There is a pattern, familiar to anyone who has worked in or studied the arts and cultural sector in Australia, of institutional creative life being built on provisionally stable ground. A festival earns a decade of recognition, then loses its venue or its funding envelope. A musician builds an audience under one name on one platform, then watches that platform reorganise its algorithm or its ownership structure, and begins again. A filmmaker’s catalogue of work, linked across years of promotional material, disappears from search when a domain lapses or a distributor restructures. The creative economy, for all its vibrancy, has historically been built on infrastructure that does not last.

Queensland’s creative economy is substantial enough that this structural instability deserves more careful attention than it typically receives. Screen production and digital games expenditure in the state reached an estimated $715 million in 2024–25, the live performance industry generated $539.3 million in revenue in 2023 with 4.9 million ticketed attendances, and more than 100,000 Queenslanders are employed in creative occupations, including nearly 40,000 professionals working in cultural production and creative industries. These are not marginal numbers. They describe a sector of real economic weight, one that is structurally significant to Queensland’s broader economy and growing faster than most comparable jurisdictions in the region.

The question this essay is concerned with is not whether the creative economy is large. It clearly is. The question is whether the digital infrastructure on which that economy increasingly depends is adequate to the scale and longevity it deserves. And the answer, under the current arrangements that govern most internet-based identity, is plainly no. What Queensland’s creative economy looks like with permanent digital infrastructure — genuine permanence, the kind anchored onchain rather than leased year to year from a registrar — is a fundamentally different proposition from what it looks like today. Understanding that difference matters for every creative practitioner, institution, and community that calls this state home.

THE ECONOMY BEHIND THE CREATIVE TITLE.

Queensland’s Time to Shine, the Queensland Government’s 10-year strategy for arts and culture running from 2025 to 2035, is built on six key focus areas and is designed to grow the state’s creative economy and support the arts, cultural and creative industries. It is, in the government’s own framing, a commitment to growing the state’s creative economy by strengthening arts and creative businesses and careers, delivering statewide arts experiences, and celebrating the state’s creative talent and stories with national and international audiences — a strategy that outlines Queensland’s priorities to build a creative future that connects Queenslanders with one another and with global markets.

The Queensland Government invests more than $420.7 million in 2025–26 through the Arts portfolio, supporting five Arts Statutory Bodies including Queensland Museum, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, State Library of Queensland and Queensland Theatre, as well as four Arts Owned Companies including the Aboriginal Centre for Performing Arts, Major Brisbane Festivals, Queensland Music Festival and Screen Queensland. This investment supports more than 300 arts and cultural organisations, festivals, artists, regional arts programs and tours, screen productions and games development in communities, studios, venues and galleries across the state, including essential core operational funding for 18 Indigenous Art Centres.

The scale of this investment is a statement of intention. But it also reveals something important: the Queensland Government treats the creative sector as infrastructure, not ornament. That is the right frame. Creative industries are not merely lifestyle enhancements or cultural amenities layered over the real economy. They are productive and replicable forms of economic activity — they employ people, generate IP, attract international capital, and increasingly anchor the state’s tourism and export identity.

The creative workforce is essential to the state’s ambition to grow an experience economy and deliver vibrant cultural programming in the lead-up to and during Brisbane 2032. The Games frame is important here, not as a destination but as a focal point. Creative industries are being positioned not just as supplementary to Brisbane 2032 but as constitutive of its legacy value.

THE SCREEN AND GAMES SECTOR: A CASE STUDY IN DIGITAL PRECARITY.

The screen and games sector in Queensland is one of the clearest illustrations of what a creative economy can achieve with the right policy infrastructure — and one of the clearest illustrations of the gap that remains when digital identity does not keep pace with creative ambition.

Industry employment in Queensland’s games sector has surged four-fold to more than 665 full-time roles, and Queensland is now the second largest state for games development in Australia, with local games and studios attracting the interest of major publishers and platforms including Sony PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch, as well as expanding audiences on Steam and Apple Arcade. This is a remarkable trajectory. Since the introduction of the Digital Games Incentive and Games Grants in 2021, Screen Queensland has helped drive a 155 per cent increase in local sector employment and a 123 per cent increase in local expenditure through to May 2024.

These studios — many of them small, founder-led teams building original intellectual property — do not own their digital presence in any durable sense. Their web addresses are leased annually. Their community identities on commercial platforms are subject to platform terms, ownership changes, and algorithmic deprecation. A studio that builds its reputation under a particular name, and publishes that name across years of press coverage, grant applications, and international festival listings, can watch that identity fragment when a domain registration lapses or a platform account is suspended. The creative labour remains. The digital address that collected and signalled it can vanish overnight.

