Notes from NAVA Workshop for National Cultural Policy: A place for every story

• A place for every story or ‘diversity’ isn’t its own pillar. The pillars need to be broken down and the policy needs to have a whole-of-ecology approach and all these things embedded throughout.
• Establish an Anti-Racism Strategy. Anti-racism to be central to arts recovery to work towards an equitable sector.
• Invest in opportunities for artists and arts workers with disability to gain sustainable, reasonable employment opportunities or opportunities to earn income and to develop a career path. Increase the visibility of people with disability as leaders or in senior management positions across the arts sector.
• Develop a framework around access to education at all levels of school and university and TAFE, access to career development and skills development and professional practice so that individually and collectively people can follow chosen pathways and chosen careers regardless of where they choose to live or their internet connection or ability to travel or afford to go to another university or place of practice.
• Artists and employees of all gender identities in the arts are afforded the safety, security and dignity that they're entitled to under anti-discrimination law.
• Support the next phase of the new Australian Curriculum 9.0. 

Alexia Derbas, Research and Policy Manager, Diversity Arts Australia

Diversity Arts Australia is the national peak advocating for racial equity in the sector from migrant view. 

DARTS is calling for an anti-racism strategy. Anti-racism to be central to arts recovery to work towards an equitable sector.

We have experiences for racially marginalised communities, being exclusion, historical exclusion from leadership and decision making positions from work in the sector and in the pandemic crisis, this has led to a lot more of that. I think everyone has had this experience in the sector of lost work and lack of work and access to our livelihoods, but if you've been experiencing ongoing racism as well during the pandemic, we're seeing that this is having a compounding effect and so we're looking at a future sector that has lost a generation of underrepresented artists whose stories we know need to be told.   

Anti-racism work needs to put First Nations people first. We recognise solidarity and recognising CALD communities we need to have an approach we seed the funded sector having to have that solidarity too. We're asking our peers and colleagues to also put anti-racism as a strategy in their submissions too.   

This pillar also has this. I want to problematise this and being diverse groups, under a place for every story. It's a colonial structure and as a result our submission is addressing all five of the pillars and kind of ensuring that equity principles are addressed under all five because we see the centrality of the artist being really important in terms of anti-racism. Strong institutions are anti racist and they're inclusive and audience, reaching the audience, that last pillar, CALD communities are really engaged in the sector as audiences but not being collaborated with enough and so we're really making sure that we're addressing all five pillars. 

We want to it acknowledge that there are racist outcomes in terms of exclusion in this policy, in any policy approaches like in the colony and so we need to have policies and practices that rectify these.

Diversity, it is not an extra pot of money. We're trying to show that it's not extra money to address marginalised communities, but it should be embedded in your practices from the get-go. That's actually good business, but also we're seeing that historically excluded people do require extra support mechanisms. Equity is not about giving everyone equal opportunities, but understanding who is not being given opportunities and writing policies, having governance processes and practices that are really aimed at getting people at the same starting point to get to that. 

In terms of our calls to action and recommendations, under those principles we are calling for public funding. Federal and state agencies should have the expectation that the things that they're funding, the organisations they're funding are representative of the Australian population. Also public funding should have accountability mechanisms for diversity, equity and inclusion in their workforces. 

We need better data collection to understand our workforces but it's not enough for a major to say, this is our workforce. Oops, it looks like this. There needs to be some kind of accountability attached to that and incentives for doing better.   Employment pathways promoted at all levels, including emerging mid-career experience, so we want to have targeted leadership programs, internships paid, paid internships, and things for artists who are already doing good work from under-represented communities but they're not being supported to do so. The policy needs to recognise our sectors as an ecology of small to medium, independent organisations, that's where under-represented people are given opportunities and for excellence and pathways to employment and engagement in larger bodies, so just recognising that and targeting support in terms of when I say anti-racism, this is part of what an anti racist policy could do is actually target where the work is being done in communities.   

The last point there is around place, so policy must address place. We do have a geographical distribution of inequity in our society and so policy needs to recognise that and so I know we're going to be speaking to regional soon, but even in our cities as well, in terms of migrant populations, there are geographical kind of spots where we do have higher migrant populations with lower health outcomes, lower educational and employment opportunities and so policy needs to address that as well. 

Work conditions must be made culturally safe, from a First Nations and CALD perspective.   We are being told stories in our consultations about tokenisation in the workplace, being a box-ticking kind of exercise and we need to make sure that workplaces are safe. There's ongoing education and training in anti-racism and cultural safety, particularly for leaders, and the last point there is around research being supported to evidence the experiences of First Nations and CALD artists and creatives to kind of get to that accountability I was talking about earlier.  

