By Karen Crawley, Julian Meyrick, Sarah Joseph and Samid Suliman, Griffith University
Submissions for the next iteration of Revive, Australia’s national cultural policy, closed on 24 May. Launched in 2023 as a five-year plan for ‘a place for every story, a story for every place’, the roll-out of the Revive policy has been surreptitiously qualified by a different expectation: that cultural organisations manage what artists do and audiences see in the interests of ‘social cohesion’.
Funding bodies, politicians and boards now reach for social cohesion as a reason to meddle with programs, withdraw commissions and discipline individual artists. In February 2025, the national arts agency, Creative Australia, defended the rescission of Khaled Sabsabi’s Venice Biennale selection at Senate Estimates on the grounds that ‘maintaining social cohesion is a national priority’.
The following August, the Bendigo Writers Festival instructed its speakers to avoid ‘inflammatory, divisive or disrespectful’ language, leading to the mass withdrawal of writers. In September, the Victorian government formalised the test as policy, requiring grant recipients to sign a Social Cohesion Values Commitment. In January this year, the Adelaide Festival board cancelled Randa Abdel-Fattah’s invitation to Adelaide Writers’ Week, citing the festival’s role in ‘promoting community cohesion’. The widely publicised fallout saw the withdrawal of 90 authors, the resignation of the chair and three board members, and the cancellation of the 2026 event.
So what is ‘social cohesion’?
The impact of ‘social cohesion’ – quick links
A slippery concept
The term ‘social cohesion’ appears nowhere in the Creative Australia Act 2023, which, in contrast, requires the agency ‘to uphold and promote freedom of expression in the arts’. Nor does it occur in the charters of the festivals invoking it.
In academic scholarship, the concept is a technical one. The Scanlon-Monash Index, for example, Australia’s longest-running cohesion measure, tracks factors such as belonging, worth, social justice, political participation and acceptance of difference. The Bertelsmann Social Cohesion Radar treats it as a mix of resilient social relations, identification with community and orientation toward the common good.
James Jupp’s Social Cohesion in Australia (2007) sees it as the result of a sound economy, accepted networks of laws and institutions, equal civil and human rights, and a high level of trust between citizens and authorities. Jane Jenson describes it as a process rather than a state or a goal – the capacity of citizens to live together while disagreeing.
But tipped into the public domain, the concept has now become associated with a very different set of meanings around consent, coercion and control. In his recent Menzies Oration, Hugh de Kretser, president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, argued that social cohesion is a ‘loaded and coded term’ that ‘sounds positive but can be used to mean conformity and assimilation’.
The cost of ‘cohesion’
The cost of this semantic drift is measurable. In the years since Revive 1.0, one running count now has a tally of 66 cultural organisations that have censored their own programs, in what Samuel Cairnduff and Greg Barns have called Australia’s turn toward ‘cultural McCarthyism’.
This count includes the Sydney Theatre Company’s public apology after three of its actors wore keffiyehs at the curtain call of The Seagull; the National Gallery of Australia’s covering of Palestinian flags in an artwork for ‘security reasons’; Jayson Gillham being dropped from the program of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra; KA Ren Wyld’s withdrawn Queensland literary fellowship; and Brisbane City Council pulling its sponsorship of the Queensland Music Awards after Kellee Green’s River to Sea won the jazz prize.
Most of this happened with the support, if not at the explicit prompting, of federal ministers, state premiers and boards of statutory cultural agencies. Although the aim was to manage risk, the effect has been the opposite: prolonged controversy, mass withdrawal of artists and partners, reputational damage and increased attention to the very content these superintending organisations sought to limit.
ArtsHub: Arts boards in crisis – how have we landed here, yet again?
Protecting artistic freedom
Treating freedom of expression and social cohesion as trade-offs is a category error. Freedom of expression is an internal attribute of cultural activity, an inherent good. Without it there is no culture worthy of the name, only sanctioned content.
Social cohesion, as the academic scholarship makes clear, is an external outcome. It relies on a mix of contingent factors: employment, housing, the conduct of public officials, the integrity of media, global political and economic currents, and so on.
Depending on the situation, social cohesion may be not even be desirable at all. (Think of artists in Putin’s Russia, for example.) In democratic contexts, it is achievable through policy instruments that do not require constraining what artists make, say or do.
To trade the intrinsic value of the arts for a downstream policy goal that artists are poorly equipped to deliver is to lose our grip on both domains.
The task ahead
Revive 2.0 must take artistic freedom more seriously. Freedom of expression in the arts and culture is intrinsic to the structure and purpose of that domain. Arts events are organised settings. Cultural festivals, exhibitions, productions and panels are programmed, moderated and shaped by professionals and are disciplined arenas for raising and debating difficult subjects.
There are, after all, times when political leaders are too constrained and too divided to host a public conversation. On these occasions, it is artists who can – and do – carry it on.
Artists bring a different kind of attention to questions than politicians, academics or activists. Their artwork offers shared experiences across disagreement, which political argument or scholarly debate rarely does.
Yes, sometimes arts and culture can be controversial, even offensive. Better red wine spilled in galleries than blood on the street. A country that treats every difficult artwork as a threat loses the capacity to examine itself – a necessary condition of a democratic society.
The next national cultural policy should make artistic freedom and freedom of expression foundational commitments across all policy pillars. (Revive had five: First Nations First; A Place for Every Story; Centrality of the Artist; Strong Cultural Infrastructure; and Engaging the Audience.)
It should rule out ‘social cohesion’ as a criterion for support in cultural bodies. And it should require funders and organisations to publish their reasoning whenever an artist or artwork is withdrawn, deselected or altered.
Cohesion, properly understood, is not built on silencing argument. It is built by trusting the appropriate institutions, and the people in them, to handle it.
Karen Crawley, Julian Meyrick, Sarah Joseph and Samid Suliman of Griffith University are organising an upcoming public forum – The Future of Art and Democracy in Australia – which will be recorded and broadcast on ABC’s Big Ideas. Find out more.
