Justin O’Connor’s book, Culture is not an Industry, critiques the arts sector embrace of the description of itself as a “creative industry”. The idea and initial adoption was a pragmatic attempt to gain political legitimacy and funding, but it came at a time (in England under Tony Blair, and rolling out from there) when neoliberalism had undone all the structures and legitimacy of industry planning. Accordingly, the creative industry approach commodified culture and functionalised it without arresting any of the impoverishment of art/culture (both in public standing and artists’ livelihood).

I know very little about art and culture, so I do not want to review O’Connor’s book here. Rather, I want to reflect on the relevance of the issues raised to the social service sector where I work.

Issues in Common

The creative industries frame sees art and cultural work as just one form of “creativity” alongside commercial knowledge creation areas. As O’Connor notes, the creative industry workforce figures drop by more than half when software and industrial design are excluded, and the mantra of creative industries has done little to protect or promote actual cultural industries (live and recorded music, films, games, books, TV and radio, newspapers, theatre, etc). There was never more than token recognition of the unique contribution of art and culture to place, community and the economy, there was no increase in public funding, and art and cultural production became increasingly dominated by the global monopolies of platform capitalism. The result has been a diminishing of creative autonomy, remuneration and security of actual cultural workers.

For its part, the boundaries of the not-for-profit social service sector are similarly hard to define, and the sector often sacrifices the uniqueness of its community base for incorporation into categories which seem to have greater economic importance. For instance, one peak body adopts the ABS-defined “health and social assistance” industry data (which includes public hospitals and health system), while another uses ACNC charities data (which includes universities, environmental charities and cultural institutions). This is misleading, and the claims of economic importance get little political traction anyway.

The parallels in the positioning of the arts and social service sectors can be seen clearly in the following from O’Connor. I have simply inserted alternative text in brackets.

“Anyone familiar with the arts and cultural [social service] sector will know its hand-to-mouth, cunning pragmatism, where one renders to Caesar whatever Caesar wants if it means getting that grant. The grant you need to survive. Given the antipathy to cultural [welfare] funding by many governments, many are content to huddle under the protective umbrella of the creative economy [health and social assistance industry classification], with all those jobs and wealth and innovation metrics, simply in order to keep their heads above water.” [p. 200]

The problem is not simply the need to render to Caesar endless and largely meaningless quantitative data on social and economic impact, it is that this approach fundamentally misunderstands and perverts the mission of the sectors. For O’Connor this means seeing and valuing arts and culture primarily as a contributor to economic growth, rather than as an essential expression of the human experience and a facilitator of a shared cultural citizenship. For the social service sector, it facilitates a model of top-down service provision, rather than a broader agenda of community development and advocacy for structural change.

For both culture and for social service, the embrace of an economic model comes at a cost.

Neoliberalism and Differences in Sector Experiences

For all the commonality above, the arts and social service sector have had a very different experience of neoliberalism’s hollowing-out of the state and abandonment of the public provision of goods and services. These processes impoverished arts and culture, and left cultural workers more precarious, but the not-for-profit social services sector massively increased with the outsourcing of government services (although arguably the demand for and complexity of service provision also increased with the withdrawal of public housing, cuts to public services and the impoverishment of social security payments).

But the differences between the sectors are not just about size.

Another key strand of O’Connor’s book is the analysis of neoliberalism’s privatisation and individualisation of culture. The marketisation of culture along with the growth of platform capitalism leaves us now with mass consumption of cultural product via Netflix, Disney etc. The household, rather than public spaces, become the primary place of cultural consumption as part of a broader neoliberal shift from mass consumption (public goods) to personalised choice (private goods). This shift is based on a false premiss (as even private consumption is socially constructed) and it is damaging to the community as a whole.

This shift is also evident in social services, although the issues and experience may be very different. The much-heralded NDIS is exactly that sort of shift, from the provision of public and institutionalised disability services to a model of service provision as a private good “purchased” by the recipient (or their advisors). The same could be said of the move from institutional aged care to the increased provision of services at home. These systems may not be perfect, but were a necessary departure from their oppressive predecessors.

