TRANSCRIPT - PLENARY ADDRESS – WORLD CONFERENCE ON CREATIVE ECONOMY - INDONESIA - THURSDAY, 22 OCTOBER 2026

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

PLENARY ADDRESS – WORLD CONFERENCE ON CREATIVE ECONOMY

JAKARTA, INDONESIA

THURSDAY, 22 OCTOBER 2026

TONY BURKE: Minister Riefky, fellow ministers, senior officials and friends all.

One of the concepts of the conference, of the global conference that has brought us all here today, is to make sure that when we talk about investment and our economies, we are dealing with the creative economy as well.

What I would like to do today, though, is to talk about both sorts of investment. The economic investment that matters and the cultural investment which is irreplaceable.

Because we always want to make sure that in pursuing one, we never accidentally lose sight of the other.

There are many parts of investment where you don't need to think about both like this.

Many industries where you can simply look at the dollars and that's the whole story.

But with the creative economy, we are dealing with investment and dollars that are part of the economy that really matter.

That have often not been taken economically seriously, I think because they bring so much joy.

As though somehow bringing joy makes them less economically valuable.

But the other thing we mustn't lose sight of is that creative economy, the cultural part of wherever you live in the world, also defines how we see ourselves, how we see each other, and country by country, community by community, it is the main way that the rest of the world sees us.

What I'd like to do in the time available to me today is give a sense of how Australia has been wrestling with these issues.

Every country is different.

Some of these issues will be relevant to yourselves, some of them won't be.

But I'd like to explain what we've been wrestling with and what we've been working through.

For a start, for a long time, and I first became our Arts Minister back in 2013, I had a time when I was away from it and then came back again in 2022. So I've been with the portfolio for a long time.

In Australia, when I first became Arts Minister, what's now 13 years ago, I was very conscious that I wanted to make sure I was making the argument that only an arts minister could make.

And so rather than talk about the economic benefit, I tended to talk about the intrinsic value of the art, of the music, of the painting, of the story.

And then COVID hit.

And I realised that for so many people, there was a view, say at a stage production of a show or a concert, that the people who built the stage had real jobs, the people who sold the tickets had real jobs, the people who showed you to your seat or took the ticket had real jobs, but somehow the artists themselves, the creator, was viewed as they were being paid to do a hobby.

And so from that moment, I realised from Australia's perspective, we had failed in the public debate to make it clear that because someone is creative doesn't prevent it from being a real job.

And we need to not only give them the respect as creators, but also give them the respect as workers.

This brings me to two challenges that technology is bringing to us.

They are access to audience and ownership of content.

I want to deal with each of those in turn.

Because there are opportunities and there are threats.

No campaign has ever successfully said, well, we will just resist the technology.

It's been argued at different times ever since the Industrial Revolution and the argument that we can somehow stop technology has never won.

And there are great opportunities in the technology.

Allow me for a moment just to focus on contemporary music.

A contemporary musician who has their music up on a streaming platform, who used to only have access to the audience that turned up to the venue, technically has access to audience all around the world.

But as a country, for Australia, we lose something if the Australian audience is no longer hearing the Australian music.

We want our own works to be the soundtrack to life in Australia.

So while there is an opportunity to reach the broadest audience, there is also a challenge in terms of making sure that the local audience doesn't somehow lose contact.

The Australian experience here is fundamentally different to the Indonesian experience.

The Indonesian experience with the music streaming platforms has been overwhelmingly, your own music.

Other music is available as well, but your own music is being returned to you.

In Australia, our music is forming a smaller and smaller share year by year as to what Australians are being exposed to on these platforms.

I think part of it is as a country where overwhelmingly most people only speak the English language, it means that overwhelmingly people are listening to music in English, and therefore we are competing immediately with the biggest English-speaking music markets in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Australia is a relatively small population for the size of the land mass that we have, but also, compared to those big competitors, it has meant on those platforms our own sense of being able to hear our own music has been becoming harder and harder.

Overwhelmingly now, the music that Australians are listening to will be greatest hits albums of bands that weren't even new when I first started listening to music.

We, if we care about culture, need to find a way through where the experience of living in a country allows you to have put to you the art, the music, the stories that speak to your experience, while still exposing you to the world, while still introducing the world to you and giving you that wonderful access of technology.

But we must not end up in a situation where those platforms effectively provide almost no pathway through to a career for the new musicians who are telling the new stories and performing, hopefully, to the new audience that they're not actively being able to reach because of the way the algorithm is operating.

The way we've responded to this as a government is to promote live. We've focused very much on live music, on festivals, on venues, because in doing that, we are trying to make sure that our artists can still have a career, that they can still reach an audience, but it means that great opportunity that would otherwise be there through these new platforms is something that, at this point in time, isn't working for us.

