Copyright @ eContent Management Pty Led. Jimovarion: management, policy & practice (2009) 11: 230-239. 1. INTRODUCTION: THE POLICY A 5 Australia’s best: observed in 2006, Australia doesn't have a Australian cultural and innovation policies: Never the twain shall meet? Ben ELTHAM Centre for Policy Development, Sydney NSW; and Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, Parramatta NSW, Australia ABSTRACT In recent years, Australian cultural policy-makers have begun to pay more attention to innovation policy. Several of the Australian states specifically addvess issues of innovation in their formal eul- ‘ural policies, and the Australia Council for the Arts has published an Innovation Strategy which purports to constitute ‘a coordinated approach to supporting creativity as one of Australia’s most valuable assets’ (Australia Council 2006). However, despite this prima facie policy commitment to supporting and fostering innovation in the arts and cultural industries, there remains a disconnect between cultural and innovation policies in Australia, On the one hand, cultural policies in Aus- tralia are confused and incoherent in their approach to cultural innovation, and many policy set- ings as they apply t0 cultural industries are antithetical to the aims of fostering innovation and RED. Meanwhile, innovation policies continue t0 pay only marginal attention ro the ereative arts and cultural industries, This disconnect will be briefly examined in three fields of cultural policy: arts and cultural funding: copyright and intellectual property policy: and broadcast media policy. Ie is argued that rather than promoting innovation, existing policy frameworks in all three areas, when not specifically framed around the protection of vested interests, are often contradictory and inimical to the disruptive influence of innovative artists, technologies and firms. Possible reasons for she disconnect include pragmatic matters of busy ministers and low policy priorities, and con- ceptual confusion over the status and value of culture. Keywords: cultural policy, innovation policy, cultural industries, creative industries, culcural economics, Australia (Craik 2007). The result is thar ‘innovation’, ENVIRONMENT OF AUSTRALIAN however defined, has only occasionally been a CULTURAL INNOVATION STRATEGIES policy goal of Australian state and commonwealth governments in the realm of arts and culture. In contrast, when Australian governments have chown cultural economist formally stated government cultural policy (Throsby 2006). Instead, Australian cultural poli- cies are the product of an evolutionary history that has tended to accrete new policy frameworks around existing structures of funding and support 230 turned their policy attention to innovation in the ingly) con- automo- broader economy, they have (unsurpri centrated on different industries — li tive manufacturing — and different cognitive ly science and technology. disciplines, especi INNOVATION: MANAGEMENT, POLICY & PRACTICE Volume 11, Issue 2, August 2009Australian cultural and innovation polici ‘These two tendencies are perhaps best illustrated by the Hawke Government's iconic industry poli- cy of the 1980s, the Button Car Plan (Capling & Galligan 1992). Policy responses in this sphere have tended to focus on direct public investment in national research organisations and tax incen- tives for corporate R&D (Cutler 2008) ‘The result is thar innovation and cultural poli- cies have seldom linked up or even addressed each other in the Australian political economy, despite the recent trend by state governments to define cultural policy in terms of the so-called ‘creative industries’ (Hartley 2005). Common- wealth and state innovation policies deal only tangentially with innovation in the cultural or creative industries: Cutler's Venturous Australia (2008), for instance, mentions the phrase ‘cre- ative industries’ only once in 228 pages, and the Australia Council not at all. Discussion of the arts and cultural sector is confined to a plea for “better understanding of the connections and commonalities between science and the arts’ Cutler (2008: 48) continues: After all, both science and the arts are con- cerned with the endeavour of making sense of apparently random phenomena, to explain why things are as they are or could be. It is instructive to recall Charles Darwin was first and foremost an obsessive collector, and it was this obsession with taxonomy that generated his world-changing insights about the evolu- tion of species and living systems. Today he may have been director of a museum. Cutler (2008) goes on to recommend a mod- est reform in the funding of creative arts training — essentially to address the funding imbalance between institutions funded by the Environment, Heritage and the Arts portfolio as the National Institute of Drama Arts and the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, and those funded out of the federal Education portfolio, such as university-based arts academies like the Victorian College of the Arts. But by late 2008, the Australian Government had moved in the Volume 11, Issue 2, August 2009 INNOVATION: MANAGEMENT, POLICY & PRACTICE Never the twain shall meet? opposite direction, defunding the Australian National Academy of Music and transferting its operation to the University of Melbourne (Chan- der 2008). Venturous Australia’s modest interest in the arts is notable because irs author, Dr Terry Cutler, isa former senior government arts offi Ir illustrates the history of disconnect between Australian arts and innovation pol larly at a federal level. s, particu 2. THE CREATIVE