TRANSCRIPT - SPEECH AT BOOK UP CONFERENCE - THURSDAY 7 AUGUST 2025

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

SPEECH

BOOK UP CONFERENCE

THURSDAY, 7 AUGUST 2025

SUBJECTS: AI in the arts, Australia’s national cultural policy Revive, Writing Australia

TONY BURKE MP, MINISTER FOR THE ARTS: First of all, just thank you to Yvonne. Yvonne made reference to the fact that Welcomes to Country have somehow, by some, been seen as controversial these days. There is nothing more gracious than being told welcome. Nothing more gracious. It's one of those moments where I guess some people will always be looking for a fight. Of all the things that could be said when you look at the history, if the word that we are hearing is welcome, it is the most gracious thing that could possibly be said, the kindest thing that could possibly be said to the rest of Australia. That just gives me a pretty high degree of confidence that some of the wild views claiming that there's something controversial over here, are a phase that some people will go through. Ultimately, when people act with that sort of generosity that's contained within the word welcome, common sense and decency finds its way through, and thank you for being so generous.

I'm going to say two things about artificial intelligence, one at the start and one at the end. The start one is more interesting to me than to anyone else and may or may not be true, but I checked this morning. According to ChatGPT, I am now Australia's longest ever Arts Minister. Because I found out through ChatGPT, I have no idea whether it's true.

I asked them for a list of ranking orders and the first list left out about half of the arts ministers Australia had. I checked it three or four times. One day I'll find out if it's true, but it won't be through checking with ChatGPT. Anyway, that's the first thing I'll say about AI. The stuff you'll want to hear will be at the end.

This is the first speech that I've given about literature, writing, and publishing since the creation of Writing Australia. Let me say a little bit about Writing Australia before I get to more about the mission and the place that writing holds in the fabric of our nation.

When we came back to office in 2022 we really only had one arts election promise, which was to re-establish cultural policy and to bring it back within six months, which was an ambitious timeframe, and we got there within eight. The first cultural policy, even though Gough Whitlam often gets credit, well, he didn't in fact have a cultural policy. As such, the first cultural policy was when Paul Keating was Prime Minister and Michael Lee was the Arts Minister, and that was Creative Nation. That was towards the end of the Keating Government, and it lasted a bit over a year before it was then thrown out.

The next cultural policy was when Julia Gillard was Prime Minister and Simon Crean was the Arts Minister, and that was Creative Australia. Simon Crean was gone as Arts Minister by the end of the week and I came in for the final six months of the Government and implemented Creative Australia. And then after six months of Creative Australia, the government changed, and the cultural policy was turfed out.

I was determined that our new cultural policy would start right at the start of the life of the Government so it had time to be embedded, and that it would be a five-year document so that there was a demand for it to be refreshed.

Revive was launched in 2023. It established Creative Australia and established a number of bodies within Creative Australia - a First Nations board; a board called Creative Workplaces, acknowledging the fact that people who devote their lives to the arts are not engaging in a hobby they are workers as well and deserve the respect as such; Music Australia, which got set up very quickly because we had an area of neglect in terms of contemporary music being viewed that it would look after itself. With what was happening, in particular with streaming and loss of different forms of income and the challenges for live music, it meant that it needed an area of focus, if something that we had always expected - that soundtrack to life in Australia - was to survive into the future.

Then, what we were originally - in the cultural policy - going to call Writers Australia. It was Christos Tsiolkas who made the case - he kept wanting to call it Writers and Readers because he wanted the whole involvement, not just the writers, to be part of the focus. We were conscious that Music Australia hadn't been Musicians and Listeners, and we were trying to work out how we would deal with this. We ended up landing on the title Writing Australia as something broader than writers, acknowledging there's an entire ecology of people there.

For most Australians, the interaction in your own mind, is very much with the author. That's how you feel. Unless, of course, it's something where the writing is being done, where there is another voice in between; for playwrights, for screenwriters. In which case, for the audience member, you often feel it is the actor communicating directly to you, even though every word and every movement often has been carefully chosen by a writer before that.

These stories tell the story of Australian creativity, not necessarily the story of Australia. One of our first big novels to receive international recognition in early times would have been Thomas Keneally with Schindler's Ark as it was originally published. Tom has taken us back and forth, whether it be Jimmie Blacksmith, whether it be The Playmaker with the beginning of theatre in Australia, whether it be back overseas to Versailles in Gossip from the Forest, or whether it be more recently with Two Old Men Dying, going right back to stories that go to the heart of the start of this continent.

