Changing the landscape of the future – a new focus on cultural rights

The arts and culture sector has spent far too many years pressing the case for why Australian culture is crucial to Australia’s future without seeming to shift the public policy landscape to any great degree. Perhaps a proposed fresh approach focusing on cultural rights may offer some hope of a breakthrough. What makes this approach so important and so potentially productive is that it starts with broad principles, linked to fundamental issues, such as human rights, which makes it a perfect foundation for the development of sound and well-thought out policies – something that currently we sadly lack.

The thing I like about going to a forum about arts and culture is that you never know who you will find yourself alongside. It’s definitely not a world of the colourless and quiet. In March this year I was at an Arts Front forum at the Brisbane Powerhouse to discuss framing arts and culture in terms of cultural rights.

Setting the agenda - sharing experiences and views from across the country at the forum on cultural rights.

At the start, as I sweltered in the riverside humidity, I found myself next to Frederick Copperwaite, a Bunuba man from the South-West Kimberley region of Western Australia. He is co-founder and co-artistic director of Moogahlin Performing Arts, based in Sydney, one of a powerful trio of First Nations theatre companies, comprising Yirra Yaakin in Perth and Ilbijerri in Melbourne – what not to be impressed by? Yet he was only one of a very weighty coterie of artists and others who have been working for many decades in the arts and culture sector to change the world for the better.