Of course one should not push this analysis too far. These aged and disability services remain publicly funded welfare supports, and in both culture and social service sectors there has been a common shift from an intrinsic value to a transactional one. Further, as with creative industries, the shift to the consumer model of social service has enabled private profit making and the construction of NFPs as pseudo-corporations – with similar precarious results for workers.

In short, neoliberalism’s reshaping of the cultural sector provides a useful window into what is happening in social services, but the impacts can’t simply be cut-and-pasted from O’Connor’s analysis.

Universality and Social Service Sector Advocacy

The final point I want to consider arises from the above discussion and O’Connor’s passionate advocacy for the provision of social infrastructure and universal basic services (housing, health, education, welfare and transport). This draws on Foundational Economy scholarship that argues that people’s lives and household liveability is not simply based on the market or cash incomes. Rather it is underpinned by three pillars: household income, essential services, and social and cultural infrastructure.

Given this, and his concern about the privatisation and the neoliberal fracturing of culture, O’Connor argues that increasing services or supports in a way that further privileges household consumption at the expense of any wider social connection or solidarity is not an unproblematic advance. Indeed, O’Connor is suspicious of calls for a Universal Basic Income, for a variety of reasons, but including because it replaces social activity (work) with atomised individual activity (consumption).

While decent wages and income supports are obviously important, O’Connor’s argument provides a significant challenge for social service advocacy, which over the last decade or more has been very focused on raising the rate of income support payments like Newstart/Jobseeker.

In a world of limited resources (and even more limited advocacy power), there are real policy choices between income supports, essential services and social and cultural infrastructure. Should we be advocating for more public libraries and public wifi, or simply higher incomes so people can better afford to purchase data and devices? Is government housing support better delivered as direct rent assistance payments or by increasing the provision of public housing? Should we be investing in the “communal luxuries” of theatres and galleries, sports fields, public institutions and public spaces, or simply increasing incomes so people can support their own culture and leisure choices?

I saw some of this tension play out in a recent ACOSS Post-Budget Event. Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers tried to deflect criticism of the failure to increase JobSeeker by pointing to a range of other budgets measures which would support people on very low incomes. The audience did not buy it and remained focused on income-support payment levels.

Of course, when pressed, our sector would go for the “all of the above” choice avoidance, but in reality, social sector advocacy tends towards income-based solutions to poverty and disadvantage (or small-scale, after-the-fact services) rather than public infrastructure and universal public services. This is not just in what we advocate for, but also how we understand the problem. Our preferred descriptor of “income support” reflects a more individualised focus than the older term of “social security”, while our basic measures of poverty and inequality relate to only to income (e.g. a poverty line of $x per week). This is despite the fact that:

• the limited data available suggests the inclusion of a range of universal public services as “social transfers in kind” in the income data radically reduces measured inequality, and
• old ABS data shows that accounting for these service (along with inputed rent) decreases the poverty rate by about two-thirds (from 12% to 3.9% in 2013-14).

This is surely an argument to focus more on collective solutions through universal basic services, rather than only on payments. Yet despite this, and the strength of O’Connor’s arguments, I was surprised that I was still uncomfortable about the universalism and subsequent cost of such service provision. I kept going to the need to provide for the poorest first and to target funding. For instance, free public transport would be a subsidy to middle class office workers, managers and city professionals who can afford weekly tickets. Surely concessions for those on low-incomes would be cheaper and better targeted?

Given that I have just spent three years campaigning for better state government concessions, my head is very much in that income-support space. But O’Connor’s and the foundational economy approach is a useful reminder that a tactical win is not systemic change or the end goal. Some of the best supports we can provide to those with limited income or resources may not be directed to those people at all, but may be about creating better services for all.

Conclusion

I have some quibbles about some of the theoretical propositions in O’Connor’s book, and more questions about the Foundational Economics approach. I may return to these at a later date, but overall I found Culture is not a Creative Industry both readable and challenging. I will be interested to see its reception among arts and cultural practitioners, but for me it was well worth the read for its insights and applicability beyond that space.