Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

How will the Voice to Parliament change Australia? In this second collection of the New Platform Papers, From the Heart: The Voice, the Arts and Australian Identity, Josephine Caust, a veteran of Australian arts policy, and major First Nations thinkers and writers from the creative arts, law and philosophy reflect on the culture of Australian democracy and the role of the arts within it.

In the first commissioned essay of the new series, Arts, Culture and Country, Josephine Caust asks if the self-serving behaviour that has dominated Parliament for three decades is the product of a nation that has not taken culture seriously. What would Australian government look like if it took its lead from the First Nations of this continent and replaced KPIs with a concept in which arts, culture and country were one?

In two dazzling and powerful companion essays, artist and philosopher Tyson Yunkaporta sketches the parallel paths traced by competing concepts of art, culture and economic value through the history of relations between Aboriginal and colonial Australia; and Noel Pearson launches a blistering assault on the 'natural rate of unemployment' that has deliberately sacrificed parts of the population to poverty and hopelessness, and calls for a job guarantee. Drawing on the 2022 Currency House Authors Convention From the Heart: the implications for the arts-the sector responds, this volume also highlights the addresses of keynote speakers Eddie Synot, Sally Scales and Rachael Maza, on the meaning of sovereignty in Australian law and culture and how it should be embodied in the Voice to Parliament and the National Cultural Policy.

This volume also includes Wesley Enoch's bestselling essay from the original series of Platform Papers, Take Me to Your Leader: The dilemma of cultural leadership.