Similarly, we've had authors that have taken us across the landscape in a tradition of Patrick White with Voss doing that journey, expedition and interaction with stories of people who arrived more recently and people who've been here since the first sunrise. Probably most recently replicated by Tim Winton with The Shepherd’s Hut, that concept across the continent.

For myself, my own stories that I was trying to make sense of as an activist in Young Labor, was informed by Amanda Lohrey letting me know about The Morality of Gentlemen, and what had actually happened in the moments where the party that I was forming a great love of and interest in, how it split in the most vicious ways. In stories that I’d read something about in terms of history but I was given a window into the emotions of what it felt like to be there in those years it was split, because Amanda took me there long before the world of The Labyrinth.

I remember Kate Grenville comparing to me - on the opening night of the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Secret River - the literary form, to the screenplay, to the live theatre play. She said when she watches cinema, for her, she goes straight to what’s missing, what was in the novel, what have they cut out, because cinema can be so literal. Whereas with theatre, she felt it was very much a cousin or a companion to the book because it was able to be so metaphoric in so many ways.

Those First Nations stories, whether it was the conversations that Sally Morgan took off with in My Place or more recently what Claire Coleman has done in the genius of Terra Nullius, taking us to a story of First Nations where we think we have an historical distance before we realise we're reading a novel about ourselves. I've gone very much to the more detailed form of literature and novels which I personally love. But with the love of poetry that I have, I have to acknowledge the extraordinary genius - and sometimes it's the same people - David Malouf from An Imaginary Life, which is a novel but more of a prose poem, through to Johnno, clearly a novel, through to Typewriter Music, with the precision of language and then short stories with Antipodes. I've been very inspired for many years over that work, The Empty Lunch-tin, and what that says about poverty.

Writers make sure that we know about each other. There are so many people who would have had their view of homelessness changed through meeting Lola in the Mirror. There are people who would have their own childhood, watching the same popular culture and having the same board games in their bedrooms, realising that it could be a very different household filled with books, where a boy swallows the universe.

All of these stories are not simply important for the representation that people have in seeing their own world and seeing their own story, but in understanding each other. Sometimes the creativity takes us to other parts of the world. Christos Tsiolkas will take us all the way to Damascus and then back to Melbourne, and then with Seven and a Half, into the creative process itself of putting a novel together. In all of this, we learn about each other in the most personal way.

Of course, I can't talk about writing without acknowledging the extraordinary playwrights we have and without acknowledging in particular the recent phenomenal international success and importance of what Suzie Miller has done with Prima Facie. I remember sitting in that beautiful little theatre- well it wasn't beautiful, It was a terrible little theatre. The Griffin Theatre. But watching at the end of that first season of Prima Facie, people not being able to move at the end of the show. To know now we have something that's not just gone over the world but is used in some countries now as compulsory training for judges so that they understand exactly what's happening.

In all of this, in every example, whether it be Sarah Holland-Batt with The Jaguar,  sharing the experience of grief, or the other examples I've gone through, in every example we are seeing something that an author can do, that a writer can do, that a machine cannot do, and that is, we are dealing with how people feel. We are dealing with the emotions of feelings. This is where literature does something different to any other art form and why it needs a special place separate to any other art form.

We've got behind it, we're getting behind it with Writing Australia, getting behind it with the public lending rights. We've had to make sure the public lending rights have caught up with the digital age in that when libraries started to switch to e-books, authors' incomes weren’t being matched because it wasn't in the physical form. We've changed that. That was basically 25 per cent of what lending had become, and made sure that that's part of authors' incomes as well.

Writing Australia will be able to take this to new levels. Writing Australia has a dedicated budget, but I've seen what Music Australia has been able to do. Instead of it being a constant pitch to the minister of ‘here's an idea, here’s an idea’, and we're deciding between competing good ideas for a limited budget, based on our limited knowledge. We largely know about your work as consumers, not as producers. To have a board of people who are involved in the whole production of what literature is, of what writing is, as to how you get that out, means that, yes, we had more money than we previously had for literature. Yes, we needed to because literature and writing in all its forms has historically been the most underfunded of all the art forms. The Australia Council used to always recognise that, they never found a way of being able to deal with it. Dedicated funds is a way to deal with it. A board of experts is a way to deal with it. Of all the boards, and you know, my boards end up being more controversial than most, that's the nature of people who are for culture wars. I don't think I've ever had a stronger positive reception to the announcement of a board than I've had to Writing Australia, and I want to thank everybody who's agreed to go on that.

