Across regional Australia, arts organisations, councils, and cultural institutions are reporting growing difficulty in recruiting the next generation of trained, locally embedded arts workers. Emerging research from LabNorth – a consortium of arts researchers and community stakeholders based in Townsville, Cairns, Darwin and Broome – points to a troubling pipeline problem: it is becoming increasingly difficult to source young, qualified arts professionals from within regional communities.
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In North Queensland, the closure of tertiary creative arts programs such as James Cook University’s creative arts offerings has significantly disrupted local training pathways. Previously, graduates from programs like JCU’s Creative Industries degree frequently moved into the regional arts workforce through casual and project-based roles in local organisations, often leading to sustained careers within the sector. This pipeline once ensured that arts positions were filled by professionals with both formal training and deep contextual understanding of regional communities.
Today, that pathway has weakened. Creative industry positions are increasingly filled by individuals without specialised training or by those from outside the region. While these professionals contribute valuable experience, there is a growing need for more structured opportunities to cultivate the next generation of locally trained arts workers who possess a deep, nuanced understanding of the region’s cultural context – an understanding that has historically played a vital role in shaping and enriching the local creative landscape.
This issue reflects a broader national concern. The Creative Workforce Scoping Study Report (released by Creative Australia in March this year, in partnership with Service and Creative Skills Australia (SaCSA) under the National Cultural Policy Revive) identifies critical workforce shortages in production, technical, and business support roles – particularly within galleries and performing arts organisations. The report emphasises that these gaps are especially pronounced in regional and remote areas, where training and education models developed in metropolitan centres often fail to meet the distinct needs, knowledge systems, and expectations of regional communities.
Australia’s mid-sized regional cities are not immune. They too suffer from diminished local education offerings and limited career pathways, which in turn restrict the development of a locally grounded, professionally trained arts workforce – further widening the gap between regional cultural potential and institutional capacity.
The Cairns context
In Cairns, the workforce trends reflect national concerns. According to the Cairns Regional Council’s Arts and Industry 2022/23 Report, the median age of the arts and culture workforce is 43 – higher than the Queensland state average of 39. While 71% of these workers are in professional or managerial roles, only 34% hold a degree or higher, compared to 41% state-wide. Arts workers in regional cities are out of sync with the longer-term outlook, such as the Australian Universities Accord, which outlines a vision for 80% of Australians to hold a tertiary qualification by 2050.
The 2019-2023 State of the Arts in Cairns (SoARTS) Reports, commissioned by Cairns Regional Council, also underscore the importance of youth engagement as a regional strategic priority, identifying education, career pathways, and long-term retention as critical challenges. Locally, Cairns is punching above its weight. Cairns boasts a vibrant ecosystem of youth arts initiatives, including the Cairns Regional Council’s Strategy for Young Creatives, Flame.Arts, Youth Week, the Energy exhibition at Tanks Arts Centre, the Children’s Festival, the Youth Urban Art program, outreach programs from the Cairns Museum and Cairns Art Gallery, youth-focused showcases at the Tanks and Bulmba-ja Arts Centres and TAFE’s Cultural Arts courses for Indigenous students – together creating diverse, practical, and inspiring pathways for the next generation of regional creatives.
But it’s not enough to retain and train the next generation of youth arts workers, with the sector facing significant challenges including the loss of youth engagement, limited youth-oriented organisations, closure of arts organisations such as The Young Company Theatre (TYC) and a lack of young people in leadership roles. Shrinking tertiary pathways, high study costs, weak school-to-industry connections, disappearing youth programs, prohibitive ticket prices and a disconnect between traditional venues and youth culture all contribute to a growing brain drain as young creatives leave the region in search of opportunities elsewhere, or forego further education altogether.
Read: Regional training program tackles technical theatre jobs
As a significant portion of the current workforce nears retirement, the need to support a generational transition has never been more urgent. Developing a local arts workforce with deep regional ties – rather than relying on talent imported from elsewhere – is essential to the sustainability of cultural ecosystems in northern Australia.
The education crisis: the $50,000 barrier
Regional universities are often engines of their communities, and the disinvestment in the arts in regional universities like CQU and JCU is a significant factor in the equation here. The Albanese Government has a rare opportunity through the Universities Accord to undo the damage wrought by the Job-ready Graduates (JRG) scheme. Introduced in 2021, JRG inflated the cost of many arts and creative arts degrees to over $50,000, with the Commonwealth covering just 3% of total fees and shifting the burden almost entirely to students.
