Policy announcements are a peculiar kind of theatre, and Labor’s launch of its new five-year arts plan, Revive, was a strong example of the genre. It was held at Melbourne’s iconic Espy in St Kilda, a venue where arts audiences were treated to words of encouragement from Minister Tony Burke on his speaking tour to spruik the submissions process in 2022, and where ‘DJ Albo’ once entertained a modest crowd.

I watched it on the livestream, along with more than sixteen hundred others from around the country. Onscreen, the name Revive was superimposed on an ochre horizon under a pale sky. Someone in the design department understood just how parched the Australian arts and culture sector had been feeling after a decade of cuts and compounding crises.

Like a big-ticket book launch, numerous speakers and performers were invited to pad out the announceable material (concrete policy changes and budget figures). Opera singer and composer Deborah Cheetham let her voice soar. There was a poetry reading by Sarah Holland-Batt. Music and literature were a clear focus. This was fitting, given that these two areas have been worst served in recent years. With scarce government funding increasingly skewed to protected major performing arts companies such as The Australian Ballet and Opera Australia, and to the bare survival of our biggest institutions, music and literature have often been left to the private sector, with little incentive for big publishers to support local content. Australia Council CEO Adrian Collette has called literature ‘our most under-funded art form’.

For many years, the arts has been a site of ideological combat. Each incoming federal government has trampled on the previous government’s approach. Creative Australia, the last attempt at an arts and culture policy, was announced in 2013 after a long and arduous process of consultation, but was torn up within months when Tony Abbott took office. Creative Nation, from 1994, fared little better, lasting only two years before it was shredded.

Revive is a five-year plan from a government that clearly expects to remain in power for at least two terms. It is also a government that is willing to allow arts and culture to take centre stage for a moment, with a policy launch from the PM himself – introduced, of course, as ‘the artist formerly known as DJ Albo’.

Labor likes to celebrate its legacy. There were numerous references to Gough Whitlam’s vision for the arts, the contribution of Paul Keating’s ministry and Creative Nation, and Creative Australia (Simon Crean, arts minister at the time, was in the audience). Albanese was not shy in referring to the past ten years as ‘a decade in which opportunity wasn’t so much missed as thrown away’, characterising the Coalition’s approach as one of ‘calculated neglect’.