Consultant Amy Harrison worked on the current Government’s “Amplify” strategy for the creative and cultural sector in Aotearoa, released in August 2025. Here Amy explains the economic focus of the strategy, and then looks abroad to how other national strategies have focussed on different government priorities.
The issue of government funding for creative and cultural sectors can be polarising.
On the one hand, it’s often conservatively viewed as a nice-to-have – great if you can afford it but quickly done away with in fiscally tight times.
On the other side, arguments in favour of continuing to support the sector through the good and the bad days run the gamut, from creativity and culture being fundamental to the human condition and so always being worth funding, to more specific evidence-backed arguments that the sector can bolster a country’s economy or international standing or that access to the arts improves specific educational, health, or social outcomes.
I won’t take sides here in the longstanding debates about whether arts and culture should be valued as a precondition for a healthy society or for its more specific contributions to social or economic goals. But I do want to highlight how different governments around the world, our own included, have identified very specific purposes for their support of arts and culture, in line with each government’s priorities.
And “the arts” means … ?
First though, I want to note some differences around definitions and scope. Strategies can differ in the sectors they capture, from taking in the wider creative and cultural sectors, including architecture, design, and modern media for example, to a narrower focus on “the arts” – the kind of art you might immediately think of, like painting, dance, and stage performances.
But often this can be a largely semantic distinction, signalling not so much a difference in scope as a difference in purpose and focus for the particular strategy. Strategies pitched at the “creative industries” tend to focus on the economic, while strategies referring to “the arts” tend to focus on broader social outcomes.
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Amplifying the sector’s economic impact: Aotearoa New Zealand
In late August last year, the Government released Amplify: A Creative and Cultural Strategy for New Zealand, outlining how the Government will prioritise its support out to 2030.
Economic growth is a priority for our current Government, and with Amplify it has extended this priority to New Zealand’s creative and cultural sector. The sector’s economic contribution has been put at almost $17.5 billion – or 4.2% of GDP (Infometrics). The focus of Amplify is quite tightly on this economic contribution, with a target of increasing that $17.5 billion figure to $22 billion by 2030, through actions ranging from developing our creative exports and cultural tourism, to loosening up regulatory restrictions on growth.
Another of the strategy’s three key targets for 2030 is to increase the size of the creative sector workforce – which in 2024 was 118,000 – by 5,000. Actions to achieve this include making it easier to access funding, and improving education and training to better match the needs of the sector, as well as simply expanding the size of the sector.
Amplify is currently in Phase 1 (2025–26) of its implementation plan, which includes, for example, developing a research programme to create an evidence base, including creative and cultural organisations in international missions, and reviewing regulations with an eye to removing barriers to sector growth.
First Nations First: Australia’s “Revive” strategy
The Revive strategy, released in 2023, has less of an economic focus than New Zealand’s Amplify. Instead, Revive focusses heavily on Australian audiences and their access to Australian – including indigenous – arts, culture, and heritage.
Revive is a comprehensive “First Nations First” policy. It aims both to address years of perceived funding neglect and federal policy drift, and to support Australia’s cultural and creative sectors following the particularly trying COVID years.
Revive came with $286 million in funding over four years – a whopping sum from a New Zealand perspective – and a large, ambitious remit for things to spend this on.
Key policies in the strategy include establishing a new funding and governing body for the arts in Australia, introducing legislation to protect First Nations knowledge and cultural expressions, establishing a First Nations Language Policy Partnership, and supporting a range of initiatives to improve access to the arts.
Equality, cohesion, and quality of life: South Korea
Any parent of a school-age child with a Netflix log-in will be able to tell you about KPop Demon Hunters (Netflix’s most-watched title for those who haven’t been subjected to this phenomenon) and so will have an intimate understanding of the “Korean Wave” – the increasing global popularity of South Korean culture and media.
But the international reach of the Korean Wave is perhaps a more indirect result of South Korea’s explicit cultural strategy, Culture Vision 2030, which has more of a focus on access to culture for broad societal benefits.
South Korea’s strategy identifies specific social problems like people working too many hours and the high cost of cultural leisure activities, and also focusses on gender equality and on ethnic and other community divisions. The goal is for the strategies in Culture Vision 2030 to do nothing less than improve the quality of life for South Koreans.
Strengthening “soft power” and global reach: The UK
The UK’s 2023 Creative Industries Sector Vision, released under the Sunak government, is notable for its very direct and explicit focus on the UK’s global cultural influence.
Similar to New Zealand’s Amplify, the UK’s strategy has a strong economic thrust, with a target of increasing the value of the creative industries by an extra £50 billion. But alongside the economic target was a target to “Maximise the positive impact of the creative industries on individuals and communities, the environment and the UK’s global standing”.
The strategy is quite explicit that its goals for the creative industries include “strengthening the UK’s soft power” and global reach, with an aspiration to maintain or improve the UK’s 2023 second-place ranking in the Brand Directory Soft Power Index.
The UK’s newer Creative Industries Sector Plan, released in 2025 under the Starmer government, maintains this international focus, with the ambition of positioning the UK globally as a “creative superpower”. Deep as we now are into the uncertainty of the second Trump administration, with longtime international relationships in doubt, the UK government is no doubt especially keen to boost its influence abroad – perhaps with a new, 21st-century wave of “Cool Britannia”?
Lead actors or supporting players?
UNESCO argues in their 2025 “Global report on cultural policies” that “culture is not a peripheral sector to be supported, but a central force to be mobilised”. The report is subtitled, “Culture: the missing SDG” – it argues for a stand-alone Sustainable Development Goal for culture being added to the 15 SDGs adopted by the UN in 2015.
The UNESCO report sees the value of culture as being foundational, with culture as “a cornerstone of our shared humanity, well-being and sustainable development”, part of the foundations of “inclusive and democratic societies”.
It’s perhaps not surprising that national governments deciding how to allocate resources may be more likely, as I’ve described, to cast their creative and cultural industries as supporting actors in larger stories about economic growth, social cohesion, or global influence, rather than giving them their own lead role as UNESCO urges. The differences in emphasis and ambition in the different national strategies here reflect the varied contexts and aspirations of the governments designing them.
But that shouldn’t diminish the importance of each of these national strategies in bringing together policy settings, investment decisions, and long term aspirations for creative and cultural life. The strategies all signal an understanding that cultural expression shapes how nations see themselves and how they are seen by others.
And whatever the strategies’ particular form or focus, the process of developing them provides a rare and valuable opportunity for the creative and cultural sectors to clearly articulate their value to central government.
