Have your say on the arts in SA

The South Australian Government has announced plans to redevelop its long-term vision for the state’s arts, culture and creative sector. SA artists, arts workers, arts lovers and audiences are encouraged to have your say.

You can do this by:

• Taking a three-minute survey or making a submission before 31 January 2024.
• Registering your interest to attend a workshop or online town hall meeting in February 2024.

You are also welcome to copy and paste anything you find useful from my own draft response (below). Or you can read more about the consultation on the YourSay website.

Draft submission notes

As an arts practitioner and consultant who now calls Tarntanya/Adelaide home, I welcome the opportunity to feed into the latest long-term vision for the arts, culture and creative sector in South Australia.

Unfortunately, this enthusiasm has been tempered by:

• The absence of consistent, bipartisan policies and support for the sector that are able to survive a change of government.
• The timing of the consultation and policy development process over the summer festival and shutdown period, within a more tenuous operating context than the sector has ever experienced, and during a time of significant global crises, grief and pain.
• The single-question online survey, which creates the unfortunate impression of a preconceived outcome unlikely to be shaped by sector input.
• The discussion paper’s tone and presentation of an apparently thriving sector, which fails to recognise the ongoing impacts of the pandemic, unsuccessful Voice referendum, cost of living and climate crises, unprecedented levels of stress and burnout, more people leaving and fewer joining the cultural workforce than ever before.
• The request for people’s biggest ambitions at a time when the majority of the sector is necessarily focused on self-care, duty of care and organisational survival.
• The use of language that appears to be preparing the sector for a narrowing of focus and scarcity mindset.
• The concurrent recruitment of a taskforce intended to combat artist precarity while modelling precarious and minimum-wage working conditions, potentially limiting who can afford to take part.

What do you most value about the arts, culture and creative sector in South Australia?

• “South Australia boasts a wealth of First Nations artistic and cultural practice, cultural and archaeological sites of international significance, and internationally respected artists in many art forms” – Arts South Australia Aboriginal Arts Strategic Plan. 
• Closeness, collegiality and non-competitiveness of the South Australian arts, culture and creative sector.

What are the strengths and characteristics that are unique to South Australia’s arts, culture and creative sector?

• While SA used to lead the nation in a number of areas, it now shares its key characteristics with the rest of the country’s decimated arts, cultural and creative sector.
  • “Real arts funding has been in decline for years, and the rapidly growing costs of the established arts have made life more difficult for artists.” – Tim Lloyd, The Advertiser
  • “With an eroding and unstable funding base, the arts and cultural sector has been reduced to endless, resource-intensive, short-term grant cycles and philanthropic dependency. Meanwhile, the diminishing pool of available public arts funds has increasingly been directed away from areas of greatest need, such as grassroots arts organisations and independent artists… Permanent good jobs in the arts have become even more scarce, and precarious work in its myriad forms has exploded (including casual work, gigs, contracting, and freelancing).” – Alison Pennington and Ben Eltham, Creativity in Crisis
  • “Sector leaders have described skills shortages as an ‘absolute crisis’ with ramifications that will be felt for many years. While COVID-19 cancellations took away the livelihoods of many and spurred career changes that led to a significant loss of talent, the difficulty of finding skilled backstage crew is not a new issue for the sector. Even when shows have been able to hit the road once again, many practitioners have faced difficulties in not having enough workers to realise ambitious ideas and the pressure for less experienced staff to step up into roles for which they may not feel ready.” – Celia Lei, ArtsHub
  • “Around 45% of all employees in arts and recreation services were in casual roles (defined as employment without access to basic paid eave entitlements, like holiday and sick leave, and superannuation). Artists and writers are categorised as sole traders, and as small businesses we absorb many of the costs of our labour (studio space, materials, administration, communications). We have no sick leave or protection if injured. We are under-unionised and lack the kind of organising power that might change these conditions for the better.” – Jennifer Mills, Meanjin
• Governments are often tempted to focus on shiny new infrastructure or city-based cultural institutions, but research reveals that SA’s independent artists and small-to-medium organisations are the real powerhouses of innovation, experimentation and audience development.
  • “Individual artists and small-to-medium and independent companies are forced to endlessly justify their existence, but it is these organisations that are most likely to be doing the heavy lifting of both artistic innovation and cultural diversity.” – Ben Brooker, ArtsHub
  • “It’s often argued that the funds quarantined to the Major Performing Arts are justified by audience development. Not so. That’s debunked by the massive audiences of the small-to-mediums.” – Esther Anatolitis, ArtsHub
  • Small-to-medium organisations also outperform larger organisations and statutory authorities in terms of broader representation of South Australian stories and cultural heritage, as well as better modelling of access and inclusion at all levels – including board members, artists and performers, not just audiences. The impact and influence of small-to-medium and service organisations that support artists at the beginning of their careers can also be measured across the wider sector, particularly those organisations who operate as incubators for innovative programming models and artist profiling.
• In beginning to address these issues, we can learn from Australia’s new national cultural policy, ‘Revive’ – aptly named to recognise its deficit starting position and the care and investment needed to move the sector beyond it.