I just whizzed through our main call to action in anti-racism work and we are asking people to get in touch if you want to be an ally, because that's how we are framing this work, is that we need to get as many people supporting these calls in their organisations as individuals as well for the policy, and you can get in touch with me at that email address there, so I would be happy to talk to people about that further.

Matthew Hall, CEO, Arts Access Australia

Arts Access Australia is the national peak body for arts around disability and we seek essentially to increase opportunities for artists and arts workers and audiences with stability to fully participate in arts and culture and to improve access and equity.  

I thought it would be useful to share with some of the feedback that we've received of as a result of undertaking our consultation to develop a National Code of Conduct for Access in the Arts and how that might feed into the sorts of policy levers that you as a sector need to think about in terms of making some changes to bring about the sorts of things that we're hearing in that feedback.

The first point to note is that most arts organisations get the need to ensure that there is access for people with disability in terms of audience. Many organisations - I think it's fair to say most, if not all, recognise the need for that and many organisations have commenced on that journey to improve access for audience. But where there has been a real lack of focus, we think, has been in terms of the development of opportunities for artists and arts workers with disability in terms of stakes to sustainable, reasonable employment opportunities or opportunities to earn income and to develop a career path, and also in terms of the visibility of people with disability as leaders or in senior management positions across the arts sector.   We know of just one person who leads an arts organisation that is not focused on disability, who identifies as a person with disability. The fundamental principle that we start from and which is fundamental to all sort of disability advocacy is the premise that there should be nothing about us without us and so to the extent to which every story has a place, so every story about disability has a place that is accessible by people with disability, the starting principle must be that that doesn't occur without the direct involvement and agency of people with disability.  

The types of things that National Cultural Policy needs to deal with is what are the barriers to visual arts organisations employing more people with disability, or providing pathways for people with disability, and having more people with disability more visible both within your programming or curation or even administration. Both in terms of commissioning artists or curating a program within an exhibition. Also just employing people as arts workers because the artists will be telling the story of a person with disability, but it's also important to have within - on the arts workers' side a focus on professional development pathways and employment for arts workers. A key part of it is a transition from formal education or vocational training opportunities into the workforce and what is it that may need to be done within the educational system, the higher educational system or the technical and further education system in relation to the skills that the visual arts sector needs that addresses also the needs and access requirements of people with disability.  

Ros Abercrombie, Executive Director, Regional Arts Australia

Regional Arts Australia represent all art forms across all geographies outside of the capital cities.   

A little bit slightly different approach that we're taking but there's a lot of synergies in both what Matthew and Alexia are saying, the pre-work we're doing is looking at other industries framing submissions, and there's some pointers there that I think are useful for us.  

Obviously, the work that we're doing is around the advice around cultural policy and how to approach it. Australia Council’s Framing Submission and the two other documents that we've been diving into are the Sports 2030 and National Farmers Federation 2030 Roadmap because those industries have built policies and roadmap policies for the next couple of decades before us and so they're good templates that we have been using to inform some of our thinking. Another useful document that we found was the UK Cultural White Paper which still has some challenges with that title, but it's a value proposition paper around putting value central to the UK policy and so that's also been a useful document to dive to. Then from there we have a national network of colleagues in every state and territory that we work closely with who help us and advise us in putting our budget submissions in and a lot of the thinking we're jumping from here is on the back of the cultural plan recommendations that came out of the House of Representatives 2021 Inquiry of which the first recommendation was for a policy.   

We are keen that we utilise a lot of the thinking that has been done and really honing that to the pillars that have been provided to us as a template, and as Alexia and Matthew have said, we are absolutely addressing all five pillars and we see that regional practice across individual institutions is across all those five pillars and we weave in and out through that.  

A lot of that positioning is that we're writing is all presenting on a value proposition and ensuring that we are clear and concise with what we're saying and for us as well it is very much a whole of sector approach with subnarratives and also that it is a whole of government approach and so we're looking at how we weave government: state and territory and federal together in how we talk about what the sector needs and what it is asking for as we work forwards, and for us that is looking at the value for what and for who, the purpose of that value, and providing the solutions to that and providing the case studies and the models for that as well because I think from my understanding, what the Office of the Arts and Australia Council are going to want is these are all the things we want, but these are the examples and the case studies of models of how we can do it and how we can achieve it and good ideas are going to be heard. Which is exciting.   