Read: The misguided misfires of university pricing controls
This policy has an outsized impact on students from low socio-economic backgrounds, Indigenous communities and those who are the first in their families to attend university – groups that make up a significant proportion of the student population in regional Australia. Unsurprisingly, enrolments in creative programs have dropped across regional universities, with damaging implications. James Cook University closed its Creative Arts program in 2024. Southern Cross University in Lismore has put its arts and creative arts degrees on indefinite ‘pause’. In the latest casualty, the University of Tasmania earlier this month announced a proposal for major cuts to its arts and humanities courses.
In the February 2025 issue of Australian Humanities Review, Emeritus Professor Graeme Turner offered a stark warning:
‘Back in 2014, when Kylie Brass and I published Mapping the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences in Australia, it was already clear … regional universities in Australia were heading for a crisis. At the time, there were certain areas … already so depleted as to be no longer viable without corrective intervention – teaching in foreign languages, for instance, and in the creative arts. Over the decade … Australia has continued to make its way towards that outcome … where even their survival across the Group of Eight can’t be guaranteed any longer. But the situation in the regional universities is even more critical. … [P]rograms that required creative arts performance or production training— theatre, say, or film and video—are almost all gone.’
Despite rhetorical commitments to regional equity in the Australian Universities Accord, practical support for arts and humanities education in regional universities continues to decline, and Minister Clare must put paid to his promises to support regional student pathways, for students from any background, no matter what they wish to study.
Arts education as infrastructure
The problem is, arts and creative arts enrolments per capita in Australia have not declined since the introduction of the $50,000 Arts degree – because in metropolitan Australia where students are much less likely to be first-in-family to university or come from a low SES background, demand for these degrees in elite Go8 universities has not materially declined since its introduction in 2021.
But at regional universities, where these degrees typically attract the most vulnerable people in a community for whom an arts degree is both transformative and now materially unaffordable, arts degrees are not luxuries – they are necessary infrastructure. They train local professionals for roles in councils, galleries, festivals, and creative industries. Regional universities don’t just produce graduates – they produce community stewards, many of whom stay local and support Indigenous-led and place-based initiatives. Arts education drives local economic value in a myriad of ways – not least by anchoring arts workers in the regions where they’re most needed.
Research around shifting notions of value as it pertains to arts and culture shows that the value of arts and culture to communities and to nations extends beyond economics to include critical social and cultural outcomes, essential for resilience and identity in regional communities.
This view is supported internationally. The UK-based Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre recently showed that areas with more arts and culture workers also have higher levels of cultural participation. The implication is clear: cultural plans must not only foster engagement but also invest in sustaining a local creative workforce – especially in underserved regions. LabNorth argues that the future creative workforce needs to be a part of the Developing Northern Australia Policy, and that Developing Northern Australia must be careful to avoid a false dichotomy between development as mining and defence and cultural development and wellbeing.
Market failures and generational loss
There is a place for the arts in development which requires both regional and national support. Over the last three decades, as the Commonwealth Government has increasingly adopted a neoliberal funding model for higher education, regional universities have not benefited significantly from private revenue sources such as international students. As funding models have shifted towards marketisation, non-vocational degrees such as the Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Creative Arts have been the hardest hit, especially outside capital cities.
Yet, as the Deans of Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities noted in recently published reports, graduates of these fields are in demand, contributing cumulatively to multi-million-dollar industries in arts and creative arts. Indeed, research on cultural value highlights a broader policy blind spot: the long-term, generational benefits of arts education are routinely ignored in favour of short-term KPIs. The result isn’t just underinvestment; it’s a failure of imagination.
This crisis cannot be solved with another five-year roadmap. Nor can it afford to be delayed by the long rollout of the proposed Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC), designed to oversee national higher education policy.
The immediate priority, now the Albanese Labor Government has a clear majority in the Upper House, must be to reverse the JRG scheme and reinstate fair and equitable funding for arts and creative degrees. Prioritising these degrees as essential training for regional infrastructure – and as vital investments in the next generation – requires a government that genuinely values local knowledge systems, creative careers, and the long-term sustainability of regional communities.
Equitable access to arts education is one of the most powerful levers we have to strengthen regional communities. In places where generational renewal is urgently needed, it could mean the difference between thriving cultural ecosystems and long-term decline.
Learn more about LabNorth.
This article was ammended after publication at 4:33pm on 27 May 2025 to correctly identify the SaCSA: Service and Creative Skills Australia. ArtsHub apologises for the error.
