Now at the project’s half-way point, the Australian Creative Histories & Futures (ACHF) team has accrued substantial knowledge of the sector’s data holdings, systems and capabilities – and how co-ordinated development of data infrastructure can improve the scale, speed and quality of research, evaluation and impact measurement.

ACHF welcomes the opportunity to provide insights from its work to help guide the next National Cultural Policy. 

Recommendations: 

Informed by learnings from the ACHF project to date, the team recommends a continued commitment to the generation of meaningful data and research in the new National Cultural Policy to support the arts and cultural sector, specifically: 

• Support the principles of Indigenous data governance in the arts and encourage the same from the wider creative sector. 

• Acknowledge and support ethical governance standards for those working with data about diverse communities. 

• Assist in securing and developing data sets of national importance. 

• Support efforts to develop interoperability and accessibility between government and sector data sets. 

• Support collaborative research between government, sector and universities such as Australian Creative Histories & Futures in long-term and sustained ways. 

• Support sector capability and capacity to use, interpret and critically assess data effectively.  

• Strengthen support for the Cultural and Creative Statistics Working Group as a cross-government cooperative data and research forum 

• Continue to refine the way the Australian Bureau of Statistics collects and reports data about arts and culture to enable more accurate and accessible knowledge about the cultural workforce and participation in cultural life. 

• Support and engage in research that develops new frameworks for understanding and assessing the value of arts and culture that reflect long term social, civic, cultural and intergenerational outcomes of the public value of arts and culture.

High-quality data and data literacy are fundamental to informing policy and telling the stories of the arts through research, evaluation and impact measurement. 

ACHF acknowledges and applauds actions in Revive to improve data collection and encourages the Australian Government to expand on these with a strengthened and updated commitment to data and research.

Read the full submission > nncp-1474903-achf.pdf