Artist Activism in a Cultural Policy Void

Australia has had two national cultural policies, Creative Nation (1994) and Creative Australia (2013), both of which were short-lived due to changes of government and, as a consequence, any long-term strategies went unrealised. Creative Australia, did, however, encourage broad artist engagement with Federal cultural policy development which set the stage for the widespread sector disquiet that emerged in the wake of the abandonment of the policy and a number of subsequent informal policy shifts which led to a Senate Estimates review. The artist activist network, ArtsFront, developed in 2017 as a response to what many artists and cultural practitioners viewed as the lack of vision for the arts in Australia. This chapter analyses the activation of politics associated with Australian cultural policy (formal or otherwise) between 2011 and 2017 and argues that in the absence of Federal cultural policy and leadership, it is artists who have taken up the challenge of political advocacy for cultural change. The chapter draws on data from submissions to the ‘Senate Estimates Impact of the 2014 and 2015 Commonwealth Budget decisions on the Arts’, and an analysis of the activities of the ArtsFront network.