Games supported by Screen Queensland include BAFTA-winning titles such as Unpacking, as well as Broken Roads, Capes, Cities: Skylines – Remastered, Go-Go Town, Phantom Abyss, and Servonauts. These are internationally recognised titles. Their developers, based in Queensland, have earned a place in the global games culture. What they have not had, until now, is a form of digital address that reflects the permanence of that achievement — an address that cannot expire, cannot be acquired by a third party, and does not depend on the continued goodwill of a commercial registrar.

Supporting the state’s artists and creatives to leverage emerging technologies and grow creative entrepreneurship is explicitly listed as a policy objective within Queensland’s Time to Shine strategy. Permanent digital infrastructure is exactly the kind of structural technology support that objective implies.

THE BRISBANE 2032 CULTURAL DIMENSION.

The Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games is a once-in-a-generation event and a global platform for Queensland’s creativity and vibrancy. The Games and associated cultural programming will be transformational for Queensland, activating communities with new and enhanced infrastructure and events that draw visitors and build the state’s cultural reputation. Arts, culture and creativity will underpin the Games experience, with rich and engaging statewide arts experiences set to elevate and enhance Brisbane 2032 legacy outcomes.

Along with the popular Opening and Closing Ceremonies, the Games include a four-year Cultural Olympiad and a 20-year Legacy Strategy with arts, culture and creativity outcomes. This is a significant architectural commitment: the cultural dimension of the Games is not a two-week programme of exhibitions alongside the athletics. It is a decade-long investment in positioning Queensland’s creative sector on a global stage.

An equally important impact will be that which is played out in theatres, on riverbanks, in parks, and in the cultural spaces that will host the Cultural Olympiad — the parallel celebration of art, identity, and expression that has long accompanied the Games. And yet one of the persistent lessons from previous Games is that the cultural infrastructure activated during an Olympic cycle often fails to outlast it. The Cultural Olympiad should be judged by what remains: communities empowered to actively engage in creative spaces, art created by local talent, sustainable practices normalised across businesses, and cultural identities being preserved.

Permanent digital infrastructure is directly relevant to this question of legacy. If a festival programme, an artists’ collective, a First Nations cultural initiative, or a community creative hub establishes a digital identity in the context of Brisbane 2032 — and that identity is anchored onchain, not rented from a registrar — then the address endures. The work it points to can be found, cited, linked, and built upon for decades. The legacy becomes technically retrievable in a way that legacy websites, housed on commercial hosting plans with renewal schedules, are not.

The runway to 2032 presents a significant opportunity to celebrate Queensland’s extraordinary artistic and creative talent and ensure the state’s stories, cultures and creativity are embedded in the fabric of Games delivery. Digital addresses are part of that fabric. They are the connective tissue between creative work and the public — the mechanism by which a story, a film, a game, a performance, a piece of public art is found and remembered. If that tissue is made of materials that degrade, the story is at risk.

WHAT PERMANENCE MEANS FOR CREATIVE PRACTITIONERS.

It is worth being precise about what is meant by permanent digital infrastructure in the context of onchain namespaces, because imprecision here can mislead. A conventional domain is a lease. The registrant pays annually for the right to use an address. Non-payment, registrar insolvency, or the expiry of an organisation without a successor to manage the renewal — any of these can cause the address to lapse. For creative practitioners, whose organisations are often small, underfunded, and structurally precarious, this is not a theoretical risk. It is a lived reality.

An onchain address — anchored to a blockchain namespace rather than a centralised registrar’s database — operates differently. Ownership is recorded on a distributed ledger. It does not expire because no one remembered to pay an invoice. It does not disappear because a corporate registrar was acquired or restructured. It is not subject to the same class of institutional failure that affects conventional domain infrastructure. The namespace persists as long as the underlying chain persists, and the major chains are engineered specifically for persistence.

For a Queensland musician, filmmaker, artist, or cultural organisation, this changes the nature of the digital investment they make in their identity. Work spent building a presence, accumulating inbound links, establishing a recognisable address in the public record — all of that work is anchored to something that lasts, rather than something that must be renewed. The address brisbanefestival.brisbane · qagoma.queensland — illustrative examples, not registered entities — carries a different weight if it is onchain than if it is leased. It carries the weight of a permanent civic address rather than a commercial licence.

Queensland’s Time to Shine identifies as key focus areas: transformational arts and culture for Brisbane 2032 and beyond, uniquely Queensland arts experiences, maximising opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander creatives, a future creative workforce for a creative economy, arts for all Queenslanders, and sharing our stories and celebrating our storytellers. The sixth of these — sharing stories and celebrating storytellers — has a specific digital dimension that permanent infrastructure directly addresses. Storytellers need permanent addresses for their stories to be found.

