On Tuesday 16 April ALIA CEO Cathie Warburton and Deputy CEO Trish Hepworth appeared before the Senate Environment and Communications References Committee as part of the Inquiry into the National Cultural Policy - Revive. Trish and Cathie appeared alongside Dr Stuart Glover (Australian Publishers Association), Olivia Lanchester (Australian Society of Authors) and Claire Pullen (Australian Writers’ Guild).
ALIA welcomed the release of the Cultural Policy ‘Revive’ in January 2023, its commitment to Australian stories, writers and readers, and its recognition of the role that libraries play in providing access to those stories. A highlight of the policy the $12.9 million extension to library lending rights to include audiobooks and e-books, a change ALIA had been advocating for strongly in conjunction with the Australian Society of Authors (ASA).
Appearing before the Senate Committee was a powerful opportunity for ALIA to once again represent and advocate for libraries and to reinforce - in front of key decision-makers - how essential they are to our social infrastructure. In her opening statement, ALIA CEO Cathie Warburton highlighted their essential role in the access to and the preservation of Australian stories, culture and heritage.
Libraries are among the most popular cultural institutions in Australia. Each year, around 150 million physical and digital items are borrowed just from public libraries, and in 2021, 3½ million people participated in public library programs, from story time to author talks and digital literacy classes. That's increasing post COVID. In addition we have the National Library's Trove database, which has more than six billion items of culture history available for browsing by the public.
Emphasising that libraries serve readers of all backgrounds across Australia, she highlighted their role fulfilling essential societal needs, countering mis and dis-information, improving literacy levels and creating safe and inclusive spaces for all.
To access many art forms and culture or create it, you need connectivity and you also need digital literacy of many types. Libraries—public libraries in particular—are a backbone across the country for people to have that digital access and for that digital inclusion to be provided. It's something which, if there's united work to use that backbone—those public libraries—to progress and close that gap on digital inclusion, we think that would be most beneficial.
Cathie and Trish were able to provide updates on where and how ALIA is engaging with key parts of the policy, including the extension to library lending rights, and provide more detail to the committee about this beneficial government scheme.
The hearing also provided an opportunity for ALIA to identify areas where action is needed to advance the aims of Revive outside of the arts portfolio advocate for further action in areas where we need government action to ensure the future health of our libraries and of our communities. Cathie and Trish spoke about the current inequity of student access to school libraries, and how Revive could be leveraged with education to support students and also Australian creators.
We know that recent research unfortunately shows a decline in reading by young people. However, we also know that reading is four times as influential on intellectual progress in teenagers as having a parent with a degree, and recent research from ACER found that students who never or almost never borrowed books from libraries scored lower on reading comprehension than their peers. Despite this, we have no national data on student access to school libraries and no commitment that every Australian student can access a well-resourced and staffed school library. This poses a significant challenge for reading and writing into the future. We'd like to see the national cultural policy drive support for a school library for every child, regardless of their postcode.
Cathie also drew attention to the significant funding for public libraries from local government, and the way that much of that funding was now being used to support Federal Government responsibilities, with little recognition and funding, an unsustainable situation.
One of the things that we hear from public libraries is that they are doing a lot of work for federal government departments. These are federal government departments which no longer have places people can go, in their local community, to walk in and get help, whether it be for Medicare or Centrelink or something else. It's online, but people are finding it hard to work it out online, and they're actually told, 'Go to your library. They'll help you.' And that's true—they will—because to help is in librarians' DNA. But there's some frustration, because they're spending a lot of time helping people with federal government issues but with no funding for it.
The official recording can be seen here (with Cathie and Trish appearing at 12:10) and the transcript is available here.