How do we make a case for public investment in the arts without suggesting that every project deserves funding?

Yeah, I mean, I agree, right? Like art is always going to be made, right? And people are always going to create art because they're human beings and art is integral to what it is to be a human.

So yeah, it's a good question.

Like why should we fund the arts? And the answer to that, I think, is pretty simple, which is if you fund the arts, you'll get more art.

It's a bit like saying, would we have health care if we got rid of all of the public funding for health care? Yes, we would.

We'd have health care for rich people.

We'd have doctors who are really expensive.

Do you think there's a danger that the arts sector will become so focused on fighting the government for funding that it forgets about fighting for audiences?

I suppose my question is why do you think that investment in art is so fundamentally important not just for the state but also for us as human beings on this planet?

Yeah, there's a couple of answers to that.

The first, I think, and the most fundamental answer is that art is part of who we are as human beings.

So to make art, to engage in creativity, to be an audience member, to play an instrument, to tell a story, these are fundamentally part of what it is to be human.

There's archaeological evidence of musical instruments that are almost 40,000 years old There's rock art in Moorojuga in Western Australia that is nearly as old as that as well.

So we know that the practice of art, the making of art goes back well before human civilization in the sense of people living in cities or agriculture, the wheel, some of these fundamental technologies that we think are very old and constituent of what it is to be a human being.

Art and the practice of art fundamentally predates that.

You kind of answered my next question, but I've had many conversations with young emerging artists and artist-run initiatives, and I've noticed that there's these common anxieties that have been felt that working or have it like work in the arts there's this expectation that a lot of it must be conditioned to voluntary work or unpaid labor and I guess with that kind of like I think the phrase you use like artists that they can't just be artists anymore I guess what Could you say to kind of ease or perhaps provide an optimistic outlook for artists, especially young artists that feel like they're really trapped or relegated to these, to unpaid labor and perhaps like committing to other places where they can get income from because the arts are so underfunded or undercut?

And what was making you laugh before?

Yeah, well, I mean, I find this whole discussion really amusing, right, because you're hearing a lot of politicians use a lot of phrases that I think they don't understand.

So you're hearing both James Patterson and Andrew Charlton, both the Labor and the Liberal politicians talk about frivolity.

Frontier models, you know, like we're riding along on a horse into the sunset.

But actually, what is the sort of special, you know, special source that these frontier models have? Maybe they're six months ahead of the, you know, open weight models that are being made in China.

Maybe they're 12 months ahead.

There's probably nothing particularly amazingly special about these frontier models that's anything better than would arrive in Australia on a slightly slower timeframe than but with probably much more ability for us to actually use it and control it.

great

How do you, how do you see this present moment in terms of artistic freedom? Is it distinct?

Uh, it is distinct.

Uh, things are bad, and they're getting worse.

You're right to point to a number of festivals that have disintegrated in the wake of overt censorship.

We've seen arts ministers and premiers intervene into cultural policy in very overt ways.

We're seeing, uh, I think, a chilling effect on the speech and the expression of artists across a number of different institutional settings, and that ranges all the way from, uh, what should be the, the premier honor in Australian visual art to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale, the world's most famous visual arts festival.

But it ramifies all the way down to, uh, poets and writers giving workshops at the State Library of Victoria being disinvited because of their views on the conflict in the Middle East.

Well, we've only had an arts policy in Australia, what, since the '70s?