FIRST NATIONS CREATIVE PRACTICE AND THE CLAIM TO PERMANENCE.

Eighty-four per cent of Queenslanders acknowledge the significant positive impact of the arts on individuals, communities and the economy, and 72 per cent of Queenslanders believe Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts are an important part of Australia’s culture. These numbers point to something structurally important: the cultural legitimacy of First Nations creative practice is broadly recognised, but the digital infrastructure through which that practice reaches the world is not designed with permanence or sovereignty in mind.

The Indigenous arts and cultural sector has the potential to be a key economic driver for Queensland cultural export and tourism experience development. That potential depends, in part, on digital infrastructure that is trustworthy. When an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander arts organisation builds a digital presence — a gallery address, a community portal, a cultural archive — the fragility of conventional domain infrastructure is not an abstract policy concern. It is a direct challenge to the continuity of cultural expression. Languages take generations to record and transmit. Visual traditions take generations to develop and teach. An address that can lapse is not adequate infrastructure for a sector whose meaning is measured in generational time.

Queensland’s Time to Shine envisions a future in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, creative professionals and businesses are thriving. Thriving, in a digital economy, means having digital addresses that are as permanent and trustworthy as the cultural claims they represent. Permanence, here, is not a technical nicety. It is an ethical posture — a recognition that the infrastructure we build for the digital representation of culture should reflect the durability we claim to want for that culture.

Supporting the state’s artists and creatives to leverage emerging technologies and grow creative entrepreneurship to grow the sector’s scale and impact is a stated Queensland Government policy commitment. Onchain namespaces are one of the specific emerging technologies that this commitment should encompass, precisely because they address a structural deficiency in the current digital ecosystem that particularly affects the most precarious creative practitioners.

THE INFRASTRUCTURE QUESTION BEHIND THE CREATIVE ECONOMY QUESTION.

Creative economies are ecosystem phenomena. They are not the sum of individual creative acts; they are the product of networks of trust, recognition, and discoverability that allow creative work to circulate and accumulate value. Those networks are, in the digital age, substantially constituted by naming infrastructure — by the addresses at which things can be found.

The conventional internet’s naming infrastructure — the Domain Name System, operated by ICANN and its delegated registrars — was designed for a different era. It was designed as a routing mechanism, not as a permanent identity layer. The assumption built into it is that addresses are provisional: they are leased, not owned. This was adequate when the internet was primarily a technical communications network. It becomes inadequate when the internet is the primary medium through which culture is discovered, remembered, and transmitted.

Investment in cultural infrastructure ensures Queenslanders have places to create, present and engage in arts and cultural experiences. The understanding of infrastructure implicit in this formulation is predominantly physical — galleries, theatres, studios, venues. But digital infrastructure is now equally constitutive of what it means to have places to present and engage. An online gallery without a stable address is not a gallery; it is a temporary installation. A podcast without a permanent home is not a publication; it is a series of files with an uncertain shelf life.

Queensland’s Time to Shine identifies a creative careers roadmap and a cultural infrastructure plan as among the first actions of its ten-year strategy. These include the development of an arts education plan, a creative careers roadmap and a cultural infrastructure plan. A cultural infrastructure plan that does not address digital identity infrastructure — the permanence and trustworthiness of the addresses at which creative Queensland presents itself to the world — will be incomplete. The physical and the digital are not separate categories of infrastructure; they are layers of the same ecosystem, and both require the same basic property: durability.

A SECTOR THAT OUTPACES ITS OWN FOUNDATIONS.

Queensland Government investment in local screen and games practitioners supports a growing screen industry, and incentives attract high-value production and projects to Queensland. The Bluey film, produced by Ludo Studio, will be made in Queensland supported by investment through Screen Queensland, creating more than 130 local jobs and contributing an estimated $35 million to the state’s economy. Bluey — the globally syndicated children’s animated series created in Brisbane — is one of the most significant examples in Australian cultural history of a creative work achieving permanent global recognition while maintaining a clear Queensland identity. Its digital addresses, across streaming platforms and promotional ecosystems, are managed through commercial infrastructure that its creators do not own. The address of Queensland creative culture in the world’s consciousness is, right now, mediated through infrastructure that Queensland itself does not control.

This is not a criticism of any particular creative organisation or government programme. It is a structural observation about where the creative economy sits relative to its own digital foundations. The creative sector in Queensland is, by the evidence, growing fast, producing internationally significant work, and increasingly oriented toward global audiences. Twenty new projects in the games sector alone are in development, supporting 330 local jobs and boosting the economy by a record $23 million. This is the output of a sector that has earned permanence.

