GRIEVANCE DEBATE
Ms WITTY (Melbourne) (13:18): When I gave my first speech in this place, I spoke about Melbourne as a city that pulses with live music, breathes a soul of theatre and has creativity running through it. I've had plenty of reasons since then to feel even more strongly about that. I have the enormous privilege of representing a part of Australia where you can walk a few streets and come across live music, theatre, comedy, galleries, record shops, games, fashion and people making things you probably wouldn't find anywhere else.
Melbourne has built that reputation over generations. A lot of it has happened in small venues, rehearsal rooms and studios above pubs, behind shopfronts and in places where somebody was prepared to give an artist a go. I was reminded of that recently when I toured the Melbourne Fringe Festival.
Fringe has been part of Melbourne for more than 40 years. This year's festival has more than 450 events, and its open-access model means an independent artist does not have to go through a selection committee or audition before registering a show. There is theatre, comedy, circus, cabaret, music, dance and visual arts.
There are established artists and people putting something in front of an audience for the first time. For 20 days, that work takes over theatres, pubs, shopfronts and community halls across Melbourne. You can see people trying things out.
Some of it's funny. Some of it's strange. Some of it is even challenging.
That willingness to experiment has always been part of Melbourne's culture. Earlier this year I visited St Martins Youth Arts Centre in South Yarra. They have worked with children and young people since 1980, putting them in rehearsal rooms with professionals and treating them as artists in their own right.
They help create the work themselves and develop scenes, movement, sound, characters and performance. I really enjoyed seeing how seriously they take young people's ideas and creativity. People including Ben Mendelsohn, Catherine McClements, Gina Riley and Jane Turner have come through St Martins.
Another area where Melbourne exceeds is gaming, and I recently saw the launch of Melbourne International Games Week at ACMI in Federation Square. ACMI is Australia's only museum dedicated to screen culture, bringing film, television, video games and screen based art together in the middle of Melbourne and welcoming around one million visitors each year. It has also taken video games seriously as an art form for more than 20 years.
It exhibits and collects games, supports developers and hosts Melbourne International Games Week, a 10-day celebration of Australian and international video game culture and industry. Digital games development recorded average annual growth of 13.1 per cent over the decade of 2024 to 2025, the strongest growth across Australia's culture and creative sector. The broader cultural and creative economy contributed $70.3 billion in 2024-25.
Another organisation I've been proud to support is the Social Studio. The Social Studio has been part of Melbourne's scene since 2009, creating training, employment and creative opportunities for people from refugee and migrant backgrounds through fashion, design and the arts. Their school, manufacturing studio and retail store give emerging creatives somewhere to build skills and find meaningful opportunities.
When talking about art, I often come back to music. Melbourne's music scene is one of the things I love most about representing this city. On almost any night, you can find someone playing somewhere.
There are rooms packed with people and rooms where the audiences can practically lean on the stage. There are musicians playing their first proper gig and others who have spent their lives performing. Around them are sound engineers, bookers, promoters, producers, venue staff, good audience members like me and all the people who keep live music running.
Those smaller venues have a practical place in Melbourne. Long before an artist can fill a festival stage, they need somewhere to play in front of a much smaller group of people, and hopefully that's more than one. They need someone willing to book them and audiences willing to take a chance.
The Albanese Labor government knows the pressure the live music sector has been under. We established Revive Live to support Australian owned venues and festivals and give Australian artists more opportunities to perform, develop an audience, hone their craft and earn an income. Some of the Melbourne organisations and venues supported, including the Grace Darling Hotel, the Bodriggy Brewing Company, Yah Yahs and Punters Club alongside Ability Fest and Glo Glo in Fitzroy.
Across Australia, Revive Live has provided $19.3 million to 221 live music businesses, including 100 venues and 121 festival activities. Our government has committed a further $12.5 million for 2026-27. Labor's cultural policy, Revive, also established Music Australia within Creative Australia to support and promote contemporary Australian music and help Australian artists develop audiences and markets.
As incredible as Melbourne's arts and culture scene is, it is under pressure and threat from unregulated AI training. If you make music, write, illustrate, photograph, design or perform, your work is your intellectual property. Australian copyright law gives copyright owners economic rights over their material, while creators and performers also have moral rights including attribution and protection against false attribution.
Generative AI has raised serious questions about what happens when copyright work is used to train AI systems. The Albanese Labor government has already made clear it supports artists and their work by ruling out a broad text and data mining exception in Australian copyright law. Parts of the technology sector had called for such an exception.
It could have allowed AI developers to use Australian creatives' copyright work, for free and without permission, to train AI systems. The government has ruled that out and has been clear that it has no plan to weaken copyright protection because of AI. The government's Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Reference Group is bringing creators, industry and experts together to work through what comes next, including how copyright material is used as inputs for AI and questions around transparency.
The government is considering different ways of addressing this emerging technology—for example, whether Australia should establish a paid collective licence framework for AI or continue with voluntary licence agreements. It is also examining whether copyright law needs greater clarity around AI generated material and whether a small-claims forum could make it cheaper for copyright owners to pursue lower-value infringements.
These discussions are ongoing, and I am pleased to know that artists and creative workers are at the heart of these talks. Melbourne gives me the chance to see how broad our arts scene really is—independent performers at Fringe; young people making theatre at St Martins; designers at the Social Studio; game developers, musicians, technicians and the people keeping local venues alive.
The mix has taken generations of people to build. I am incredibly proud to represent them and proud to be part of a government that backs Australian artists and wants the next generation to have the opportunity to make a life and a career from their creativity.