Arts activism in a cultural policy void

Australia has only ever had two national cultural policies, Creative Nation (Department of Communications and the Arts, 1994) and Creative Australia (Commonwealth of Australia, 2013), both of which were developed by the Australian Labor Party and were short-lived due to subsequent election losses. As a consequence, long-term strategies associated with the policies were unrealised. Significantly, though, Creative Australia encouraged artists to engage with federal cultural policy development, which set the stage for the widespread sector reaction to the 2015 Federal Budget of the conservative Liberal-National Party coalition government, which shifted funds away from the Australia Council for the Arts to the Federal Government’s Arts Ministry, reduced funding to the small to medium arts sector (SME) and challenged the principle of arm’s-length funding. The artists’ response to this Budget led to the establishment of a Senate Inquiry and also questioned the vision and leadership of the arts in Australia. In 2019, Australia still lacks a formal arts policy.