Page 4175 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 18 November 2015
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the value of the arts as the underlying element in our city’s economic prosperity and social well-being.
Alain de Botton, the philosopher, says in his book Art as Therapy:
Like other tools, art has the power to extend our capacities beyond those that nature has originally endowed us with. Art compensates us for certain inborn weaknesses, in this case of the mind rather than the body, weaknesses that we can refer to as psychological frailties.
This book proposes that art is a therapeutic medium that can help guide, exhort and console its viewers, enabling them to become better versions of themselves. You can take that definition and apply it to economies as well. You have art as a tool that helps individuals be whole, productive and participative, and it allows economies to be dynamic and to achieve great things. It is interesting that the recently-released research from Tourism Research Australia has detected a trend and says:
Continuing a trend which first emerged in 2013, visitors
Continuing a trend which first emerged in 2013, visitors participating in arts and heritage activities increased strongly during the year:
art and craft workshops and studios—up 26% …
heritage buildings sites or monuments—up 24% …
festivals, fairs and cultural events—up 20% …
botanic gardens—up 22% …
All of those increases in those very specific categories are in the 20s, and some of them are in the high 20s. It could be a description of Canberra—the Botanic Gardens and our fairs, festivals, heritage building sites, monuments and art and craft workshops. Yet for this year of the report, Mr Assistant Speaker, you will be stunned to note that international visitor numbers to the ACT went down. We are not using the arts to our advantage in this community.
So you ask: why does that happen? It happens because we have a framework that means nothing. It is a nice glossy, the same as the 2012 version, but it does not actually say that we can harness the arts and use the arts to drive change in the ACT—to drive change in individuals and to drive change in our economy. That is very important because one of the things that the government have done—and they are to be congratulated—was to produce an economic overview of the arts in the ACT. What does it say? On page 1 it says:
The arts and culture sector directly added $426m of value to the ACT’s economy in 2012–13. This was equivalent to 1.3% of total value added by industry.
It continues:
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