L-R: Event facilitator, Dr Gemma Beale, AICSA Co-Chair Emma Webb OAM, SACOSS CEO Ross Womersley, Kuma Kaaru’s Cliffy Wilson, The Hon Peter Malinauskas MP, Premier of South Australia, SA Unions Secretary Dale Beasley and Conservation Council SA CEO Kirsty Bevan.
Civil Society Roundtable lunch with The Honourable Peter Malinauskas MP, Premier of South Australia
AICSA participated in the Premier’s lunch with the Civil Society Roundtable on Thursday 8 August. Formed in 2022, the Civil Society Roundtable is made up of five peak bodies representing people and organisations in the for-purpose sectors: South Australian Council of Social Service, South Australian Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations Network, Arts Industry Council of South Australia, Conservation Council of South Australia, and SA Unions. The Roundtable facilitates discussion between these peak bodies and the The Honourable Peter Malinauskas MP, Premier of South Australia and his Cabinet, around issues like climate, Closing the Gap, culture, funding and taxation, human rights, poverty and precarity reduction, and workers’ rights. AICSA was represented at the lunch by 17 members of the arts and culture sector representing a cross section of artforms, organisations and lived experiences, including independent artists. Co-Chair, Emma Webb OAM, addressed the Premier and the event on behalf of AICSA. We were pleased to hear the Premier speak enthusiastically about the role of art and culture, while acknowledging that the sector had suffered from underfunding. The Premier committed to serious consideration of the Artists at Work Taskforce recommendations and releasing the recommendations publicly. AICSA emphasised that the Taskforce recommendations and the new State Cultural Policy, were highly anticipated pieces of policy work which needed timely delivery with resources attached. The event was also an excellent way to network and collaborate with our colleagues in other sectors such as First Nations leaders, the union movement, the environment movement, social services and community workers, all working towards a fairer and more just South Australia. Please see Emma Webb OAM’s speech below:“Thank you Premier for being here for this conversation, to my colleagues in the other peak bodies here, and to Cliffy Wilson for your Welcome to Country as we gather here the beautiful Country of the Kaurna Nation. My name is Emma Webb, Co-Chair of the Arts Industry Council of South Australia. AICSA has been so appreciative of being part of the Civil Society Roundtable and through this the recognition by our colleagues that arts and culture are indeed central to civil and democratic society, and progressive community life. Premier, from our conversations with you and the SA Government I know you understand that globally there is a real shift and renaissance in cultural policy. UNESCO has redeclared culture as a “global public good”, with a world-wide push for significant new investment in art and culture, and cultural labour, because of its unique position in progressing democracy and citizen participation, fighting climate change and building resilient communities, reducing poverty, and importantly, creating bonds of solidarity and peace between people. Culture and art is a social right, not simply a consumer choice. Good government policy then means increasing participation and access for people across their full lives, birth to death, and embracing that art and culture will be both celebratory and also critical and dissonant. One of the reasons why there is this new global push around cultural policy is because rather ironically, when culture is seen as everywhere and all of the time, which of course it is, then what can happen is it becomes invisible or highly instrumentalised in public policy. This is why strong and specific cultural policy is very needed at this time. The Federal Labor Government’s cultural policy Revive, led by your comrade and ours Tony Burke MP, has made a good contribution to reversing a lack of policy in Australia – with important pillars such as First Nations First, Strong Cultural Infrastructure (with infrastructure meant in its broadest sense of ecology) and The Centrality of the Artist. It’s this – The Centrality of the Artist- that I want to speak to further, as it encompasses attention to the conditions of labour and production in art and culture, which is of critical concern to us at AICSA and my colleagues here in the room. We cannot have a healthy arts and culture sectors without public policy addressing the working and living conditions of artists and arts-workers themselves. Research continues to show that artists and cultural workers are vastly under paid and undervalued, are in fact subsidising our art and culture through their unpaid work, are living very precariously including in their housing, and as a norm miss out on basic entitlements taken for granted by many other workers in Australia. I suspect this is a familiar story in fact to many in this room – people in the disability and other social service support workers, First Nations workers and many others. Essential to progressing a civil society agenda is how we value workers at the front line of these sectors who dedicate their lives to public good and to service. To be really clear, this is how we need to see artists. They are far more closely aligned to community health workers, teachers, climate scientists and precarious people working in everyday community economies than is popularly appreciated. And we need public policy that understands and champions this and improves their lives. So Premier, we are very excited that the SA Government is currently in the process to two key policy initiatives. The new landmark South Australian cultural policy to set a longer-term plan for art, culture and creativity in the state; and the Artists at Work Taskforce which will make recommendations to Government actions that address the work insecurity and income inequality experienced by some South Australian artists and creatives. We are very much looking forward to a timely move through Cabinet and release of these highly anticipated policy pieces with resources attached. We congratulate the SA Government on these initiatives and look forward to them making a significant difference to keeping SA artists working well in our state, and the SA Government work in this area sitting proudly alongside the contemporary global agenda on culture as a public good, critically important to all healthy social democracies, and to the human rights agenda in South Australia.”Photos below supplied by SACOSS:
