A nation’s cultural policy is its most confident document.

It empowers artists with the courage to make work that the entire nation welcomes. It outlines all of the means available to government to stimulate this work, without privileging any artforms or platforms that would prescribe the work. It legislates artists’ rights to fair pay, working conditions and intellectual property, as well as peer-led decision-making to protect arts and culture from politicisation. It offers regulatory and investment frameworks for arts bodies to collaborate and extend beyond. It situates the arts within an industry context that encourages both creative and entrepreneurial risk, with incentives for collectors and philanthropists. And it expresses a confidence in the expert generation of ideas that exceed government’s own remit. More than any other area of policy, it’s a statement of exactly what government is for.

It’s no surprise, then, that right now Australia lacks such a policy…

>>> Read on at the Australian Council of Deans & Directors of Creative Arts’ NiTRO

 

IMAGE: Blue skies in Melbourne as seen through the opening atop Studio Mumbai’s 2016 MPavilion by Bijoy Jain. Photo by Esther Anatolitis.