finding it harder to get work. But a whole lot of artists took that step. Had they not, we wouldn't have known about the need to establish Creative Workplaces. I want those artists who stuck their necks out in different ways—those arts workers and their union, MEAA, who said these stories needed to be told—to know that they have been heard by the government. And, in this legislation, we're taking specific action to make sure that those workplaces can be safe and fair.

I didn't know the Prime Minister was going to make the references to the Sydney Opera House, but I'll just conclude with this, because I think it brings so many threads together. Normally I stay in Canberra on a Thursday night and have dinner with some friends. Tonight I'm heading off, and I will be at that building. Tonight will bring together the best building in the world with projections of art—the art of none other than John Olsen is going to be projected there. And the performance work that'll be done tonight, which will be difficult and challenging, is from the artist Deena Lynch, who performs as Jaguar Jonze. She's a visual artist, she's a photographic artist, she's a performance artist and she's a contemporary musician. She was one of the artists who spoke out and put herself in jeopardy in different ways by doing that. But all of that comes together, tonight, with one of the artists who helped drive the cultural policy that we're now implementing, at a building which has housed our storytellers ever since it was built and is globally iconic, while this building is having projected onto it the work of one of our greatest visual artists.

I want those stories to keep coming. I want those new artists to keep breaking through. I want people, when they think of Australia, to think not just of the natural beauty but of the stories that are still being told—the new stories, the new creativity, and the stories that have lived on this earth and on this continent ever since the first sunrise. That's what's possible, and that's a decision that the parliament is taking in now implementing the key recommendation of Australia's cultural policy, Revive.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Message from the Governor-General recommending appropriation announced.

See this speech in context