Dear Heads,

I don’t envy your role as the change agent for Return to Work (RTW) in this country. Taking on the issue and evolving its systematic, process driven approach to one that engages people in relationships and creates partnerships is not a job for the faint-hearted.

In my own brief observation of RTW I have sometimes said that workers’ compensation feels like being in a car whose four wheels are going in different directions. The conflicts of interest too often appear to dominate and the consequences for claimants at the bottom of the pile scare the crap out of me.

I wonder how you will bring these disparate elements to a single focus.  Find something of greater purpose within which self-interest can defer to a common good.

Candidly, my experience of RTW has more than once left me pacing a mental landscape of frustration.  But then, I have spent most of my working life in a community development context in which there was a vast commonality of purpose – Community Arts.  Despite the differences, there are parallels between this context and Return to Work and this is something you – with your unique opportunity to drive change – could exploit.  They might seem like strange bedfellows, but RTW has a lot to gain from considering the lessons of the Community Arts movement.

'Community Arts' once described itself as a movement.  Today participative arts practice is so deeply a part of the mainstream that to think of it as having a radical voice seems absurd.  But for a couple of decades it did: the voice of advocates who shared a passionate, indeed revolutionary agenda for community development.

I'd like to tell you about the woman who was responsible for shaping Community Arts in Australia.  Her name was Ros Bower.

In the early 1970s Australia was, in comparative terms, an artistic wasteland.  This began to change in the cultural flux unleashed by the first Whitlam Government.

The organisation, now called the Australia Council (for the Arts), was then a small group of thinkers trying to work out what to do.  Ros Bower caught their ear.  She said that the development of the arts in Australia would be the richer if, in addition to supporting professional artists, the Council invested in creating opportunities for all Australians to actively participate in the arts.

Ros wanted more than to foster Australians as an audience, passive recipients.  She saw something far more valuable and advocated that the opportunity to participate in the arts be available to everyone.

The Council made a small gesture.  Ros was given a budget of a few hundred thousand dollars and a support committee.

In the 40 years since, the community aspect of the arts within the Australia Council has become part of the bedrock.  Community relationships now underpin arts practice in every discipline throughout the country.  The impact has been enormous.  The work of one woman with a small budget has evolved into hundreds of State and local budgets, and investment that totals hundreds of millions of dollars every year.

How did one woman with a vision achieve this?  Ros Bower used a 'message' and an 'approach'.

The 'message' is 'the arts are good'. Everyone can agree with that. The concept has always had bi-partisan political support at the federal level.  And what it means has been researched, examined and discussed endlessly to prove the case.  As a result access to artistic practice has today become a fundamental right, a public service that ranks up there with roads and rubbish collection.

The 'approach' grew out of the objective.  To enable individuals to actively participate in the arts one has to create opportunities for them to do so.

As we in the RTW field know, enabling people to give the best of themselves to others via an activity of their choice is a powerful and satisfying thing.  It can't be achieved via legislation, through authority, by a system or by using threats, regulations or even incentives – although all these things have influence.  Nor is it about places and facilities. It is instead, a matter of culture, about relationship, partnership, the opportunity to make a positive choice. 

The approach Ros used was a culture, an attitude. It had principles and values to guide it, but its processes and outcomes could be as diverse as the participants.  She understood that every person at each level of the process had to understand the message.  They also had to ‘feel’ the approach and know the principles.

Open discussion was vital, independence within the movement was fundamental.  Its leaders emerged from those who gave Community Arts the greatest service. Those at the top came from the bottom. 

One debate in the 1980’s took place when the fine arts boards of the Australia Council sought to diminish the influence of Community Arts by labelling it as ‘welfare’.  The field erupted.  Eventually it was declared that welfare is a remedial activity applied to a negative situation, while Community Arts is an enabling activity applied to human potential.  Yes, we said, there are circumstances and contexts in which Community Arts can and should be used for remedial purposes, but what it is at its core is the creative enabling of a positive present that that has faith in the future.

We no longer hear the passionate voices of Community Arts workers explaining the importance of Australians participating in the arts. There is no need; they succeeded.

Ros only lived to see the first decade in the development of the extraordinary gift she gave to this country.  But it was her message and approach that laid the foundation for it.  The simplicity and clarity of her message and approach carried the day and gave energy and scope to thousands of Australians who contributed the very best of themselves to realising her vision, and in so doing the arts have flourished in Australia.

Do Community Arts and Return to Work still seem strange bedfellows?  It seems to me that in the successful execution of both, there is a single idea: the greatest gift any individual has to offer society is their work.

Yes, there are remedial aspects to address via Workers’ Comp.  Individuals who are ill or injured in their employment need assistance and time to recover.  Yes, there is a welfare aspect.  But, fixing what is broken is not the only lode we have to mine here.

I reckon we have the opportunity to step beyond the remedial in both our message and practice to focus on something far more exciting and infinitely important.  It is a greater truth and more powerful than anything Ros Bower had to work with.

Work is good.

There are volumes of discussion and generations of policy development to be refined from that single message.

What Community Arts says to Return to Work is that it is not the work claimants have done that is important, nor is it the work they are not doing while recovering.  It is the work not yet done that is of unknowable and therefore infinite value.

Claimants are the Return to Work field’s greatest asset, not because their misfortune gives us a job, but because facilitating them enables us to contribute to something far beyond ourselves.  Our clients are not a drag on the economy, an instance to be managed to affect a good KPI outcome.  They are each and every one a human being of priceless potential.  Ros Bower would say that every step in our RTW approach should be informed by that insight.

How good is that?  How lucky are we, at every level, we get to support people with a problem to get through it.  Assist them in a time of need, while learning from their experiences the means to prevent others suffering the same fate.  Refining and improving our approach, principles and values, but above all, we get to enable people to return to activity and contribute the work they have not yet done.

Work is good.

I reckon we should all have a chat about it for at least the next 20 years.

Best wishes

Robert Hughes, Dr Mary Wyatt, Anna Kelsey-Sugg, Gabrielle Lis