Opportunity to action: The Big Picture

What should Australian governments be doing now to make the most of their cultural investment?

Government investment in arts and culture increased in 2023–24.

Funding by the three levels of government – federal, state and territory, and local – for arts and cultural activities totalled $8.6 billion in 2023–24. This is the highest level of investment recorded in 17 years of data, and a 4% increase from the immediately preceding data in 2021–22.

But this headline does not tell the whole story. Government, organisation and household budgets continue to be under strain. Media reports and other anecdotal evidence of current financial pressures within the arts, culture and creativity system sit alongside the reality that Australians still want to enjoy cultural and creative experiences, and expect federal, state and territory, and local governments to help make these accessible.

The most recent Cultural Funding by Governments (CFG) and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data show us that:

• Government investment in arts and culture is not keeping pace with population growth.
  Australia’s population increased by 27% between 2007–08 and 2023–24 to 27 million, while expenditure on arts and culture increased by 19%.
• Capital expenditure consumes an increasing share of government investment in arts and culture.
  Capital expenditure accounted for 18% of arts and culture expenditure in 2023–24. This is up from 11% in 2007–08. From 2007–08 to 2023–24 there was a steady 14% decrease in per capita recurrent expenditure, which includes funding for the running of organisations and programs. Over the same period, per capita capital expenditure increased by 50%.
• On a GDP basis, Australia is spending around one-quarter less than its OECD peers on ‘recreation, culture and religion’.
  In 2023, Australia ranked 25 out of 31 OECD countries for government investment in this category.

ANA research shows that arts, culture and creativity is a core driver of flourishing people, cohesive communities, resilient economies, productive nations and connected regions. Australian governments can leverage significant momentum for action on the role of culture and creativity in driving wellbeing and productivity, galvanised by Brisbane 2032 and its potential for generational cultural, social and economic impacts.

Action: Stronger collaboration for enabling action

Direct funding from all three levels of government is a crucial source of revenue for Australia’s cultural and creative industries.

All levels of government in Australia invest across a diverse range of arts and cultural activities that contribute to the cultural life of the nation:

• Federal and state and territory governments each invest in all categories of arts and culture, but the focus of their expenditure varies. The federal government has typically accounted for more than 90% of government expenditure in the Film, Radio and Television category. State and territory governments have typically contributed more than 60% of government investment in the Museums, Archives, Libraries and Heritage category and, since 2019–20, more than 70% into the Arts category.
• The scale of state and territory governments’ annual investment in arts and culture now surpasses that of the federal government, contributing 39% of government funding to the federal government’s 36% in 2023–24.10
• Local governments contributed $2.2 billion (25%) to arts and culture investment in 2023–24.

Governments should work together to make the most of their cultural investment.

Creating the right conditions for collaboration

Governments can act now to establish a long-term approach to cultural policy that is multi-partisan and multi-government.

This will facilitate enduring cooperation between governments and establish a foundation for the collaboration of government with industry, philanthropy, and business over the next decade.

• A 10-year National Arts and Culture Strategy with shared outcomes and measurements will allow all Australian governments to align their efforts and use their resources in a way that complements (but does not replace) arts and culture policies at national, state and territory, and local government levels. Importantly, having a shared goal or vision for Australia’s arts and culture system is one of the most powerful levers for system change available to government.
• A Ministerial Council focused on cultural access and the cultural and creative industries will provide a powerful intergovernmental forum for resolving priorities and making decisions across all three levels of government. It will provide a consistent forum to support structural reform and maximise cultural investment.

Utilising the full suite of government enabling actions

With long-term trends showing that government investment in Australia’s arts and culture system continues to lag behind OECD peers and is not keeping pace with population growth, it is critical that all levels of government make the most of their power to help the arts and culture system thrive.

There is a broad range of actions that governments can take to strengthen equitable cultural access and foster robust cultural industries that complement and enhance direct funding.

These enabling actions can facilitate financial inflows, facilitate operations and increase engagement opportunities. They include:

• fit-for-purpose and streamlined initiatives
• legislation, regulations and standards
• measures to develop skills, career pathways and knowledge sharing
• measures that facilitate co-investment and collaboration
• non-commercial rates
• indirect industry assistance
• accessible information, promotion and marketing
• special consideration for eligibility and exemptions.

When using these actions, governments should:

• use systems thinking to understand the full suite of powers and associated enabling actions available to them
• prioritise opportunities where they are uniquely equipped to act and where they will have the greatest benefit
• use everyday settings like schools, homes and online as entry points for generating cultural and creative skills across Australia’s population.

Action: Better data for confident decision-making

A thriving arts and culture system that delivers for all Australians depends on high-quality data

The CFG dataset is Australia’s most comprehensive dataset on cultural funding by all three levels of government. More can be done to ensure policy, industry and investment leaders have the data they need to make confident decisions.

Governments should:

• Improve data collection and analysis to help system stewards understand perspectives, harmonise statistics, connect data and solve problems, supporting new or improved cross-jurisdictional and cross-portfolio ways of working.
• Share more granular CFG data, including greater detail on the government agencies participating in the dataset and disaggregated data on the distribution of federal investment to states and territories.
• Expand the CFG survey to ask jurisdictions about enablers beyond currently reported expenditure to increase awareness of enabler prevalence and options across jurisdictions.
• Experiment with reporting on the returns of government investment in arts and culture, such as aligning reporting with the benefits these investments deliver for cultural organisations, creative individuals and communities in Australia. More broadly, it could include articulating policy objectives and aligning different statistical data collections and estimates (such as ‘Australia’s Cultural and Creative Workforce’ and ‘Cultural and Creative Activity in Australia’) with evaluation and, where possible, releasing underlying data for this reporting on a regular basis.

Pursuing these opportunities will enable confident decisions that leverage arts and culture to address Australia’s cultural, social and economic challenges, including declining cohesion, stagnating productivity and the unpredictable risks posed by new technologies.

The scale of the opportunity of arts and culture is immense – it is a core driver of flourishing people, cohesive communities, resilient economies, productive nations and connected regions. It is time for purpose-driven policy action on arts and culture that delivers cultural, economic and social returns for all Australians.