NAVA Advocacy Toolkit: Helping government understand the need for urgent stimulus

Now’s the time to contact Australian Government’s Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, and/or your local MP.

Here’s a sample letter as a guide – with plenty of wording that you can adapt for social media, phone calls, messaging etc. 

Please don’t feel you have to copy it verbatim! Actually, it’s better if you don’t. This one’s focused on the visual arts, but you’ll find useful tips below for drawing on the key issues, stats and stimulus priorities articulated by our colleague sector bodies. 

Tips for email-writing success:

• Make it yours: Describe your work in your own words. Personalised letters get noticed.
• Be passionate: What does your practice mean to you? What does Australia’s contemporary arts mean to you? What’s at stake right now? Write with clarity and passion.
• Don’t risk being ignored: Offensive or abusive messages don’t get taken seriously. Worse: they completely undermine your efforts. Treat this letter as seriously as you want all artists to be treated.
• Use the Australia Council’s Electorate Profiles: Talk up key arts stats from right where an MP’s constituents live with localised information that’s targeted to a specific electorate.

Go social: Tag MPs into your posts and use #DontCancelCreativity to create a critical mass. On Twitter, the treasurer is @JoshFrydenberg.

Keen for more industry information on COVID-19 impacts, stats, and specific stimulus priorities? Great work has been done very quickly this week to assess and communicate the impacts to date, and outline what’s needed:

• APRA AMCOS: https://apraamcos.com.au/
• I Lost My Gig data and survey: https://ilostmygig.net.au/
• Live Performance Australia: https://liveperformance.com.au/
• NAVA: https://visualarts.net.au/news-opinion/ and survey
• Regional Arts Australia: https://regionalarts.com.au/
• Writing WA: https://www.writingwa.org/ and survey 

and plenty more. Please use what’s most helpful in getting the message out there about this most devastating disruption to Australia's cultural life we've experienced in generations. 

What’s my electorate? Who’s the MP?

Use the Australian Electoral Commission’s Find My Electorate 

What are their values and motivations?

Watch or read their First Speeches in Parliament

How do I contact an MP?

Contact one of them – or all of them! 

What about senators?

Look them up and read their First Speeches 

What’s their record? What bills have they voted for or against?

Search this database by name or postcode 

How do I talk up our local arts scene?

Use Australia Council’s Electorate Profiles and most importantly: your own experience and your own story.

Implementing an ambitious and well-funded stimulus package specific to the arts sector in response to industry advice:

• Offering specific measures for artists and artsworkers whose work is itinerant or casual, including paid sick leave for those required to self-isolate;
• Immediate initial relief payments to artists, artsworkers and organisations, delivered efficiently via professional membership bodies and by the Australia Council;
• Urgently implemented Centrelink eligibility with no waiting periods; a paid sick leave fund for itinerant, casual and freelance workers;
• Targeted stimulus and support for regional and remote Aboriginal art centres;
• Ensuring that the regional fire, storm and flood recovery needs are not forgotten at this critical time;
• Setting specific timeframes around national self-isolation and event restrictions, rather than indefinite restrictions, so that creative businesses can plan their work – for example, announcing a review date on public gathering, social distancing and travel restrictions; all levels of government to provide immediate clarity to publicly-owned galleries so that their boards and committees can make the decisions necessary to protect staff entitlements, collections and all programs;
• Prioritising the payment of artists and freelance artsworkers on government- or philanthropy-funded activities that are no longer proceeding; encouraging all government funding bodies and philanthropic trusts to let funded organisations know that they will not be penalised for paying artists for cancelled work, and that organisations who have been unable to present funded programs will not be penalised when the time comes to acquit their grants;
• Extending all local, state and federal multi-year funding to the end of 2021, CPI indexed; relieving organisations of reporting burdens to their government funding bodies across the next six months, to be reviewed towards the end of that period;
• Implementing immediate and ongoing additional investment in the Australia Council of $50m per year that doubles the available funding pool for the Four Year Funding for Organisations program, which has already been assessed and due to be announced on 30-31 March, so as to invest in the capacity of those nationally-focused organisations best placed to build the capacity of the entire sector; Additionally, tripling the Australia Council’s competitive funding pool budget, to facilitate timely stimulus;
• An immediate $20m to build the Artists’ Benevolent Fund into a program matching the work of Support Act in the music industry;
• On industry advice, creating well-designed long-term stimulus measures to avoid industry collapse and inspire innovation – including an impactful and inspirational public campaign to rebuild confidence.

If you’re on social media, use the hashtag started by Luke John Matthew Arnold:

• Talk up the connection between event/program cancellation and your work
• Talk up ways to keep engaging with the arts and with your work and your organisation 
• Share stats on the COVID-19 impacts so far
• Link to stimulus measures proposed by arts sector bodies
• Talk up all the ways that art creates the future. 

• Call Lifeline Australia on 13 11 14 or text the helpline on 0477 13 11 14
• Beyond Blue has a comprehensive list of national help lines and websites