Election 2025: Raise Our Voices
Contact your candidates.
We all need to Raise Our Voices to demand more support for Australia’s storytellers in the arts and the media.
Will you take a moment to send a quick email to your local candidates, telling them that our agenda for Australia’s creative and media industries is something you will be voting on this election.
In the face of hostile conditions, our members work hard to bring to life the news that you read, the music that you listen to, the films that you watch and the plays that you attend. They connect us to our culture and our society, and they are relying on you for your support.
Our plan will give our storytellers real protections and support, but we need the politicians to listen.
Send them a message now!
Our plan to secure the future of Australia’s creative and media industries:
1. Meaningfully build on the five pillars of Revive
- Extend Same Job, Same Pay and Closing the Loopholes protections to workers in the creative and media industries
- Enact legislation to embed Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property protocols into law
- Ensure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts programs are community controlled
- Increase direct funding of publicly funded performance companies and Creative Australia grants
2. Taking on the big monopolies in the screen, recorded and live performance sectors
- Mandate local content quotas for streaming services requiring 20% of Australian revenues for streaming services of scale be devoted to the production of Australian content
- Implement ‘Michael’s Rule’ to ensure that every international touring artist includes an Australian artist among their opening acts
- Conduct an ACCC Inquiry into anti-competitive behaviour in the live music industry
- Conduct a parliamentary inquiry into the state of the Australian recorded music industry with particular focus on the impacts of streaming
3. Invest in public interest journalism
- Ensure that all government grants and mechanisms to support commercial and community media organisations guarantee that funds be used to pay for the employment of journalists
- Ensure the sustainability of the ABC and SBS by restoring funding in real terms.
- Commit to an enhanced five-year funding commitment for the News Media Assistance Program to provide certainty to the industry and encourage media organisations to invest in news deserts.
4. Guarantee freedom from political interference in the media and creative industries
- Protect press freedom:
- Greater whistleblower protections
- Expanding protections for external disclosures under the PID Act
- Enhance shield laws
- Introduce a public interest defence for defamation
- Guarantee the independence of the ABC and SBS
- Guarantee the independence of Australia’s arts and cultural bodies
5. Regulate AI to ensure control, compensation and consent for creative and media workers
- Legislate an economy-wide AI Act
- Levy AI developers to pay for the work that is being used to train AI
- Ensure all content used to train AI is subject to prior consent
- Mandate public disclosure of all materials used to train AI
- Reserve copyright for human-made works
