A thriving arts economy is not measured by how many leaders we produce, but by how many practitioners can build viable, recognised, sovereign creative lives.
Every time a new arts leadership initiative is announced in Australia, the same reaction ripples through the sector: pride, excitement, and a familiar sense of déjà vu. Another program for a chosen few. Another investment in the top of the pyramid. Another round of selection, elevation, and celebration of individuals who already sit within reach of opportunity. It is well-intentioned, of course — but it reveals a deeper truth we rarely name out loud. We keep trying to fix system-wide problems by pouring more resources into the narrowest part of the structure. And then we wonder why the rest of the sector keeps collapsing under its own weight.
The dominant narrative says this is progress. That expanding leadership programs means building capability. That “supporting emerging leaders” is synonymous with supporting the creative workforce. But if leadership is the only pathway to stability, visibility, or resourcing, then what we are really saying — quietly, structurally — is that only a select category of practitioners deserve long-term security. Everyone else is left in the shadows, working without recognition, infrastructure, or a national framework that treats their craft as a legitimate profession. We’ve normalised a system where being an artist must somehow be elevated into “leadership” in order to be valued.
This narrative is not only outdated — it is economically impossible. Most creative workers do not want to sit on panels, lead institutions, or manage teams. They want to create. They want to build their ateliers, their studios, their practices, their cultural contributions. They want a system that recognises mastery — not only management — as a pathway to sustainability. But in Australia, we’ve built a model where even the attempt to fix inequity lands, ironically, as another form of gatekeeping. Leadership becomes the prize; recognition becomes conditional; and participation becomes stratified. Meanwhile, the vast majority of expert practitioners — the country’s actual cultural engine — remain unsupported and structurally unseen.
The CWA lens exposes the deeper system failure: Australia does not have a creative workforce problem. It has a creative workforce architecture problem. Leadership programs presume a pyramid. But a pyramid requires a base. And at present, there is no middle layer — no certified workforce, no standards, no national pathways, no formal recognition of creative labour as a profession. According to the Creative Workforce Scoping Study summary, Australia’s cultural and creative sectors require new systems, structures, and recognised pathways to function as a true workforce, not as a project economy.
In this context, expanding leadership programs does not close the gap — it widens it. Because no other national workforce would accept a model where thousands of skilled practitioners work invisibly, while a handful are chosen for advancement. We would never design teaching, nursing, aged care, engineering, or the trades this way. These industries have certification. Standards. Pathways. Infrastructure. They are not dependent on competitive grants, nor are they forced into a binary where the only valued role is “leader.” Yet this remains the default operating logic in the arts: a system designed for scarcity will always reward the few, because it has no structure to support the many.
What Australia needs now is not another attempt to elevate individuals without addressing the foundational absence beneath them. What we need is a system that transforms participation itself — a national creative workforce architecture that gives every practitioner a legitimate place to stand. Certified practice is what creates a profession. Provenance is what creates value. Standards are what create mobility. And when these elements exist, leadership becomes organic — the natural outcome of a healthy ecosystem, not the artificial construction of one.
Countries that have built certified creative industries demonstrate this clearly. In Scotland, the Harris Tweed Authority model transformed a vulnerable craft economy into a globally recognised, high-value industry. Over a decade, certified provenance protection generated a 570% increase in employment and a 3000% increase in industry turnover. Certification did not create “leaders.” It created a workforce — and the leaders emerged naturally from that stability. This is the structural lesson Australia has been missing.
The reframe, then, is simple: a thriving arts economy is not measured by how many leaders we produce, but by how many practitioners can build viable, recognised, sovereign creative lives. A sector cannot innovate when participation depends on grant approval. High application volume is not a sign of success; it is a sign that the system has no other means of support. And when creativity is restricted — by scarcity, by gatekeeping, by the absence of a workforce model — innovation is lost, along with the economic and health benefits that flow from it.
The solution is not to shrink opportunity upward, but to expand structure outward. This is what the Creative Women’s Association was built to deliver: a national, provenance-based certification model that establishes practice standards, workforce pathways, enterprise frameworks, and recognition systems across nine creative disciplines. It is not leadership training. It is workforce building. And workforce building is the missing architecture on which Australia’s next cultural era depends.
The irony is that even when we try to address inequity, we often reinforce it by continuing to invest in the top of a system that has no middle. But the future is not built at the top. It is built at the foundation. A modern creative nation requires more than emerging grants, elite programs, or symbolic opportunities. It requires infrastructure — the kind that transforms creativity from an aspiration into a recognised economic force. And once that foundation exists, leadership won’t need to be manufactured. It will rise naturally from a workforce finally given the structural conditions to thrive.
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Re|shaping policies for creativity: addressing culture as a global public good
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