Campaign updates

latest eDM

18 Feb 2025

Thanks so much for supporting Save Our Arts and helping put arts and Australian culture on the agenda this election.. Your support is critical, as are the stakes for arts and culture in this country.

Make no mistake, the threat from streamers, AI, and big tech to Australia’s screen, music, and writing sectors is real and grave. On platforms like Netflix Australian film and television content has shrunk to around 3%. Spotify dominates the distribution of new music with 70% of young people with Australian musicians struggling to be discovered. And in the world of literature, three independent publishers have been absorbed by global publishing houses in the last 6 months.

Algorithms and a lack of discoverability are burying Australian artists. As musician Luke Sinclair noted in the below media interview with Save Our Arts and Raf Epstein, if Paul Kelly’s early work had appeared on Spotify, he’d never have been discovered. You can rinse and repeat on iconic Australian bands, music, film, and books: from AC/DC, The Divinyls, and Midnight Oil, to Picnic at Mad Max, Priscilla, and Muriel’s Wedding, to Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Slap, and Dirt Music.

More than ever it’s essential that we have policy reform and funding to ensure the continuation of Australian arts and culture, rather than generic, AI generated slop.

WHAT WE’VE BEEN UP TO

Media coverage

Since launching Save Our Arts on 20 January, we have had ten pieces of media coverage on the campaign and arts issues in the ABC, ABC Radio Melbourne, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Brisbane Times, WA Today, The Guardian, ArtsHub, and even The Greek Herald (thanks to Ambassador Christos Tsiolkas). We will continue to pitch to national and local mainstream media outlets and to narrow cast publications and outlets to reach voter groups we want to target and influence with our messaging.

Ads

The campaign is not awash with cash but we are in the midst of an agreement with Melbourne radio station RRR to run ads in the lead up to the election as well as a series of interviews. RRR has a million listeners per month and we believe many sit within two key seats we will be campaigning in this election: Wills (Brunswick, Coburg area), and Macnamara (St Kilda area).

Supporters

Our list of supporters includes some fantastic Australian arts talent: from Prima Facie writer, Suzie Miller, to authors Tim Winton, Charlotte Wood, and Christos Tsiolkas. Musicians Darren Middleton (Powderfinger), Kit Warhurst (Rocket Science), and Luke Sinclair (Raised by Eagles). Actors Rhys Muldoon, Lehmo, and Alison Bell have supported the campaign, as have screenwriters and Producers like Ben Law (The Family Law), Peter Mattessi (EastEnders, Death in Paradise, and Sue Maslin (The Dressmaker, Road to Nhill). Christos and Luke have represented the campaign as Ambassadors.

We are also speaking to arts bodies and other campaign groups around collaboration. More to be revealed when that is solidified.

Political analysis and outreach

While we have a broad national media campaign, we will be running ground campaigns targeting specific demographic groups in 3-5 seats.

We have used data from the ABS, census, and Creative Australia’s electorate profiles to compile a list of seats that are not just marginal, but which have a high number of creative workers and arts consumers. Those seats are Wills, Macnamara, and Kooyong in Victoria, Bradfield in New South Wales, and Ryan in Queensland. The number of creative sector workers and artists in these seats range from 4,459 (4.2% of electorate) in Ryan up to 8,822 (7.7%) in Macnamara.

We are working with arts groups now on securing venues to host forums and conduct site tours with the major political candidates (ALP, LNP, GRN, Teals) in these seats.

Can you help?

You can help the campaign in three main ways:

• Become a supporter if you work in the arts

• Volunteer to help build the campaign if you live in or near the seats mentioned above

• Donate money The more we have, the more resources we can put into seats and voters we can reach through posters in venues, ads, media coverage, venue hire. You can do that through our GoFundMe link, or by reaching out directly.

Thanks once again and contact us to get involved.

Australians for the Arts responds to Age article (16 Feb) on regulating streamers

details of why X is wrong and the case for our campaign.

• Dr Ben Eltham, Monash University arts & media academic and Australians for the Arts policy adviser

for more information on the case for streaming regulations, see the [name and hyperlink] report written into Canada’s successful introduction of content quotas on streamers and algorithmic prominence on Spotify