After the Creative Industries: Platform Papers No. 47

In the 1990s, the 'creative industries' was a new concept aimed at mobilising the energies of culture in support of a new kind of economy: entrepreneurial, multicultural, youthful and digitally savvy 'Culture' moved to the top table of policy-making, and a revolution in Higher Education was proclaimed, with 'creativity' a central resource. Yet, only twenty years later the Australian Government has launched an innovation program in which culture and the cultural industries are nowhere to be seen. This Platform Paper charts the rise and fall of the concept in Australia, and argues that while undoubtedly a victim of its own hubristic rhetoric, its rapid disappearance leaves a hole in policy-making that those in the cultural sector ignore at their peril. Justin O'Connor outlines what a new agenda for the cultural economy might look like, 'after' the Creative Industries.