Queensland’s Time to Shine outlines the state’s priorities to build a creative future that connects Queenslanders with one another and with global markets. Global markets require global legibility — the capacity to be found, trusted, and returned to by international audiences, investors, distributors, and collaborators. That legibility depends on digital identity that does not lapse, cannot be impersonated, and is anchored in a recognisably Queensland namespace rather than a generic commercial extension.

WHAT THE NAMESPACE MAKES POSSIBLE.

The Queensland Foundation’s project of securing permanent onchain namespaces — .queensland, .brisbane, .goldcoast, .qld, .surfersparadise, .brisbane2032 — is, in this context, a piece of civic infrastructure provision. It is not, at its core, a product offering. It is an attempt to ensure that the naming layer of Queensland’s digital presence is adequate to the permanence and civic weight of what Queensland’s creative sector is producing.

Arts, culture and creativity will underpin the Games experience, with rich and engaging statewide arts experiences set to elevate and enhance Brisbane 2032 legacy outcomes. A cultural legacy is only as retrievable as the infrastructure through which it is preserved. The openings, the premieres, the public art installations, the community creative programmes, the First Nations cultural expressions — all of these are events in time. What persists after the event is the record: the documentation, the archive, the digital address at which the work can be found. If that address belongs to Queensland, is anchored onchain, and does not expire, then the legacy is genuinely recoverable. If the address is a commercial lease that lapsed when the festival’s three-year funding cycle ended, the legacy is a set of broken links.

Creatives working in the music.queensland · indigenousarts.brisbane · gamesdev.goldcoast namespace — again, illustrative of the form rather than registered addresses — are making a statement about the permanence of their presence that a .com.au or a social media handle cannot make. They are saying that their work is rooted here, in this place, and that this address is as enduring as the geography it names.

New analysis from A New Approach demonstrates that the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games are a once-in-generation opportunity to shift Australia’s global arts and culture standing, and that Australia can learn from other nations’ experiences to intensify efforts to become a global cultural powerhouse. The analysis draws on case studies of South Korea, France, and Brazil — nations that used the Games as a catalyst for sustained investment in cultural infrastructure and international positioning. The lesson in each case is the same: the Games create a window, but the infrastructure built during that window determines whether the cultural gains persist.

Digital infrastructure is part of that determination. If Queensland builds remarkable cultural programming for 2032 and houses it on infrastructure that cannot be guaranteed to outlast the Games, it repeats the pattern of every preceding host city that built for the moment rather than the generation. If it houses that programming on permanent onchain infrastructure — namespaces that belong to Queensland, anchored in a ledger that does not depend on any single registrar’s continued operation — it creates the conditions for a genuinely recoverable cultural legacy.

PERMANENCE AS CIVIC POSTURE.

The deeper argument here is not technical. The technical case for onchain namespaces over conventional domain leases is straightforward once the comparison is understood. The deeper argument is about what kind of permanence a creative economy deserves, and what it signals about a society’s relationship to its own culture when it builds on ephemeral foundations.

Continued investment and support through Queensland’s Time to Shine will position the state’s creative sector to build capacity, generate commercial opportunities and to thrive over the next decade. Queensland’s arts and cultural events and experiences drive the state’s visitor economy. This is a vision of the creative sector as a durable economic and social asset — something that compounds over time, accumulating recognition and value in the way that physical heritage accumulates significance. Heritage, in the physical world, is protected by legal instruments, conservation policies, and institutional custodianship. Digital heritage — the addresses, archives, and identity layers through which cultural work persists in the world’s memory — has not historically received equivalent protection.

Permanent digital infrastructure changes that. It is the equivalent, in the digital layer, of a heritage listing: a declaration that this identity, this address, this name, is not provisional. It belongs here, in this place, under this jurisdiction. It is not subject to the commercial imperatives of a registrar. It is not vulnerable to the expiry of a funding cycle. It is permanent in the only sense that matters: it will still be there when the next generation of Queensland’s creative practitioners needs to build on it.

Queensland’s creative economy — with its $715 million in screen and games production, its half-billion-dollar live performance sector, its 100,000 creative workers, its BAFTA-winning games developers, its globally distributed animated content, its First Nations artists of international significance, its festival circuit, its literature, its architecture, its music — is producing work that deserves that kind of foundation. Permanent digital infrastructure does not create that work. But it creates the conditions in which the work can be permanently found, permanently claimed, and permanently understood as Queensland’s own. That is what the creative economy looks like when the digital layer is finally built to last.