SPEECH - ART OF TAX REFROM - THURSDAY, 25 SEPTEMBER 2025
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
SPEECH
ART OF TAX REFROM
THURSDAY, 25 SEPTEMBER 2025
SUBJECTS: Revive, consultation on the next national cultural policy, taxation policy
MINISTER FOR THE ARTS, TONY BURKE: First of all, sincere thanks to Aunty Deb Lennis. I think it’s so easy to lose sight of the fact that when all the things that could be said and considered, the word we keep hearing is welcome. There is no word more generous, and so I want to thank Aunty Deb for reminding us of what always was and always will be.
I want to thank Zan for the introduction and for being here. Part of getting cultural policy right in Australia is making sure that we improve the relationship of Australians with artists. Can I say, what you’ve done with giving Australian musicians a chance through their top five songs, to be able to really get better known and to have that deeper pathway into music. People keep saying, ‘can we recreate Countdown’ but you’ve actually found a way of connecting audiences with artists, in a way that I Australia needed and artists have been really well served by. So, I just want to acknowledge Zan Rowe for that.
Thanks very much to John Graham, New South Wales Minister for the Arts, and to my colleagues as Arts Ministers from around the country who’ve travelled different distances, some very long distances, to be able to be here. It’s really appreciated. Acknowledgments to Adrian Collette from Creative Australia and to Susan Templeman, the Arts Envoy, my parliamentary colleague.
Let me start with a quick explanation as to what I’m hoping for out of the work that New South Wales is doing today. When we put Revive together, we bravely promised we’d get the whole thing done in six months, which we only fell a few weeks shy of between starting consultation and announcement.
I was very conscious of the fact that cultural policy historically had happened right at the end of a period in government. They then lost office and it had all been abolished and all the funding associated with it has been taken away. That’s what happened to Paul Keating’s Creative Nation. That’s what happened to Julia Gillard’s Creative Australia. Revive is actually the first cultural policy to last more than two years. We had bravely called it a five-year plan. We’re going to make that. But we also put in it that we would start the consultation on the next cultural policy after three years. That means the consultation starts next year on the next cultural policy.
When we did the consultation, it was within a context of everyone having to move quickly. Of course the easiest things to put together off the table are funding ideas – they’re quick, they’re easy to put together and that’s largely what we got in consultation. Sometimes structurally there’s a taxation part of the puzzle that can be as effective or more effective in terms of modifying behaviour and helping people find their way through. But if you’re going to try to consider taxation policy, a lot of legwork needs to be done. It’s very easy to cost a funding program because it costs as much as you put into it. The full structure and decisions around taxation are more complex.
So, I’d been chatting to John Graham about this challenge and chatting to the Arts Ministers from the different jurisdictions and decided we’d all lean in on this. Effectively, this is forcing us to imagine a different way of doing things, which will then feed into the consultation next year. I can’t guarantee where it will end. I can’t guarantee which bits will be picked up, but I can guarantee this - unless we do this work today and follow through, there is no chance of tax reform in the arts sector.
There have been some tax changes that have been made incrementally along the way. They’ve principally, but not exclusively, been in screen. If you go through, some of the changes from the previous government, I take some credit for them, because they ended up going through after having been amended in a form that the previous government really didn’t like. But it was still under them, so you know, still tick. But we moved the producer offset, for example, for TV from 20 per cent to 30 per cent, acknowledging that cost per minute of TV programs had been getting closer and closer to the cost per minute of feature films. We ended up doing that without reducing what would be available for feature films, keeping the location offset and stopping the shifts that were going to otherwise happen for some of the thresholds.
We’ve since then made a change to the above the line cap which is very significant for screen producers. We’ve changed the location offset, less significant for Australian screen producers, but very significant for a lot of workers who are getting jobs in the industry because of overseas investment. Really significantly, we introduced the digital games offset. Now digital games is just going at a rate of knots. That’s a brand-new offset, already in the order of $69 million, finding its way through there.
But most of what we did was in funding with the cultural policy. You know the five pillars that we operated under; First Nations First, A Place for Every Story, the Centrality of the Artist, Strong Cultural Infrastructure and Engaging the Audience. Under that we made a total of $880 million worth of additional investment.
The investment that we made was significant, but in some ways, some of it was just catching up on where things had fallen behind. The ARTS8 training institutions had all fallen well behind. It was to make sure that they could get back to where they needed to be. The cultural institutions, the National Gallery, for example, you talk about First Nations first, the job of the National Gallery for the First Nations director was being crowdfunded through philanthropic donations. That wasn’t even guaranteed through government funding. We fixed the funding challenges that were there for those institutions.
I think some of the things that we’ve done that are more exciting than that as well are the structural changes. The old Australia Council became Creative Australia with Creative Partnerships merged into it, but also with a new commercial focus. The idea being that there’d be a single arts body that would look at the government funded sector, the commercial sector, and the philanthropic sector. Why one body for all three, why not separate it? Because it’s the same workforce and it’s the same audience. Getting all of that into one organisation has been significant.
