Rowan Holzberger (Forde, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in support of the Public and Educational Lending Rights (Better Income for Authors) Bill 2026 and the associated bill. In doing so, I recognise the work the minister—the Leader of the House and the Minister for the Arts—has done. I appreciate talking to people within the arts community about how involved he is; it's part of his down-to-earth personality, and that means he really fits in with that work for that community. The work these bills do sits in the broader context of the work that the minister and the government are doing. I also pay credit to the caucus committee, which has pushed for this. It is a modest but meaningful part of the government's broader arts strategy—a strategy which is not only to the material benefit of our community but also to our cultural and spiritual benefit.

I think those that have listened to one of my speeches before know quite well that I like to claim many careers, having been a station hand, having worked in servos, having worked in Goat Works, having run a construction company. I claim to have done many things, but being an artist is not one of them; I think anyone in history who reads my speeches in this place will see that that statement is well and truly underlined! To me, a true artist is not somebody who is made but somebody who is discovered. I'm reminded of when I took my now-adult child to an art gallery in Tamborine Mountain, in the hills of the Gold Coast, when he was five years old, and the art gallery owner came up to him and said, 'Do you want to be an artist when you grow up?' He said, 'I am an artist.' I thought, 'Well, only a proper artist would say something like that.' We've got a responsibility as a community to create the space for people to create and be that person they are passionate to be, and art is one of those highest expressions.

While I might have considered myself a bit of a Philistine in my earlier life, funnily enough it was in construction that I discovered the true beauty of art, of architecture. Something was pointed out to me which I hadn't realised before: in this room around us, everything we see started off as a drawing. Something starts off as an idea in somebody's head, somehow gets converted to paper and somehow then gets passed on to somebody else, who is able to make it into form. Construction is quite an amazing thing, and it is very much where art meets science. For those that have been involved in construction and have looked at those modern drawings on CAD—computer assisted design—as much as they are an expression of human thinking, they have a certain sterility. They are sterile compared to those hand-drawn architectural sketches. When you look at some of those hand-drawn sketches, there's always a slight imperfection. It is within that imperfection that you can see the humanity of the person who has drawn it. That, I guess, did make me appreciate art a little bit more than I thought I had in the past.

But, of course, preparing for this speech today gave me a chance to reflect on my own past. Art comes in many forms. I remember being a young kid, a young teenager, in Broken Hill who was part of the Broken Hill Repertory Society, where I took part in greats such as Hello, Dolly! and Fiddler on the Roof. I also remember, as a 14-year-old, taking part in a one-act play festival. This is in a mining town in outback New South Wales. These kids had come from Mildura, Cobar and all around the countryside. That experience has really lasted with me. Those memories that I had were so incredibly fond that it's stuck with me forever.

It gave me an opportunity, now that I'm the representing the electorate of Forde, to have the honour of being the patron of the Beenleigh Theatre Group, a local repertory group which puts on fantastic performances. One I went to last year was The Lightning Thief, the Percy Jackson musical. It was my experience as a 14-year-old of the Broken Hill Repertory Society—I saw these kids coming together. They'd come from as far away as Tweed Heads, about an hour's drive from the far northern suburbs of Brisbane. These kids had come together over the school holidays, and they had welded themselves together as a team through rehearsals. I was privileged to be there on that last day that they performed. When they came out and took their final bow, the tears in their eyes were something that I could feel and I could place myself in. The relationships that they had formed and the lessons that they had learned are something that is unique to the arts. I think that really goes to show why cultivating that and giving people the space to do that is so important.

In fact, I said in my first speech that, in many ways, artistic expression is one of the most pure forms of humanity. Indeed it is what defines Homosapiens. If you go back to some of those earliest cave paintings, they are really the difference between us and the rest of the animal kingdom. It's this ability to express our thoughts in the physical world. It is what makes us human. So it is incumbent on us, as governments and societies, to give people that space.

I'm very much an optimist. While I said that in my first speech that in many ways I'm a huge believer that technology is going to create that material wealth to give us the time to really pursue our passions, I think that in many ways we're living in the Dark Ages and that people in the future will look back on us as we look back on the Romans and go, 'Jeez, they were really clever to get by with what they had, but I wouldn't like to live then.' I think that, when we've got that room to really follow our passions and follow our pursuits, that is really the highest form of being a human being.

In many ways it is us living in this world today where none of us have time. We're all flat out—not just in this place, of course, but trying to raise a kid, trying to look after a sick parent. It really means that you just don't have the time to follow your passion. That's why I think artists and authors have an income of around whatever it is—$16,000 or $17,000 a year; it's somewhere around there—because the money is actually not the important thing. It's being able to express yourself.

To bring it back to where we are and where this policy sits, it sits well and truly within the Labor Party's history of advancing Australia that the Whitlam government very much represented. It's a rejection of the cultural cringe, where we looked to the old country for our cultural leadership. The election of the Whitlam government very much marked that clear line. And so it was that the policy which we are effectively adapting today was first established as the Public Lending Right in 1974 by the Whitlam government. It's when the Whitlam government established the Australia Council. Indeed, Creative Nation was launched by prime minister Paul Keating and arts minister Michael Lee, followed by Creative Australia as the product of prime minister Gillard and arts minister Simon Crean. Here we are again, fixing, as Paul Keating called it, the 'Rip Van Winkle years' of coalition government, where nothing was done, where the forelock was tugged to the mother country. Here it is again: a reforming Labor government committed to the arts, committed to the expression of the Australian people, is taking steps to give people that space, that income, that ability to express themselves artistically.

But it is not just, of course, about the beauty of that sort of spiritual fulfilment. It is a strong economic imperative that the government has a commitment to arts policy. There's something like a $17 billion industry in Australia now which has grown up around the arts. It employs somewhere around 400,000 Australians. In Forde, there are many people working in the film industry which is burgeoning in the Gold Coast. There are not only people who are taking part in some of the technical things but also carpenters, painters and drivers, and it underlies more of our economy than many people might imagine. The fact is that, again, this sits well and truly within federal Labor's—by that, I mean the Labor Party's—commitment to Australia, their commitment to Australian culture. The idea that we can rely on other countries to give us our expression of what it means to be Australian—it just does not happen without government being involved.

And so it is that I commend this bill. This is an important bill. I just realised I was remiss when I was talking about the Beenleigh Theatre Group to not give a shout-out to Chris Art, who always makes me feel extremely welcome when I go to the performances there, and to Ros Johnson, who is, I think, in many ways the silent backbone of the organisation. It is a pleasure to be a patron of that organisation, and it is a great honour to be in this place to support this policy, which sits within that wider government policy of supporting the arts in this country.

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