From an RAA point of view, absolutely a whole-of-ecology approach. Whilst we represent regional and remote, it is important that all areas work as one and we're looking across artform, small to medium, funded and unfunded. The institutions and volunteer communities. It's important that the recommendations and the policy for us is, obviously, regionally led, sector led. Very important that it's a sector led responses and approaches and as someone said prior as well, it is place based, it is really important that it is for the artists and the individuals and the orgs in their place, for their place, by their place, as we navigate going forwards.   

One of the key things that we will be driving for is around, and it's very similar to both Alexia and Matthew, around access and equity to participate, to engage, to be audiences members, to have a connection to creative opportunities and creative practice wherever they choose to live, work or study. We're really working up a framework around access to education at all levels of school and university and TAFE, access to career development and skills development and professional practice so that individually and collectively people can follow chosen pathways and chosen career regardless of where they choose to live or their internet connection or ability to travel or afford to go to another university or place of practice.   

Many we have a regional statistic framework that put together and we will be working that somehow into the five pillars because that is around connecting to six industries and embedding creative practice alongside those railways industries ... industry and industry advancements and for environment and how we look at, engage with, our red and blue lands and oceans and what the creative industries can do in leading that space.   

We're across all pillars of practice to ensure that there's employment and career opportunities ultimately supporting vibrant culture and liveability and if we can support a creative practice across regional and remote and all of Australia, then we have a much better chance of thriving, sustainable, liveability and that's the ecosystem that we're advocating for.

Amy Prcevich, Countess Report

Good morning everybody and thank you to the NAVA team for having me today. My name is Amy Prcevich and I’m speaking today from unceded Gadigal land. I’m an artist and a producer, and today I’m speaking from the perspective of The Countess Report which is a three person art-activist collective that I work within alongside Elvis Richardson and Miranda Samuels.

As a short descriptor, since 2008 Countess has created artworks and published data and analysis on gender representation in the Australian visual arts sector. The Countess Reports that were released in 2016 and 2019 chronicled key changes in gender representation in the arts and continue to stimulate national discussion around institutional accountability to gender equity and diversity. 

I should note that the points I’m raising today have been compiled by Miranda Samuels and stem from conversation and consultation that has occurred in multiple ways - between Elvis, Miranda and I, with the NAVA team, with Countess as participants in the National Gallery of Australia's gender equity action plan working group, from people we have spoke to at conferences, or after we’ve given talks, perspective shared by the team of counters who have gathered data for the reports, and also from communities that have offered feedback and very generative critique of work we’ve presented.

In the interest of time, I will just read these comments as a list and if there’s anything you would like me to elaborate on or have specific questions about, we can address that in question time. 

Firstly, to ensure that artists and employees of all gender identities are afforded the safety, security and dignity that they're entitled to under anti-discrimination law, 

Similar to what you were saying Alexia about data collection - for organisations to conduct surveys of staff across all front-facing departments, regarding harassment by audiences and the public to determine safety provisions.

Ethically collect and self-report data on gender representation at regular intervals and that's in terms of the employees, whether they be casual, part time, full time, and also gender representation in exhibition programming.

Consider how gender roles and conceptions of gendered labour may vary between cultural contexts and between non-Indigenous and Indigenous communities.

To provide childcare for employees and visitors as well as suitable spaces for breastfeeding and flexible hours to employees of arts organisations.

Ensure women and gender diverse artists are fairly represented in marketing and collateral material for group exhibitions. 

Redress historical gender inequities in collections, quotas, policies and targeted collection fundraising. 

Accommodate accessibility requirements of gender diverse people, including gender neutral bathrooms. 

Complete gender pay gap analysis and promote pay transparency. 

Ensure women and gender diverse artists are afforded opportunities for professional growth and take part in governance and decision making. 

Avoid tokenism when organising exhibitions around things connected with gender.   

Q. Do you feel like there's any kind of recommendation around a reasonable timeframe for all of those things to occur?

I think the timeline varies significantly between those points, and also between the sizes of different organisations, so I think that sometimes smaller organisations can often act more swiftly, especially in regards to collecting data or taking surveys of the current state of their workplace. When it comes to things that are infrastructural, such as programming exhibitions or thinking about pay equality or access to, for example, gender neutral bathrooms, often those things involve so many layers of decision making or planning that that is more long-term, but what we have noticed in terms of collecting the report data is that it is small to mid-sized organisations who have been able to swiftly respond to very contemporary conversations about gender and larger organisations feel like they need a whole institutional turn that seems to be happening but definitely is slower.