INDUSTRIES MOMENT IN CULTURAL POLICY Meanwhile, on the cultural policy side of the fence, the late 1990s and early 2000s saw an interesting trend in Australian cultural policy at state and municipal levels. While the Australian Government under John Howard's succession of junior arts ministers embarked on a cautious strategy of policy-by-inquiry, many Labor admin- istrations at state and local government level began to embrace an industry policy model of cultural policy as a pathway to regional industry development. Writers and academics such as Charles Landry (2000) and Richard Florida (2003) became extremely influential, especially at a local government level. For instance, Landry was invited to Perth in 2007 as a ‘thinker in resi- dence’, while a speech by Florida in Brisbane in carly 2004 was attended by Queensland's Premier Peter Beattie, and Brisbane’s Lord-Mayor Camp- bell Newman Ar the time, both the Brisbane and Queens- nd governments had published new cultural policies based on the creative industries move- ment (Brisbane City Council 2004; Queensland Government 2003). These policies, along with Victoria's ‘Creative Capacity+’ policy (Arts Victo- ria 2003), included at least some discussion of ‘innovation’ as a goal of state support of cultural industries and artforms — although they showed little interface with, or understanding of, the existing innovation policies being implemented in other parts of their own governments. For example, the Australia Couneil’s Innovation Serat- egy specifically purports to constitute ‘a coordi 231Ben Eltham nated approach to supporting creativity as one of Australia most valuable assets’ (Australia Council 2006). Likewise, the Queensland Government's Creativity is Big Business policy discusses in some derail the benefits of innovation in the culcural industries as a tool for promoting regional cco- nomic growth (Queensland Government 2003). But despite this prima facie policy commit- ment to supporting and fostering innovation in the cultural industries, the reality of state and Commonwealth cultural policies showed little change. Australian state and federal cultural poli- cy frameworks are in fact nor geared to support ing cultural innovation and remain essentially documents based around welfare economics argu- ments of the ‘merit goods’ of certain types of cul- tural output (Craik 2007; Cowen 2006). Evidence for this proposition will be examined in three spheres of Australian government cultur- al policy: arts and cultural funding; copyright and intellectual property kaw; and broadcast media policy. 3. THE REALITY OF AUSTRALIAN CULTURAL FUNDING PRIORITIES Although certain elements of state and Common- wealth government cultural policies address inno- vation, overall state and Commonwealth cultural policy priorities are not primarily or even sub- stantially framed around innovation outcomes. For instance, the Australia Council’s ‘innova tion strategy’ is a small document that is minor in scope compared with the Australia Council's ongoing funding commitments to its client organisations. The policy should also be seen in the broader context of the Australia Council’s recent history, in which a recent organisational restructure abolished its funding, program specifi- cally designed to support innovation in arts and cultural practice, the New Media Arts Board (Gallasch 2005). Cultural innovation within the cultural policy environment has generally been defined in the context of what the funding agencies call ‘new work’: the creation of new copyrighted cultural 232 texts, However, even if one defines cultural inno- vation (rather generously) in this way, cultural funding agencies in Australia devote only a small percentage of their funding and activity to this goal. Most funding and activity is concerned with g, their exis profit cultural sector ~ principally the so-called ‘major performing arts organisations’, the stare art galleries, and the capital city arts festivals (Craik 2007; Westbury 2007). ‘As Westbury (2007b) wrote: servi ig clients within the non- ‘The Sydney Symphony receives nearly $9 mil- lion each year. That is more funding than goes to all of Australia’s visual artists, or all of the nation’s writers and publishers, or all the dancers, or all the Aboriginal and Torres Serait Islander artists, or all the community art prac titioners. The majority of these organisations define their own missions in words like ‘excellence’ and ‘tradition’ (Opera Australia 2008; Australian Bal- Jet 2008) rather than ‘innovation’, and their activ- ities consist not in commissioning and developing new works bur rather in performing and present- ing a canon of culturally validated ‘classics Even where culeural funding agencies do com- mit to support innovation ~ for instance in the Australia Council’s specific ‘new work’ funding categories ~ there is an acknowledgment that much of this new work never reaches the stage of commercialisation (even in the form of an initial public performance or presentation). Indeed, this was a specific finding of the Australia Council ‘Theatre Board's ‘Make It New’ paper (Baylis & Joshi 2006). In screen policy, there are similar concerns about the inability of new scripts and film pro- duction funded by screen bodies to reach market places. This had led the new agency formed from the merger of the AFC and FFC, Screen Aus- tralia, to propose sweeping changes to its funding programs, including essentially abandoning the support of short films (Lowenstein 2008). How- ever, the dismal commercial record of Screen Aus- INNOVATION: MANAGEMENT, POLICY & PRACTICE Volume 11, Issue 2, August 2009