With movie streaming, we saw a similar situation where Australian content had been insisted on, on free-to-air television.

We had a quota system. But on the streaming platforms, a number of streaming platforms were doing a really good job in providing new Australian content. One of them was doing zero new Australian content.

And so last year, for the first time, we introduced streaming quotas for the video online content where those streaming companies, for the money they spend purchasing work, they have to spend 10 per cent of that money on producing Australian work to try to make sure that when the streaming is available to you, people will choose what they want, but we just need to make sure our own stories are on the menu.

Those quotas have made sure that we're able to do that.

The final challenge isn't from algorithms. The final challenge comes from artificial intelligence, where, once again, there is both opportunity and risk.

The opportunity is clear.

Like with all technology, artists will use artificial intelligence, and they'll use it to create new work and to create fantastic work.

Probably the most famous of the works that's made use of artificial intelligence would be what was the final song released by The Beatles, Now and Then, which had existed on an audio cassette for decades, unable to be turned into a song because of all the background noise that was on the audio cassette.

A recording of John Lennon at the piano run through artificial intelligence was able to separate his voice.

Having separated his voice, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr could then come back together and release a true creative work that they had creative control over.

That's the artists in control of artificial intelligence.

The great challenge for artists has been the first wave of artificial intelligence has taken place without their control, where work has simply been taken from them to be trained on, and then that work can be reproduced in ways that means their stolen product was trained on to be used to now compete with them and to do them out of business.

Some of this training has been for different reasons.

For example, some of the literature that's been taken has been taken where the learning is on grammar and on syntax rather than necessarily trying to put forward a competing work.

That doesn't change the fact that work was taken without the right to be able to use it.

Anyone, no matter where they are in the world, no matter what their career, when you're wanting to be able to drive economic investment, as we talk about the creative economy, principle number one is no economy works if theft is legalised.

Trying to wrestle with this will be one of the great policy changes of our generation.

The capability of artificial intelligence is incredibly important, and those who might want to do us harm in my home affairs portfolio have the technology.

We need it too to be able to defend our people, to be able to provide our security.

So the technology itself isn't something that we would fight with, but the concept of how it operates cannot be from a deficit model where the artist automatically loses their creative control.

The challenges here just aren't only on the training and the inputs, they also go to the outputs. Let me give you the simplest example.

First Nations art in Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, will have many rules around it.

Some art will be governed by a principle called Tjukurpa. In this principle, there will be very strict rules as to who is allowed to reproduce certain symbols and the cultural ownership, even within the community, as to who has authority to reproduce that work.

If you go to most of the AI models and you ask them to provide you with a work of art in the style of Australian Aboriginal art, within about 60 seconds, there will be a work on your screen that will be violating what are deep cultural rules that have existed in Australia for 65,000 years.

It will put forward a work which is then potentially competing on the market with work that is other people's livelihoods.

This is where we need, as we work our way through regulation, to not only look at the concept of training, to not only look at the concept of whether we can find a way to monetise for artists, to first give them control over whether their work is used at all and, if it is used, to have this as a new line of income for them.

It is not unreasonable for some of the profits to go to those who provided the foundational work.

Similarly, there is the question of artists.

If we think what it is about the creative economy that we love, yes, the economic bit, the dollars, that all matters. That provides livelihoods. It can drive communities. It can turn around communities and areas.

But there is also something which we should never shy away from, which is the way that the arts touch the heart, move the spirit, reach the soul.

These concepts need to be treasured as well.

I believe it matters whether or not, when you listen to music, you are listening to something that interacts with another person.

I do believe that a so-called work of art that is purely machine-generated by definition lacks that concept of soul, lacks that direct concept of the beauty of human creativity.

When we deal with the challenges for the creative economy, new technology that is coming to us is both opportunity and risk.

In Australia—and I suspect these conversations, as I've had with my counterpart, Minister Riefky today—these conversations will continue as we share our experiences and as we try different ways to interact.

Effectively, the task and the mission of our generation is like no generation before.

We have a task in front of us that goes right to the heart of human creativity.

We decide whether it matters. We decide whether it's rewarded. We decide where it sits within the dignity of community.

I want our artists to be able to have good careers. I love the idea of them being able to draw income and opportunity from all around the world.

For me, as I'm sure it is true for the communities throughout the multicultural nation of Indonesia, as it is for the multicultural nation of Australia, even if the only audience is the local audience, the fact that they are seeing the work that speaks to them matters.

The fact that they are seeing their stories and hearing their stories told back to them has an inherent dignity that we must defend.

The task before all of us, the task that I'm wrestling with in Australia and the task that I believe will be for our generation, will be whether or not, in 20 years' time, whoever has our roles is able to still say that the creative sector allows people to see themselves, to learn about each other and for the world to know us.

Thank you