Australian musician Tim Minchin has urged tax and economic experts to invest in a "railway" for art and expressed fear humans will allow AI to be stuffed "down our choking throats, while we look wild-eyed at one another, thumbs up, convincing ourselves that we're having an excellent meal."
Speaking at the Art of Tax Reform Summit late last week at the Sydney Opera House, he observed the risks "taken to build this building was enormous, and if they had any idea how far the budget and timeline was going to blow out, even the dreamers who commissioned it would have run a mile. It was a mad gamble.
Tim Minchin’s Full Speech at The Art of Tax Reform Summit 2025 - NSW, Australia youtube.com/watch
"But was it? When you go this hard, with this level of vision and intention and commitment to excellence, the odds that it will fail across the long arc are near zero and the asymmetry of the upside is immeasurable. For the record, it paid itself off 20 or 30 years ago, and now they attribute about a billion dollars a year to her magnetism.
"That's just dollars generated. How would we measure the extent to which it has contributed to the identity of this state, to this country? Where's the spreadsheet column for per capita pride, the youthful inspiration?
"This is a church, it's a cathedral. And like all cathedrals, its creation was embarked upon in the knowledge that the vast majority of its beneficiaries were as yet unborn."
More than 50 years after its completion, he wondered how the visionaries who created the Opera House would feel about the era of social media and AI. "What would the blue sky long-term investment be in the age of fucking TikTok? AI? I mean, shit."
Humans feel fatalistic about AI, he argued, worrying "we will just roll over and let our apps feed ... us" AI creations now large language models have "stolen all the art and innovation of all of human history."
He asked, will we "just roll over and let our apps feed it to us? We'll just lie there and let a robot stuff the plastic nozzle of a can of whipped cream into our gaping maws and squirt it down our choking throats, while we look wild-eyed at one another, thumbs up, convincing ourselves that we're having an excellent meal. I mean, you wouldn't put it past us. Humans do seem dead set on conveniencing themselves into meaninglessness."
He is more "optimistic and defiant" than that, and he urged those in the room -- economic and tax policy experts plus people from across the arts sector -- to join him. "Because art isn't, and was never, just content. Art is content plus intent. And deep down, we understand this. Deep down, we know whipped cream is devoid of nutrients."
While the failure of a single musical, the closure of one theatre company, or the shuttering of a festival is "survivable," it's the compounding effect that stifles conversation and worsens liberal democracies, he argued. "And bureaucracies, governmental or otherwise, are not amazing at picking what art matters.
"So we need a system that just helps the ecosystem flourish. This cathedral would not get built today, but we don't need to build it, because those mid-century kooks caring for the future, understanding the value of art, gonads of steel, built it for us. We have a different job, a slightly less glamorous one. We need to built a railway.
"Rail is a long-term project requiring ongoing investment. Rail needs meticulous craft in its planning and a lot of expertise and focus in its construction. A railway is route, a pathway, not a terminus. And here's why my metaphor fucking rules. The whole point of rail is that it largely succeeds by removing from the equation one thing. It radically increases capacity for connection by minimising friction, by making the journey rub less.
"We're not currently asking anyone to buy us more trains. We'll fill them with ore. After all, we're artists. We conjure trains out of thin air. We'll do the mining. We will dig up stories from the gold seams of our imaginations. We just need as few barriers as possible once we get rolling. Keep us on track and we'll save the world baby."
He predicted AI content will ultimately become "kitch, uncool" and "junk". "And I think it will happen quickly and people will be driven back into the warm, sweaty, sexy arms of live art." Young people are already buying tickets to live performances, he noted.
"They want to see someone, a person, with other people. And that's what live art is, humans sharing their take on what it is to be human with other humans. And we're drawn to it, to witnessing someone who has had to work their guts out to acquire their craft. Who's doing something that we might not have the capacity to do, who may yet play the wrong note, or forget their line, or fall off their trapeze.
"We crave intention, jeopardy, risk, sweat, messiness, virtuosity, proximity, collectivity, and empathy. Empathy. It's the most miraculous outcome of consciousness, don't you think, the ability and inclination to imagine what it might be like to be someone else. That we want to hear other people's stories. It is the thing that keeps humans living to an extraordinary degree in peace."
When humans fail to empathise, the result is literal war, he said. Storytelling is the antidote, the "cultural mechanism" by which "we break down barriers and flatten fences."
"Have we ever so needed a revolution of storytelling and live art, and has there ever been a country with better capacity to ferment one?"
Two years ago, Droga5 asked Tim to be the frontman for a film celebrating 50 years of the Sydney Opera House, 'Play it Safe'. In just four days, director Kim Gehrig captured the rallying cry to protect creativity, innovation, and out-of-the-box thinking, which went on to become globally lauded, winning a Cannes Grand Prix and Australia's first-ever Immortal Award. He played the two minute film to the room.
He quipped, "The brief was interesting. They [The Monkeys, now known as Droga5] told me that it was really up to me what I wanted to write. They just hoped my song would celebrate the building, its architecture, its engineering, its aesthetic. And ideally, it would be a broad tribute to Australian innovation and our capacity to be world leaders when we are brave.
"And, if possible, it'd promote diversity, reminding Aussies that the Opera House is for everyone, that our doors are always open. And if it wasn't too much trouble, the song would use the Opera House as a metaphor for art in general. It would articulate the vital importance of storytelling to bring us together and define our national identity. A song that would be the voice of Aussie creative ingenuity, defiance, and a can-do attitude, and on and on.
"So I went away and I thought about it and eventually I did it. I wrote a song that was the absolute opposite of what that asked for. I wrote an anthem to mediocrity, a celebration of small-thinking cynical, tribal, closed-mindedness, a tribute to the arts from the point of view of your grumpy great-uncle Ken."
The summit was held last Thursday at the Opera House, with the goal of producing recommendations for the next National Cultural Policy, due in 2028.
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