A partnership between Adelaide University and the Don Dunstan Foundation
Adelaide University’s College of Creative Arts, Design and Humanities, and its research centre Creative People, Products and Places (CP3) are joining forces with the Don Dunstan Foundation to collaborate on Cultural Policy Futures.
A series of four culture-focused public events will highlight new ideas in cultural policy, balancing visionary thinking and practical, policy-focused suggestions.
The arts and cultural sector in Australia is facing multifaceted challenges. Widespread precarious employment and low pay is exacerbated by cost-of-living pressures and a rental crisis. Cities struggle to retain their cultural grassroots spaces, including workspaces for artists and creatives.
This is all coinciding with the ongoing profound impact of platform monopolies and digital disruption, with the known and unknown impacts of generative AI now beginning to bite.
According to census data, employment in the cultural sector has flatlined in Australia and gone down in South Australia, particularly in the regions. A 2025 Victorian Parliamentary inquiry found that “It has never been harder for Victorians to make a living in the Cultural and Creative Industries”, a reality shared across the nation.
The public value of arts and culture in Australian policy is no longer an undisputed given, nor is the capacity of governments to deliver an effective strategic direction.
There has been increasing focus by all levels of government on culture’s economic and social well-being impacts. Yet the public funding necessary to deliver on these are ever-more constricted, and a depleted cultural sector finds it increasingly difficult to respond.
All of this is happening against a backdrop of geopolitical turbulence, which has seen a growing rejection of liberal social progressivism, global human rights, and cosmopolitan or internationalist values. Powerful political forces now directly challenge those historic liberal and enlightenment values which underpinned the “unfinished project” of global modernity, and an internationally organised illiberal or ‘post-liberal’ Right now seeks to “repeal” the post-1945 order.
We need new collaborative solutions to problems, recognising these do not come with any easy answers. Policy solutions require a wide range of expertise and stakeholder collaboration, just as they will need to be iterative and responsive to local specificities. At the same time, we do need some ‘big picture’ thinking within which any new policy approaches need to be situated.
This short series aims to combine realistic policy possibilities with the need for long term vision, if South Australia is to move forward in these uncertain times.
Don Dunstan Foundation
In South Australia, Don Dunstan’s progressive politics and policies created many public organisations, supports and structures that have underpinned the arts and cultural sector for decades. The Don Dunstan Foundation is a non-profit think-tank dedicated to advancing social justice and creating a more equitable and sustainable future for South Australia and beyond. The current strategic plan identifies five core areas of focus, including ‘Arts and Civic Society’. The Foundation works through collaborative projects based on research, public engagement, advocacy and collaboration. The Don Dunstan Foundation brings to the table a track-record in progressive policy development, shaping public policy outcomes across areas of social policy, with an existing network across the cultural sector, public sector and politics.
College of Arts, Design and Humanities, Adelaide University
CDAH is Australia’s newest arts and humanities college and one of its largest. Its establishment in 2026 marks a commitment by AU to these disciplines, at a moment when these are under threat elsewhere. Bringing together an extensive range of traditionally academic and practice-based expertise, CDAH represents a significant investment by the university and a recognition of the important contribution to the future prosperity of South Australia.
Creative People, Products and Places
Directed by Professor Susan Luckman and Deputy Associate Professor Tully Barnett, CP3 is CDAH’s research centre in the creative and cultural space. It will pursue ideas formulated through Adelaide University’s Cultural and Creative Signature Research Theme (SRT), around Imagine Adelaide, Creative Solutions Lab, and Cultural Exchange.
Cultural Policy Futures
Cultural Policy Futures is a project launched by CP3 cultural policy researchers aiming to bring new ideas and robust research into dialogue with cultural policymaking in South Australia and beyond. It resonates with the recently established Australian Cultural Policy Research Association, a national research initiative involving CP3 members.
Led by Justin O’Connor and Tully Barnett, both with extensive experience and connections across Australia and overseas.
Event 1 Artificial Intelligence: Creativity, Culture, Humans (26th May 2026) Bradley Forum, City West, 55 North Terrace
The series launch will feature Anna Goldsworthy presenting her new Quarterly Essay “AI, Self and Culture”. What does AI change about the meaning of being human, their bodies, fragility and memory. How does it change human connection and learning, and what new existential and ethical risks does it bring? We also have Tim Ström, contributing author at Arena Magazine, speaking about culture and cybernetic capitalism. This will be followed by a discussion with academic and Journalist Ben Eltham, and series hosts Tully Barnett and Justin O’Connor.
Event 2 Australian Culture in a Volatile Global Order (23rd July 2026) Union House, Function Room 1
Culture is often coupled with ‘soft power’ and the projection of Australian values, but what might that mean in a rapidly changing world? The “rupture” in the “rules-based international order” presents profound challenges to our settled understanding of our place in the world. What is our relationship to the “political West”, to a rising China, to an assertive global south, and to the 65,000-year history on our own continent? Where is Australian culture?
Event 3 “What Would Don Do”? (September 2026)
As part of the celebrations around the centenary of Don Dunstan’s birth, in this seminar we look at his legacy in art and culture by asking: what would Don do now, right here, right now? The world has changed immensely since the 1960s and ’70s; the state and the nation have new challenges. But in this event we try to imagine: what would an open, inventive, future-positive Don do in the current situation?
Event 4 Culture and Democracy (November 2026)
Many in the cultural sector advocate strongly for the importance of culture in a contemporary democracy – but what does that actually mean? For some it means artistic freedom, a crucial subset of freedom of speech. For others there is no democracy without shared values and social cohesion. People talk of ‘cultural democracy’ – does that mean everybody’s right to a full participation in culture, or that nobody has the right to say this is better than that? Is that secured by the market, AI tools, or public funding? How, then, do art and culture shape or collective democratic life together?
Tickets
