Reset Art and Culture: Cultural labour and the future of cultural policy making

Reset and CP3 will be hosting a launch of their recent working paper Reset: Australian Cultural Employment - An Analysis of the Australia Census and Labour Force Survey Data, by Ben Eltham and Justin O’Connor.

This report is an analysis of employment in Australian cultural industries, using Australian Bureau of Statistics definitions and census data from 2006-2020. It reveals a sector with slow growth relative to other sectors, and increasing indications of a precarious workforce. It shows that Melbourne, Sydney and the Greater Brisbane-Gold Coast have grown fastest, with Adelaide and South Australia losing cultural workforce. Overall cultural employment is overwhelmingly concentrated in the inner core of the capital cities.

Panel Discussion: After Reset what next?

Tully Barnett, Justin O’Connor, Satu Teppo, Emma Webb. Chair: David Washington, Don Dunstan Foundation.

Beginning in late 2020, Reset was focussed on asking strong questions about how the cultural sector had become increasingly marginalised in public policy, with its funding progressively cut and required to show proof of return on investment in a highly reductive manner. The end of the pandemic, a potentially new Labor administration in South Australia and a Federal Labor promising a new cultural policy all seemed to call for new ideas and different voices. Four years later the cultural sector landscape locally, nationally and internationally has changed and the team has decided that Reset will finish its work, though with new collective projects in the planning. Join us to reflect on the moment of Reset, why it was formed and what it attempted to do. We will ask some provocative questions about the near and far future of cultural policy making, in South Australia and federally.

Read the paper here.

Thursday 21 November
5-8 pm
Samstag Museum of Art
55 North Terrace
ADELAIDE SA 5000