Submission to the National Cultural Policy
The Federal Government announced in 2022 they were developing a new cultural policy for the decade ahead, and called for submissions from everyone involved or interested in arts, entertainment and cultural sector. Read the government's archived announcement here.
Submitted 22 August 2022
- Wikimedia Australia makes this submission as a not-for-profit organisation with arts components
- You are welcome to use the words here – everything is produced under a Creative Commons By licence, please attribute our views to Wikimedia Australia
- This document may be made public.
- Contact: contact@wikimedia.org.au
About Wikimedia Australia (Wikimedia.org.au)
Wikimedia Australia is the Australian chapter of the international Wikimedia Foundation. As an independent, not-for-profit organisation and registered charity, we support our members, the broader community and partner organisations to contribute to Wikipedia, Wikidata and other Wikimedia platforms through events, training and partnerships.
We support the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation, to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally. As a chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation we offer our members an official voice in the global Wikimedia community.
Our purpose is to: grow and promote the development and sharing of free knowledge through open source software systems; develop educational resources to grow participation in Wikimedia platforms and projects; and increase public awareness and support for Wikimedia platforms and projects.
Response to the call for submissons
Thank you for the opportunity to submit to the consultation on a new National Cultural Policy for Australia. We address the 5 pillars outlined in the submission template below with an emphasis on the role of public interest platforms, digital technologies, skills and training and the need for copyright reform.
First Nations
First Nations peoples and communities are central to Australian arts and culture and Wikimedia Australia fully supports the focus on First Nations in the new cultural policy.
First Nations arts, culture and knowledge are increasingly distributed and discovered via digital platforms including Wikimedia. There is therefore an urgent need to improve digital inclusion for First Nations Australians, including infrastructure to access and disseminate content and participate in national and global conversations via digital platforms such as Wikimedia. According to the 2016 ABS Census, around 75% of regional and less than half of very remote First Nations people in Australia had a home internet connect. This level of digital inequality significantly limits the capacity for First Nations people, and all those in regional and remote areas, to engage with, share or learn about national and global arts and culture, either as producers, consumers or citizens.
Cultural institutions, digital collections and platforms such as Wikimedia have a key role to play in organizing and describing First Nations arts and culture. Wikimedia Australia is supporting experts on First Nations descriptive cataloguing at UTS to develop appropriate metadata and protocols for Wikipedia, Wikidata and other Wikimedia platforms. This is in line with other cultural and collecting institutions looking to address discriminatory collecting and curation practices. Developing new standards and protocols for describing and curating collections led by First Nations communities is essential to address the impact of colonial practices on First Nations people and should be acknowledged in the new cultural policy.
A Place for Every Story
As a global platform that is one of the most popular on the internet, Wikipedia, and other Wikimedia projects, can play a critical role in telling the story of Australian arts and culture. Australia’s cultural policy needs to consider the role of global digital platforms, particularly not-for-profit, community governed alternatives such as Wikipedia, that can share Australian stories, both for Australians and for the global community. Wikimedia provides a unique framework, community and multimedia platform for supporting Australian cultural policy, cultural communication and education, and cultural participation, including in schools, higher education and adult learners.
The Centrality of the Artist
Arts and cultural sector workers need to be skilled and trained for the opportunities and jobs of the future which will increasingly require digitally skilled creative talent across many sectors of society. As digital technologies evolve, so too do the capabilities that Australians, including artists and creative workers will require. The need for ongoing training and support should be recognised within the new national cultural policy. Wikimedia platforms provide an opportunity for training students at all levels as well as arts and culture workers, in a range of digital skills including writing, editing, publishing, photography, content management and databases, collecting and curating practices, data collection, analysis, interoperability and visualisation, collaboration, community consensus, quality sourcing and citation, misinformation and much more.
Strong Institutions
Australian’s cultural institutions urgently need support to develop their digital capabilities to engage with global platforms such as Wikimedia. Some Australian galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) institutions have invested in staff training and projects in order to engage with Wikimedia platforms but most lack the expertise or even the awareness of what might be possible. Cultural institutions need to have strong digital competencies in order to understand how to make their content interoperable beyond their own institution, including with systems such as Wikimedia. The Smithsonian Institute in the US, for example, has uploaded thousands of images to Wiki Commons to share with people around the world. Digital competencies enable cultural institutions to expand their reach, enabling geographically distant audiences and enhancing audience accessibility.
Australia’s legal institutions have a major impact on the extent to which artists and cultural workers can reuse copyright material and how this material can be contributed to and circulated on platforms such as Wikimedia. Australia urgently needs to reform copyright laws to support greater access and sharing of public interest and non-commercial content online. Australia still does not have provisions for the use of orphan works and does not have an exception for fair quotation of an existing work.
Wikimedia Australia supports the Government’s efforts to make copyright content more accessible to the Australian public, and to update and restore exceptions relating to educational institutions and libraries and archives. We strongly support any amendments to the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) that would enable, without penalty, the use of orphan works following a diligent search for the copyright owner.
The copyright system is complex and many artists and those who wish to share knowledge about their work, and Australian culture more generally, struggle to navigate the licensing terrain, both in using existing works and in disseminating their own creations. For example, Australia lacks clear rules on reproductions of public works, also known as ‘Freedom of Panorama’ laws, resulting in much confusion over what images of Australian public spaces can be included in Wikipedia and Wiki Commons.
We strongly urge the Department to advocate for copyright reform to reduce the complexities created by copyright law, and introduce Fair use principles as detailed by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) in their 2014 report on Copyright and the Digital Economy.
Reaching the Audience
For Australian artists to be able to work, connect with their audiences, and disseminate their creations successfully into the future, it is crucial they have the necessary digital access and competencies to engage with online platforms and new forms of technology.
Digital availability, discoverability, and accessibility of Australian content are crucial elements of national cultural policy. Law and regulation should be harmonised across broadcast and online media to facilitate this.
Prepared on behalf of the Wikimedia Australia Committee,
Amanda Lawrence, President, Wikimedia Australia