Kate Banazi (2022), Sydney. Public art consultancy and curatorial direction by ART AID.
There is a feature of the Australian development landscape that most people in property touch regularly and rarely think about.
It is not a landmark sculpture or a celebrated artist. It is a planning mechanism, and viewed from the outside, it is one of the more forward-thinking cultural instruments a country can have.
That is worth saying plainly, because it runs against the usual story we tell ourselves: that Australia is a young country playing cultural catch-up, that the serious public art and cultural investment happen in Europe's old capitals or in the vast new cultural districts rising across Asia and the Middle East. There is some truth in it. But it misses something we already have, built quietly over three decades, that governments elsewhere are now studying as they design their own systems from scratch.
This piece is for developers, and the argument is simple. The public art obligation you treat as a compliance cost is one of the most sophisticated cultural mechanisms in the world, and you are the one who activates it.
The mechanism hiding in plain sight
If you work in development in Australia, you already know the shape of it. Major developments over a certain value are required, through local planning policy, to allocate a percentage of total project cost, typically up to one percent above defined thresholds, to commissioned public art. It is often called “percent for art.”
The concept itself is not Australian, and it is not rare. It originated in the United States, where Philadelphia adopted the first municipal ordinance of this kind in the late 1950s, and versions now exist across North America and Europe. So Australia did not invent the idea, and any honest account should say so.
What Australia did was more interesting, and more difficult. It embedded the idea deep into private development, systematically, through local government, with real institutional scaffolding behind it.
Consider how far this has actually gone. In Western Australia, a 2019 survey found that percent-for-art policies for private development had been adopted by eighteen of twenty-five responding Perth metropolitan local government authorities, most of them within the preceding five or six years. That is close to saturation across a major metropolitan area, achieved rapidly, and tied specifically to private development rather than just government buildings. The state's own scheme has been running since 1989. Queensland, for a period, went further still, allocating two percent of qualifying state capital works to integrated art and design.
This is not a single flagship policy. It is a dense, layered ecosystem of state schemes, local planning policies, and supporting guidelines that has matured over three decades, the kind of unglamorous institutional work that is easy to overlook precisely because it works.
Why this is harder than it looks
It is easy to write “1% for art” into a policy document. It is very hard to make it work.
A percentage requirement with nothing behind it produces what every experienced practitioner has seen: the afterthought sculpture, dropped into a forecourt at the end of a project, disconnected from the architecture and the community around it. The difference in a mature system is the scaffolding, the parts that do not make headlines.
The City of Sydney, for instance, runs its public art process through a dedicated advisory panel of practising artists, curators, and architects, working to a set of guiding principles that explicitly include promoting high-quality public art in private development and embedding Aboriginal stories and heritage in public space. That is the part that matters. The percentage is only a funding trigger. The expertise, the curatorial direction, and the alignment with long-term city strategy are what turn a compliance line item into cultural infrastructure.
This is the real distinction. Many jurisdictions around the world have a percentage. Far fewer have built the institutional maturity around it that makes the percentage produce something worth having. Australia is, on this measure, unusually far along, and that is the part that draws international attention when other systems look outward for models to learn from.
The argument I want to make to developers
Here is where I will be direct, because this is the part that matters most.
“It is not a tax on building. It is one of the most direct levers a developer has to shape the cultural character of a place, and the long-term value of their own project.”
Australia is a young country still building its cultural voice. We do not have the centuries of accumulated public art, civic monument, and architectural patronage that European cities draw on, or the scale of state cultural investment now reshaping parts of Asia and the Middle East. What we have instead is a remarkably sophisticated mechanism for building that voice, one that runs through private development, which means it runs through the work developers do every day.
That reframes percent-for-art entirely. It is not a tax on building. It is one of the most direct levers a developer has to shape the cultural character of a place, and, not incidentally, the long-term value and distinctiveness of their own project. The developments people remember, return to, and pay a premium to be near are rarely the ones that did the minimum. They are the ones that treated culture as part of the design intent, not a cost to be managed down.
The countries now investing most aggressively in public culture understand this instinctively. They are building culture-driven spaces deliberately, at scale, because they have decided cultural depth is a competitive asset. Australia already has the policy machinery to do the same. The question is whether developers here see it as an obligation to discharge or an opportunity to lead.
What we should do with this
The honest conclusion is this: we have something worth protecting and extending. A cultural mechanism this mature is not something to administer grudgingly. It is something to build on.
For those of us who commission this work, it means holding the line on quality, insisting the percentage funds genuine artistic ambition, real community engagement, and where possible an educational or social dividend, rather than decorative filler. For developers, it means recognising that the most forward-thinking cultural instrument in the country is one they activate, project by project, whether they engage with it seriously or not.
A young country competing for cultural relevance cannot afford to treat its best cultural mechanism as paperwork.
First in a short series on how international perspectives are reshaping the way we think about public art in Australia. The next piece looks outward, at how some of the world's most ambitious cultural building programs approach public art, and what genuinely transfers back to the way we work here.
