Thursday, 30 November 2023

 Gabrielle DE VIETRI (Richmond) (18:22): (487) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Creative Industries, and the action that I seek is for the Victorian government to introduce a three-year living wage for artists trial. Art connects us with one another. It brings us joy. Art commemorates, art challenges us, art celebrates. It expands our minds, and it invites us to think differently. Art is fundamental to our society. It is a core part of Victoria’s unique identity as a place to study, work and live and as a place to create. If that does not do it for you, the arts also play a key role in the Victorian economy. It contributes 7 per cent of our local economy, and 9 per cent of the Australian workforce is employed in the creative industries. Despite this, the arts are chronically and dangerously underfunded. Artists earn a pittance and have to compete for scraps, even at the height of their careers. Take, for example, musicians in one of Melbourne’s most loved punk rock bands Cable Ties, an established international touring band who hardly pocket a thing from their full-time work. I hear from arts organisations all the time that are struggling with funding uncertainties and from artists who are leaving the sector in droves because they just cannot keep going. The cultural loss for Victoria is already immense.

But just because something is does not mean that it should continue to be so. A living wage for artists has been tried with great success elsewhere in the world, and the Victorian Greens propose a three-year trial for 2000 artists, where artists are paid a living wage untied to outcomes, $46,000 a year, so they have the time and the security to keep making their work. At $92 million a year it would cost less than a quarter of what this government gives to the racing industry each year, and the benefits for the entire state would be huge. If Labor does not support artists, we risk losing the music and the theatre and the dance and the visual arts – the art that makes us who we are – and we will all be the poorer for it.