NAVA will also be calling for data collection via the ABS. There was a bunch of questions around data collection around 2014 which has really prevented or stopped any accurate picture of what our sector even looks like in real terms. There hasn't been anything like that that's been able to fill that gap that was left after that since, so that's a big one that we will be putting in and we will share that in our notes as well:

In its 2014-2018 forward work plan, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) revealed it would no longer be collecting and reporting arts, culture, sport and recreation data, because the ABS was required to make ongoing expenditure reductions of A$50 million over three years. This included the disbanding of the expert National Centre for Culture and Recreation Statistics which was responsible for directing the work of the ABS in this area.

Thanks for all the presenters. I feel inspired and empowered by this conversation because, obviously, I'm from a CALD background person myself and have been through a few years journey in WA, but I think where we are all talking about the programming and the employee status, and I think maybe we need to think a bit more about if you like, the pathways because it's a kind of the pathway leading the sustainability.  If you look at two or three years programming and how that looked like for CALD person because if we're thinking about changing the policy, we're not saying this one off opportunity or one off programming.  Like I've been through a few organisations and I have seen lots of young people, they might be the second generation of migrant parents, they have been brought into the arts organisation and being raised up as a super star, but then that's it and then they disappear. I felt really - I mean, I'm much older, obviously, and I'm the first migrant, so I kind of felt very strongly for this second generation because my kids will grow up in this second generation and how they're treated in the workforce is just heart broken, and so I've felt it is important to maybe address a bit of long-term thing instead of just programming like changing the policy but it's actually a support system, mechanism there, so I think maybe I will get in touch with some of you maybe discuss what I can help to contribute to this place and maybe feel by bit more supported myself in this part of the world, but thank you very much for this opportunity to learn and share.

April Phillips, Wiradjuri-Scottish visual artist, researcher, youth mentor: Digital Lab, and First Nations Learning Designer with the Australian children’s Television Foundation

I think really a good place to start is to think about if we're going to make a place for every story that young people aren't living out some kind of dress-rehearsal adulthood, they are art makers from a very early age, and I think we also forget that we used to all be young people and if we're involved in the arts, it had to have started somewhere. At some point we just were so hungry to make arts because we loved it or we had that incredible person that entered our life and supported us to do so. One of the big things that I advocate for and I think is important is that we really kind of elevate and recognise artistic practice from young people as creators and not to push it down, diminish it, look over it and say that's, like, kid art and we're going to put thumb tacks on it and put it on the wall in a library. We need to recognise and elevate young people as artists. It doesn't need to look and feel and be seen the same way as adult arts. It is its own distinct period in time and it's actually impossible to replicate.   

At the Australian children's television foundation we can't cast a person as an older person because it's really, obvious, and I think when you ask a young person to spend time on a drawing or work in a theatre production or take a photograph, it's exactly the same, so I think that there needs to be a kind of shift in our sector where we look at youth arts in a different way, not only for social impact but as its own art mode and audience section. I think [indistinct] and actually beyond this kind of recommendation for policy in this consultation, it's actually something that we all need to work on ourselves, so I would ask all of you to do that.   

I would also like to smile and say that I loved hearing Matthew talk about skills and skill pathways and I think that's very true for youth and young people as well, so if we're travelling through school we need to really kind of think about those pathways and protect them because if there isn't a pathway, we know that being in the arts is very difficult, whether an arts worker or an artist yourself, so we will miss out on the very best people if we don't advocate and protect those pathways and make sure that they're there, so that's very, very important.   

I think it's also really important to think about access and I think this comes into the regional and remote experience again and sometimes these kind of words we throw them out there, like access. We all know what they mean, but I am sort of at this stage where I feel like we need to form what that is in a nuts and bolts way, so, for example, we know that in a lot of schools and particularly in regional and remote Australia, art rooms where you can do paint or work with clay are closing down and so at what point do we need to say this is the base level of art making for young people, and it needs to be rolled out in an equitable way, not just in independent schools or in city schools, but also schools.   

If we work out what access might mean in a really kind of straight-up way, it will help to form what the actual kind of basic human right of arts making is in Australia for young people.   

The other thing that is really important, again, is this idea of visibility and when we're programming, I love this idea of making sure that you have all of these different people involved, all these different identity politics and I think that young people need to be a part of that, setting the thumb tacks aside, and actually kind of putting young people in wider curatorial projects or programs, having spaces and places for mentorship and for peer mentorship as well. So that we are really kind of growing the sector up because things happen quickly and all of a sudden young people become grown-ups and we need to make the most of each of those years as they grow up.   