Of course as well as the funding decisions, they will decide Australia's first Poet Laureate, which I'm really looking forward to. Both as somebody who has continued since the age of 18 to read a poem out loud each day and as the local member of Parliament who has in Bankstown, Australia's largest regular gathering of poets, for us to acknowledge that art form in that specific way of a Poet Laureate is well beyond time and I'm looking forward to what comes of it.

With all of this, there is something fundamentally different in writing to every other art form. Every other art form relies on one of the senses to understand what's going on. Now for writing, obviously, it might be your eyes, it might be your fingertips, to be able to receive the information. But what you are receiving is different to any other art form. When you hear music, there is the physical sensation coming into your ears and other people are hearing the same thing. When you look at visual art, you'll have your own perspective of it, but what you are looking at is the same thing. With the experience of live performance, you might have a different perspective, a different seat, but you are watching the same experience, in the same moment, together. Similarly, if it is immersive art, there might be scent, there might be touch, there could be a whole lot of other things, but you are physically using your senses to be able to hear, smell, taste the story.

But with writing, the shape of the letters, they're not the story. The language creates a picture, a smell, a taste, an excitement that lives entirely in the mind of the reader. It is different to any other art form. It means that we will see different characters, all of us in seeing the same story. We'll feel a slightly different intensity, but we will all be taken on the same roller coaster of emotion and narrative that writers have put together. The narrative then ultimately, how we picture it, how we see it, how we feel it, lives within our own imagination, it has a personal depth that no other art form can match. A personal depth that no other art form can come close to.

That means in terms of the protection of that, there are things that you need. You need some things from government. You need us to make sure that increasingly, we respect the fact that people who work in the various art forms, that they have the respect of being workers, that we are not placed in situations where this can only ever be a second job. You need to make sure that writing is understood to be something that should not only be available for those who can afford it, that people, regardless of background, regardless of economic circumstance or postcode, regardless of whether they have a heritage that goes back to the first sunrise in Australia or whether their family arrived very, very recently, still have a similar opportunity to have their story written and for the rest of Australia to have access to be able to understand and learn.

You deserve protection from theft, as every Australian deserves protection from theft. It's quoted on the front page of the paper today from my friend Peter Garrett, I’m glad he said it. Someone asked me today, are you going to repeat it? I said it on Q+A ages ago. Use of your work for a commercial purpose, for example, for which you have not authorised, is theft. That's what it is. We have copyright laws. We have no plans, no intention, no appetite to be weakening those copyright laws based on this draft report that's floating around. We'll show the Independent Productivity Commission that it deserves a level of respect. They have a particular role that they are charged to deal with. But so do I. I respect their role, and their role is to look at things entirely through a lens of productivity.

My role as Australia's Arts Minister, is to also respect that a nation has culture and that people have a soul. There is a connection through the arts, through literature, through all the art forms, right through to some of the challenges that voiceover actors are having at the moment. There's a massive decline in their work, where not only is the work sometimes now being done by a machine, but right at the moment the machine is able to emulate their personal voice. There are issues to be worked through. I don't fear technology, I just know we need to be able to respond to technology.

One of the things we did, and I spoke earlier about establishing Creative Australia, was I wanted to have a body which was able to defend the arts and to put submissions into these sorts of inquiries that would be true to the work of artists. When I look at what Creative Australia put into the Productivity Commission, I am really proud of that mission. Really proud. They referred to the fact that there can't be theft. They referred to the fact that there has to be labelling. They referred to the needs that we have to be able to protect and preserve Australian culture. There are normal processes that happen with respect to the Productivity Commission. What they put out at the moment is a draft report and I completely respect their role. But let me say, I respect your role. We need your role.

I have apparently now had my role for longer than others. At some point we'll find out whether that's true. Whether it's true or not, as long as the Prime Minister says, ‘what portfolios would you like’, my first answer is the arts. My second answer is, and then I will do what you need me to so I can have the arts. I've always had that approach. There are many portfolios where you get to affect how people live, and that's really important work. There are very few portfolios where you get to affect why people live, and how people feel. That’s the business that you’re in. We’re a better country for it, and long may we defend it.