What role do we want the arts, culture and creative sector in South Australia to play in a national and international context?

• To be known for our bold, bipartisan commitment to arts, culture and creativity.
• To reverse current outward migration and return South Australia to a place that artists want to live and make work, not leave.
• To provide a model for State Government investment priorities and programs that prioritise independent practitioners and small-to-medium organisations, and create the conditions for them to make ambitious work and sustain viable careers.
• To ensure all of South Australia’s stories are able to be told, rather than just the elite or chosen few (particularly those whose voices and stories have been underrepresented or marginalised in the past), with associated awareness raising and outreach activity to increase equitable engagement by pro-actively identifying and removing barriers.

Where can we use our strengths, history, size and scale to our advantage?

• South Australia may be a smaller state with a smaller population, but this should be used as a selling point, not an excuse. South Australia has the opportunity to invest in and incubate work that is bold, brave and risk-taking. We should lead the country in terms of the ideas and stories our artists and arts organisations share, and the ways in which they share them. And we should channel our investment into the powerhouses of that innovation: independent practitioners and small-to-medium organisations.
• In difficult economic times, the communities that experience the largest and most detrimental impact are usually those who are already marginalised. Whether involved as artists, arts workers, board members, participants or audiences, this means (among others) that First Nations communities, Deaf and disabled people, young people, those in regional areas, and those from culturally diverse backgrounds are likely to face additional barriers to arts participation – including participation in this consultation process. South Australia has the opportunity to be a beacon of best practice. To embed access into our funding processes, arts practices and organisations. To make community-led practice, equity and inclusion a priority, not an afterthought. To focus on the creative and cutting-edge outcomes of integrated access, not compliance. And to actively redress the historical imbalance that has stopped people from underrepresented communities being able to participate in the state’s creative and cultural life, including investing in our existing arts infrastructure to make sure it’s is accessible, culturally safe and fit-for purpose.
• The benefits of engagement in arts, culture and creativity are countless, well documented and cut across all State Government portfolio areas and 97% of the South Australian community (more than double the number of people who engage on a similar frequency with sport). South Australia has the opportunity to recognise this significant contribution by implementing new mechanisms for genuine cross-government collaboration and by increasing its investment to match its spending on sport, space or military infrastructure.
• South Australia’s cultural statutory authorities, public owned companies, and funded arts organisations do not currently mirror the diversity of the communities and constituencies they serve and represent. South Australia has the opportunity to insist upon diversity at all levels of our organisations and programs. To listen to and be led by First Nations elders, artists and communities. To embed best practice principles for community-led and community-engaged work to ensure “nothing about us, without us.”

What aspects of arts, culture and creativity could only happen here?

• South Australia is home to incredibly diverse and creative communities, each with vibrant and valuable cultural practices and stories to tell.
• These communities, however, are still not reflected within the prevailing monoculture of our arts and cultural organisations or creative practice. The arts sector has the opportunity to lead the way, but we need 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. 

What is your one big idea?

A bold, bipartisan policy that is able to survive future changes of government and includes significant, sustained, state-wide and cross-portfolio investment that prioritises individual practitioners, small-to-medium organisations and under-represented communities over new cultural infrastructure, Adelaide-based institutions or cultural statutory authorities.

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