Members of the arts and cultural sector are invited to help shape Australia’s next National Cultural Policy, the successor to 2023’s five-year policy, Revive.
The consultation process invites submissions from the cultural and creative sector – and the broader community – to help identify the structures and settings needed to support and grow Australia’s arts and cultural sector into the future.
‘Your feedback will help lay the foundation where, for the first time, there will have been consecutive national cultural policies,’ said the Federal Minister for the Arts, the Hon Tony Burke MP, in a media statement yesterday (23 March).
The next National Cultural Policy – quick links
Town hall consultation sessions
Alongside the submissions process, which will be open for the next two months, the Federal Government will also hold town hall sessions around the country to directly engage with the community, details of which are yet to be announced.
Special Envoy for the Arts Susan Templeman said: ‘The strength of Revive is that it is based on the cultural sector’s own priorities. It has been heartening to see so many of the ideas shared with us during the first consultations in 2022 become a reality through the delivery of this policy.
‘The upcoming consultation process will ensure that our cultural policy continues to reflect the arts community’s ambitions and help realise its potential.
‘I look forward to continuing these important conversations with artists and cultural organisations right across Australia, where I can,’ Templeman said.
Building the next National Cultural Policy
Five expert panels have been appointed to provide feedback on the new cultural policy, each focusing on one of the five pillars of Revive: First Nations First, A Place for Every Story, Centrality of the Artist, Strong Cultural Infrastructure, and Engaging the Audience.
The expert panels will inform the Minister on key issues and themes raised through the public consultation process, as well as the newly appointed policy advisory group.
Speaking with ArtsHub, Burke says an announcement about the membership of the expert panels and the policy advisory group has yet to be finalised, ‘but I’ll be using the same structure that we did last time’.
Burke adds: ‘It needs to be remembered that those advisory panels, they don’t become the key opinions that are the only opinion to be listened to.
‘It’s effectively their role to sift through every submission and make sure that we’re not missing anything. It’s a guarantee that good ideas find their way through, even if they are a very small mention in a single submission.’
By way of example, Burke points to the new position of Australian Poet Laureate, which was mentioned in ‘very few submissions … [but] one of the panels picked it up. It got elevated. The full advisory group was excited about it as well. And it went from an idea that I had never considered at the start of consultation to being one of the things that the Prime Minister referred to at the launch.’
Nominations for the Australian Poet Laureate closed on 17 March and an announcement about the successful candidate is expected in October.
Potential areas of focus for the next National Cultural Policy
Revive: a place for every story, a story for every place has seen 85% of its key platforms delivered to date, according to the Federal Government, including the establishment of Music Australia and Writing Australia.
Burke tells ArtsHub that the next National Cultural Policy will not necessarily have a similar artform focus.
‘It wasn’t that [music and literature] were more worthy than other artforms. There were very specific needs that we were looking at. Whether we need to go further with new artforms, I don’t have a fixed view. I don’t want that to be the test, because effectively, you’re only getting that sort of focus if we have a really big structural problem, but that’s the only way we can try to fix them, and that’s what we were doing there,’ he explains.
‘Literature had forever been acknowledged to be the most underfunded art form for the former Australia Council, and no one had found a way of resolving that. Even George Brandis – who I criticised a lot – it was one of the things that he pointed out when he became Arts Minister, that literature was always being underfunded, and funding just tended to gear itself towards performing arts much more strongly.
‘So to establish Writing Australia … was a very deliberate decision to say, “Well, here’s the money that can’t go to anything else, and we’ll have a dedicated Board to be able to deal with it”.’
Similarly, establishing Music Australia was done in order to have one body that would ‘deal with government funded work, philanthropic funded work and full commercial work,’ Burke says. Creating the new body was also necessary to assist the contemporary music sector post-Covid.
‘Effectively, contemporary music was the key area that we looked at where, in the past, it had been able to run without any need for government, completely commercial, but was now facing a very different market.
‘In the face of that, we were looking at what had been one of the most popular forms … of Australian culture starting to become harder and harder and harder, at a rate of knots, for people to make a livelihood. And … once you’re going down that pathway, it can be existential.
‘The Music Australia decision was very deliberate, to step into the commercial world for the sector that was going through the most existential change,’ the Minister tells ArtsHub.
Spotlighting market development and international engagement
Burke says he is ‘really interested’ in strengthening opportunities for market development and international engagement for Australian creatives, but first has to ‘get a collection of ideas through the consultation, and then I’ve got to go through the budget processes, so I can’t get commitments about where funding will be or where it won’t be,’ at this early stage of the process.
That said, he notes that Revive was very much focused on Australia’s connections with the Asia Pacific, which now becomes a focus for the Department of Foreign Affairs.
‘There is a different question, which is to say, how can we make sure that international income becomes real for Australian artists? Because that makes it more likely that more people can have a long career in the arts,’ Burke explains.
‘I don’t want to, in any way, retreat from the importance that we’ve put in Revive [on] Asia and the Pacific. But there is a separate question, which really comes down to pillar three [in Revive], on the centrality of the artist. How can we make sure that artists have long term careers?’
ArtsHub: Producers are keen but cautious about Asia Pacific touring opportunities
Burke gives the example of Sounds Australia, which has built connections with major international music festivals and ‘done a really good job at helping Australian artists find their way onto the billing’. He adds, ‘it’s in our national interest that our artists can open themselves up to the biggest possible international audience.
‘And obviously, you know, every extra appearance at a festival has the capacity to open a whole lot of doors and expands the audience, and expands the number of people who take an interest in you – and it can lead to additional tours in its own right as well,’ the Minister says.
How to make your submission to the new National Cultural Policy
To make a submission to Australia’s next National Cultural Policy, read the consultation paper and then complete the online form or upload a written statement.
Submissions are open to those with industry experience as well as the general public. The consultation period closes at 11.59pm AEST on 24 May 2026.
Town hall sessions about the new National Cultural Policy will be announced in due course.
