Revive Australia - National Cultural Policy Submission 2026
FECCA fully endorses Creative Australia’s statement “Arts and culture shape how we see ourselves and how the world sees us. They strengthen our communities, drive innovation, and help us navigate the challenges of a changing world.”
We welcome the review of Revive as a critical opportunity to reimagine the role of arts and culture in shaping Australia’s future at a time of rising racism, increasing anti-migrant rhetoric, global instability, and growing social fragmentation.
Arts and cultural participation have the power to challenge division, humanise communities too often marginalised in public debate, and create shared spaces where people encounter one another beyond fear, prejudice, and political polarisation.
These themes were strongly reinforced through FECCA’s recent national social cohesion consultations and National Community Pulse Survey, which highlighted growing community concern around social fragmentation, racism, misinformation, loneliness and declining trust.
Participants consistently identified the need for safe and trusted spaces where difficult conversations around identity, belonging and difference can occur constructively. Arts and culture can play a unique role in creating these spaces through storytelling, intercultural dialogue and shared creative practice.
In this context, investment in multiculturalism is not optional, it is fundamental to strengthening social cohesion, democratic participation, and a shared sense of belonging in modern Australia.
Through a diversity of cultural expressions, we enable people to feel connected, represented and to learn about others in a creative way that contributes to the identity of Australia as a diverse nation.
Read our submission in full – download available to the right of this page.