The other thing that I have written down here is the curriculum that came out in May, Australian Curriculum 9.0, is incredibly ambitious and at the moment I would say teachers are not ready to teach yet. I'm so excited about it, though, and it really is where visual arts media arts, theatre music, all of our art forms, it is the good direction that we need to go in, but what we need to do is, and I'm really hoping that a lot of you can include this in your submissions, is that that curriculum needs to be supported in a next phase. ACARA, who is the governing body who releases the curriculum, cannot release any kind of pedagogies or ways of teaching it or direct any kind of learning streams or institutions who do educational work in the arts, who are the experts. I think it's really important that there is maybe an independent kind of EOI put out or something. This excellent curriculum is going to sit there and teachers won't be able to teach it and the whole thing will just kind of crumble. We have this opportunity and we really need to push for that to kind of be taken into the next phase.   

The only other thing that I have on here is, and it actually features a lot in the new Australian Curriculum for young people in the arts, is a global context. It's been so great to hear a few of the other speakers talk about the local and that hyper locality and place-based recognition is so key, it's very important. We also need to zoom up and out and make all of those people that Canberra feel so embarrassed that we don't look good enough globally, because I think that might be able to kind of push them to be more ambitious and take more risks and to do all of the kind of things that we want to do and we know we can do but we just don't have the capacity or the funding to do, so I think pushing ourselves into a kind of global market is also really important and something that young people are already well and truly thinking about.

I just wanted to make a comment. I love all the speakers and all the different areas that we've been talking to at the moment, but the one category I feel is missing is the perspective of carers, so I'm an autistic person and I fit into the disability category. I'm a female and parent, but I have a daughter who has special needs and I see even my son who is 14, a young person, when you're in the role of a carer it is hard to get access to opportunities. I don't know who is representing those people in our community because it is hard. Right now I'm trying to talk with my daughter next to me and I try and come to as many of these forums as possible. It's hard being a carer. There's lots of different ways that people are carers. When you say childcare, that's great for women who have small children but caring is a bigger title as well.

Q: What does access look like?

DARTS: From our perspective and to Susan's point as well, there needs to be an intersectional kind of understanding of people's different experiences too. For racialised communities, racially marginalised communities, access is about place, financial access as well, like, our sector can be really exclusive in terms of tickets cost a lot, and this is something that I was reflecting. I went to a hip hop gig on the weekend and the tickets were almost $200 and this is a working class art form, but people aren't able to access that, so that's how we - I haven't thought too deeply about it but that's how we would approach it. CALD communities also have people with disability and that kind of access issue gets compounded then, so that's something that we need to keep in mind as well.

AAA: We look at access in terms of - probably through a number of prisms, but I think fundamentally it is not about inviting people with disability into a space or a conversation or a place. It is about people with disability being able to join and participate fully in that space or place, whether we're talking a physical space or a digital space or a conceptual space. We would say it's making sure that there are reasonable steps or reasonable things put in place that enable people with disability to participate in the same way and to the same extent as people without disability, but we think it's really important and it's not about people with disability being invited into a space or being allowed into a space. It's giving them the opportunity to create and make their own space.

I'd like to also pick up just on the comments around the pathways and the Curriculum because I think the education portfolio sits outside of the arts portfolio, there is a risk that arts education could fall through the cracks between the two portfolios. It is just as important for us to be writing to the education minister with the same arguments that we put forward for cultural policy, so that we are being heard in the other portfolio.

The deadline for submissions is 22 August. I can't encourage you enough to please send something in. There is a template on the government website. You don't have to use it. You can if you want to. It's really there to be helpful, but it's not essential that you use that template. You could write as much or as little as you want on whatever format you like.   There is a guide also that it be three pages. That's not essential either. Obviously, don't send them 50 pages, but you can write a few sentences that you wanted to or stick to one pillar.   Or as we've heard today, something in every pillar and there's plenty of content that we will be sharing for people to be thinking about. Again, the aim is really to provide the government with clear recommendations to include in this national cultural policy. The word that they've given to me is neat, things that they can pick up and put straight into cultural policy without a great deal of extra work.   

They've said that we don't need to cost things, they will do that, but they are looking for good ideas of things they can pick up and make happen and ultimately I'm actually so thrilled about this because it is such an opportunity and I'm really excited to see so many people engaging with this opportunity this week with us at NAVA and really look forward to us making change together. Thank you.