ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the complex and often fraught scholarly relationship between cultural policy and the emergence of what has come to be identified as the creative industries. The release of Creative Nation occurred at a time when cultural policy in Australia was also developing a strong academic presence with Tony Bennett at Griffith University forming the Institute for Cultural Policy Studies in 1987. Definitions of the cultural industries have long emphasised that their defining quality is the production of 'aesthetic' or 'symbolic' goods or services, and thus the basis for cultural policy around them had focused on inclusion and contestations over the breadth of what counts as 'cultural'. The shift in emphasis from cultural policy to creative industries continues to come in for criticism. For several decades now as part of the larger focus on the economic potential of creativity that underlies the shift from cultural to creative industries, there has been a parallel emphasis upon creativity-led urban regeneration strategies.