Having dedicated bodies that were focused on contemporary music - which had always been underfunded - with Music Australia. Writing had been forever the most underfunded section of our arts work. So, establishing Writing Australia, which started just a few months ago.
As well as all that, having Creative Workplaces there as a body, which was really significant because, as I just said in a media conference where I was asked about a particular arts organization, that instead of paying the artist, makes the artist pay them - Sculpture by the Sea - that for too long, artists have been treated as though they were doing a hobby and that this was not a real job. We had to draw a line under that in Creative Workplaces, which was about making sure that we started to force those principles in as well.
Of course the First Nations Board being established so that you had a section of Creative Australia where there was First Nations autonomy over First Nations funding. It didn’t stop the obligation for funding of First Nations projects everywhere else, but there was always the challenge that many - writers in particular - had referred to that the bigger a project got, the further it became from First Nations creative control and wanting to make sure there was some financial power behind what was happening there.
All of that’s resulted in some big projects. It’s resulted in the Creative Futures program where now Creative Australia can actually invest. But also, in little things, right back to things like fellowships being re-established. In contemporary music alone, only very recently, Creative Australia announced fellowships for Thelma Plum, for Dan Sultan, for L-Fresh the Lion and for Lior. There’s a whole lot that is happening but I’m very conscious that the taxation piece of the puzzle is not something that we’re able to get to.
Revive is living up to its name. Yes, the sector is going through a real period of difficulty. We’re being smashed in different ways, a whole lot of things that are coming at us that make things really difficult. It is also true that we have now redone the stats.
The process used to be, let’s have the ABS use the biggest possible data set so that we can say our sector is as big as possible. That ended up coming to hurt us during COVID. It meant there was able to be an argument because of JobKeeper - which some people in this room will know the specific design of JobKeeper knocked out a whole lot of artists because of the nature of their work. But because the ABS definitions of the sector were so broad, it looked like a mountain of money was going into the arts sector.
What I mean when I say that it was too broad. I used to be an organiser for the retail union, I have a lot of respect for the people who work in clothing retail. I do not consider the people who are at the checkouts at Best and Less as being arts workers, but they were counted in the stats. Similarly, the people across the harbour who work at Taronga Zoo, the people who work behind us at the Botanic Gardens were counted as arts workers. Similarly, people who manufacture safety goggles, were viewed as arts workers. So we’ve bought the stats right back to an accurate reflection of the sector.
We’ve now had the first year-on-year figures, meaning that we’ve had a 6.6 per cent growth in the economic activity in the arts sector. Now, that’s at a time that the economy was growing at 4.1 per cent. Would we like it to be bigger? Yes. Does that mean it’s evenly spread? Of course it’s not. Is that off a low base? You bet it is. But it does mean, in the mission of Revive, the concept of starting to turn a corner has commenced. I think we need to acknowledge that, not pretend it is job done, not ignore the hardships that’s out there. But we also do ourselves a disservice if when things do start to grow, we don’t just clock it and say, okay, how can we build on it.
What we meet on today, is a real chance to build on it and build on it in a structural way. One of the things that’s been really interesting over the years, I referred to before when those cultural policies were short lived, each time where the cultural policy was dumped, the cuts followed. So for example, the 2014 Budget took $117 million out of the sector. Historically, there’s never been a cut to what we’ve done in taxation. The taxation changes have tended to last.
Now, this is not to say I am planning for a change of government. I am certainly not. I have spent a lot of years wanting to be Arts Minister again and I hope to retire in this portfolio well into my 90s.
What I do know is, if we get the thinking right, we get the policy rigour right, and then if over the next 12 months we can start to build some of this into the consultation, we won’t just be dealing with an announcement next year or an announcement the year after or something short term. We’ve got the chance for real lasting structural change.
Let’s think about it. Let’s aim for it. A whole lot of people at different points have raised in passing, ‘what about this tax problem? What about this tax problem?’ Let’s start to think together. That’s what New South Wales is doing now. I’m not going to be giving thumbs up, thumbs down to different ideas. I want the whole thing to be put together and when we start consultation next year- I look around at some of the places in this room, I know there is nothing I can do to stop you from making funding asks as well. I’ve known you all for long enough.
Some of you have heard me say before, it’s called cultural policy for a reason. It’s not an entertainment policy, it goes much deeper. If we build the right structural changes, we do guarantee that people see themselves within Australia at a time where a whole lot of people want to wreck social cohesion, we make sure that people see each other. Having just returned from London for a whole lot of secret meetings in my Home Affairs portfolio, where I think the only public thing I did was play Khe Sanh at the High Commission. The people around this room are responsible for how the world sees us. Thank you for being here, you’re all busy people. Thank you for your minds, your creativity, thank you for what you do everyday. Let’s get started.
ENDS