Eve of budget address to highlight need to reconsider Australia’s Cultural Policy

On the eve of this week’s Federal budget, celebrated cultural economist Professor David Throsby is to review Australia’s attempts to deliver a sustainable, wide-ranging arts and cultural policy.

Professor Throsby will be making a presention based on his new Platform Paper, Arts, Politics, Money: Revisiting Australia’s Cultural Policy, in Sydney on this Tuesday evening (1st May), reassessing the arts within wider cultural industries in Australian and in Britain, considering the role the arts can play in ‘soft diplomacy’ and their centrality to the development of remote Indigenous communities.

Professor Throsby argues that governments should remain committed to strong cultural policies, and suggests some specific, and eminently practical, policy ideas along the way, suggesting that Federal Minister for the Arts, Mitch Fifield should initiate a fresh look at the present state of the creative arts in Australia.

He suggests that the arts could be “sold” to the public as an initiative to improve the ways in which Government and the Minister facilitate the production, distribution and consumption of the arts in Australia, to the benefit of communities across the country.

In 2006, Professor Throsby wrote the landmark Platform Paper No.7, urging that in this changing world “a cultural policy would be a powerful tool with which to show what we really value about being Australian”.

Professor Throsby is Distinguished Professor of Economics at Macquarie University and is currently on a World Bank project in the Middle East evaluating investment in the heritage rehabilitation of historic cores in towns and cities.

The Currency House presentation will be held from 6 to 8pm at Dentons Seminar Room, Level 16, 77 Castlereagh Street, Sydney (between King/Market Streets).

Click here to attend. 

Image: David Throsby.

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