Australia Is Gutting the One Thing AI Can't Replace

New research published this week in the Australian Journal of Education confirms what anyone paying attention already knew: we're systematically destroying arts education in this country. And we're doing it at the exact moment in history when it matters most.

The numbers are brutal. Forty-eight creative arts degrees axed between 2018 and 2025. Year 12 drama enrolments down 39%. Dance down 38%. Media down 25%. Undergraduate creative arts enrolments collapsed at 30 of 46 higher education providers, some by more than 50%.

The cause? The Morrison government's "job-ready graduate" scheme, which doubled the cost of arts degrees while making STEM cheaper. In 2026, a maths student pays $4,738 per year. A performing arts student pays $9,537. A humanities student pays $17,399.

Read that again. We are actively punishing students for choosing creativity.

The Irony Is Staggering

Here's what makes this genuinely dangerous, not just disappointing.

Every "job-ready" skill the government pushed students towards (coding, data analysis, engineering workflows) is being automated faster than any of us predicted. GPT can write production code. Claude can analyse datasets. AI agents can manage projects, draft reports, and pass professional exams.

The skills that are hardest to automate? Taste. Emotional intelligence. The ability to feel something and know why it matters. The judgement to look at two pieces of work and understand which one has soul and which one is noise.

Those are arts skills. They always have been.

We're About to Drown in Content

Consider the world we're walking into. AI image generators produce millions of images daily. AI can write articles, compose music, generate video, design logos, draft screenplays. Within five years, the volume of AI-generated content will outnumber human-created content by orders of magnitude.

In that world, the scarce resource isn't creation. It's curation. It's the ability to judge quality. To know what resonates. To understand why one piece of writing makes you feel something and another leaves you cold, even when both are technically competent.

That judgement doesn't come from a STEM degree. It comes from years of engaging with art. From performing in plays and understanding character. From studying visual composition and knowing why one frame works and another doesn't. From writing poetry and learning that the gap between "good enough" and "genuinely moving" is everything.

AI Natives Need Taste More Than They Need Code

I've spent the last decade watching education evolve. First we panicked about digital literacy. Then coding. Then data. Now AI.

Each wave had the same pattern: government throws money at the "hard" technical skill and assumes the "soft" human stuff will sort itself out. It never does.

The students who will thrive in an AI-saturated world aren't the ones who can prompt engineer their way through life. They're the ones who can:

• Judge quality — look at AI-generated output and know if it's excellent, mediocre, or garbage
• Direct with intention — tell an AI what to make and actually know what good looks like
• Communicate with emotion — connect with other humans in ways that feel real, not synthetic
• Think originally — have ideas that aren't just recombinations of training data
• Create with purpose — understand why art exists and what it does to people

Every single one of those capabilities is developed through arts education. Not exclusively, but arts education is the most direct pipeline we have for building humans who can do these things.

The Numbers Don't Lie, But the Policy Does

The government poured $75.6 million into STEM education initiatives while doing literally nothing (not a single national initiative) to address the collapse in arts enrolments.

Meanwhile, the National Cultural Policy aims to "revive and diversify Australia's arts sector." You cannot revive a sector while pricing students out of the degrees that feed it. That's not policy. That's performance.

Prof Sandra Gattenhof, who co-authored the study, put it plainly: "We're heading into, within the next five years, a real reduction in the capacities to sustain a creative and cultural workforce."

And Dr John Nicholas Saunders warned: "We risk becoming an artless country."

I'd go further. We risk becoming a tasteless country. A country that can build AI tools but can't judge what they produce. A country that can generate content but can't tell if any of it matters.

What This Means for Teachers

If you're a teacher (especially an arts teacher) you're not teaching a "nice to have" subject. You're teaching the survival skill of the 21st century.

Every time a student learns to critique a performance, analyse a painting, write a story that makes someone feel something, or compose music that moves a room, they're building the one capability that AI cannot replicate.

They're learning taste. And taste is about to become the most valuable currency on earth.

The government doesn't see it yet. The funding models don't reflect it. The fee structures actively discourage it. But the market will figure it out, because the market always does. And when every company realises they need humans who can tell the difference between AI slop and genuine quality, they'll be looking for people with arts training.

The question is whether we'll still have anyone to hire.

The Fix

It's not complicated:

1. Reform the job-ready graduate scheme. Arts degrees should not cost double STEM degrees. Full stop.
2. Fund arts education at the same level as STEM. If $75.6 million went to STEM initiatives, match it for creative arts.
3. Stop treating creativity as a luxury. It's infrastructure. It's the foundation of every industry that produces anything worth consuming.
4. Reframe the narrative. Arts education isn't about producing artists. It's about producing humans who can think, feel, judge, and create. Every industry needs that.

Labor opposed the job-ready graduate scheme in opposition. They've been in government for years now. As Universities Australia CEO Luke Sheehy asked: "What are they waiting for?"

Good question.

Source: The Guardian — Australia in danger of becoming an 'artless country' as enrolments in creative courses collapse