Cultural organisations are navigating one of the most precarious periods in recent memory. A decades-long sustainability crisis has intensified concerns about risk, leaving everything and everyone feeling more fragile – from funding models to the relationships that hold our institutions together.
Disputes linger until someone finally walks away. Executives and boards find themselves immobilised, anxiously hand‑wringing about the broader political and cultural dynamics that are shaping their realities.
Courage feels more elusive than ever. Yet the need for genuine safety inside our cultural institutions has never been more immediate or essential.
Within this climate, the language of cultural safety is starting to appear everywhere. But whose safety is being prioritised? And what happens when the rhetoric of safety is used to shut down the very conversations it was meant to illuminate?
What is cultural safety and how should we approach it?
Safety, especially cultural safety, was never designed to shield institutions from scrutiny or neutralise dissent.
In the field I work in, cultural safety is a practice that addresses the systems of oppression within institutions – recognising how power and privilege shape our interactions. It creates conditions where hard conversations can happen with care and respect, especially for those who’ve experienced marginalisation. It asks us to tell the difference between the discomfort that comes with learning and the behaviours that cause real harm. At its heart, cultural safety exposes the inequities built into our systems and helps us recognise and undo the biases that keep them in place.
Its origins lie in the advocacy of Māori health practitioners who exposed the systemic harms embedded in services that were meant to heal. Cultural safety emerged to sharpen our critical gaze, not anaesthetise it. When it is used to silence critique or protect institutional power, it loses its purpose and becomes meaningless.
Cultural safety in practice should be defined by the recipient’s experience, not the provider’s intent. Yet we have seen a litany of examples in which institutions have instrumentalised this language, imperceptibly retaining control over who gets to define harm, whose discomfort counts, and when the conversation is closed. This is how cultural safety risks being reduced to the management of feelings rather than being a catalyst for structural transformation.
Read: What I’ve learned creating a Cultural Safety Document
The situation at Adelaide Writers Week is not an exception. It is a warning. And it offers us a timely opportunity to reflect on what must shift within our institutions if we are serious about the safety we so readily invoke. The scholarship and practice of cultural safety contain lessons that, had they been embedded from the outset, could have prevented much of the harm to the individuals at the centre of this crisis and now felt across the sector. As someone who teaches and advocates for cultural safety, I want to see this practice restored to the heart of our governance, leadership, and operational systems, where it belongs.
What should cultural organisations learn from recent events?
First, we must acknowledge that this work is difficult, and that our systems are failing us. We cannot keep propping up structures that, by design, exclude, marginalise, and harm, especially those with the least access to power.
Governance is a critical place to begin. The co-opting of diverse lived experience to serve organisational interests, without granting people the authority to question or reshape entrenched practices, is producing dangerous and dysfunctional governance. We invite diverse leaders to the table only to constrain them through procedural dominance.
Read: Arts boards in crisis: how have we landed here, yet again?
We also need to relearn how to disagree – passionately and profoundly – and still find our way back to one another. Forced consensus has flattened us, leaving us weaker and more afraid. Consensus and cohesion will not protect us from conflict – they simply bind us into silent resistance. Only the understanding that emerges through free exchange, compromise, and co‑existence can create the social harmony we claim to seek. Our avoidance of conflict is our Achilles heel. We need to retrain ourselves to see conflict not as an ending, but as part of a cycle of learning, renewal, and transformation.
Recognising racism, calling out biases and centering accountability
We also need to be able to speak about the things that feel too hard to name. Cultural safety requires us to confront the forces that oppress and harm. We must be willing to recognise racism within our systems, practices, and processes if we are serious about eliminating it from our organisations. We must be prepared to call out the biases that shape our thinking and decision‑making, building critical self‑reflection as a core leadership skill.
While cultural safety is related to anti‑racism, it is not the same thing. Cultural safety exposes harm as experienced by those with less power, but anti‑racism demands a structural analysis of how power is produced, defended, and reproduced. When institutions invoke “safety” without naming racism, whiteness, or colonial authority, they often avoid the harder anti‑racist work while claiming moral legitimacy.
Accountability must also return to the centre of our engagements. We cannot outsource the consequences of our actions through insincere apologies that skim the surface of the harm we have caused. If the mantra of institutional lawyers is to never admit fault, cultural safety demands the opposite: a humble acknowledgment of our transgressions and a sincere commitment to repair. This requires deeply human capacities – listening, reflection and openness – not spin doctoring or defensive posturing.
Finally, we need to reclaim the centrality of our values. Our institutions have drifted far from the principles that once shaped our cultural landscape. A mentality of scarcity has turned everything into a commodity, traded in the hope that financial returns might rescue us.
But when we bargain away our foundational beliefs, such as freedom of expression, resistance to censorship, and the power of art to illuminate the darker corners of our society, we forfeit what is essential. And our audiences, sensing that loss, turn away.
Cultural safety practices can help us navigate these dilemmas, but only if we protect their meaning and purpose. When the language of safety is co‑opted to mask or redirect oppression, it safeguards no one. More importantly, it deprives us of the insight required for the transformations our sector needs to survive and thrive.
