Labor has released a surprisingly modest arts policy in the final week of the election.

There is a strong ideological commitment to culture and the arts, but very little in the form of concrete policy promises. Overall, Labor's 2022 arts policy is less ambitious and more constrained than the one Bill Shorten announced in 2019.

Labor has not committed to any meaningful increase in arts funding beyond $80 million for a new First Nations museum in Alice Springs and $83.7 million for the ABC. There is nothing for the Australia Council. There is no firm proposal for local content quotas or for strengthening cultural rights.

However, Labor's industrial relations policies will help artists and cultural workers if implemented – particularly promises to improve job security for gig workers and casuals.

Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating were celebrated as prime ministers for the arts and culture. On the evidence of this policy, part-time DJ Anthony Albanese will have to do more if he is to prove the saviour many in the cultural sector hope for.

Labor has advocated for the importance of the Australian video game industry throughout their time in opposition.

Shadow ministers Michelle Rowland, Tim Watts, Tony Burke and other Labor MPs have long called for exactly the forms of support that the Coalition has finally implemented in the past year.

This puts Labor in a hard place when it comes to evaluating their proposed support for the game industry. On the one hand, their cultural policy announcement makes no explicit mention of game development (or of many other specific creative sectors, for that matter). On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine them removing exactly the initiatives they spent years campaigning for before the Coalition finally acted.

That Labor has a broader plan for cultural policy is nonetheless promising for the local game industry, as are more general policies that intend to address stagnating wages and a deteriorating social safety net.

Yet Labor’s hesitancy to commit to a rise in the Jobseeker rate remains disappointing when you remember some of Australia’s biggest game exports, including Untitled Goose Game, were made in part by independent creators supported through unemployment payments.

Announcing a return to Creative Australia, Labor has again claimed its ownership over cultural policy at the federal level.

That Labor has a cultural policy, and one that it proposes to implement quickly with a return to arms-length governance – even if this means returning initially to an outdated policy framework - is worthy of recognition and stands their platform well apart from the Coalition.

Yet there is little substance detailed for what this means for specific industries that have been awaiting meaningful reform.

Highlighted in the announcement was Labor’s commitment to “promot[ing] Australian creators on streaming platforms,” which cited the uncertainty created by the weak reforms aimed at streaming services.

Despite existing industry calls and detailed proposals for meaningful reform, Labor’s commitment to “work with all stakeholders to determine ways Australian content can be boosted” hints at further reviews and industry consultation when action is sorely needed.

Tony Burke’s policy launch delivered to gathered arts professionals in Melbourne’s Espy Hotel, gives hope that, if nothing else, the arts will again be on the political agenda under a Labor government.

In 2019, Labor went to the polls with a comprehensive arts policy as part of an ambitious platform of social and economic reform.

The lack of anything comparable in scale or scope this time around no doubt reflects its intention to avoid the presumed pitfalls of that campaign and present a much smaller target to the electorate.

Even so, already firm commitments such as its promise to reverse the Coalition’s $83.7 million cut to ABC funding, and provide both the ABC and SBS with five year funding agreements will in themselves have a flow-on positive impact on the cultural sector. And we now know that, should it win office on Saturday, a Labor government will restore the arts to a named ministerial portfolio.

They will also generate a comprehensive cultural policy comparable in scale and scope to Keating’s "Creative Nation" and Gillard’s "Creative Australia". This is to be welcomed.

As Keating once observed, our arts and culture – the ways that we imagine ourselves as a nation – are no mere distraction from the "main game" of government. Rather, it is an "intrinsic part of the way we secure these things."

The Labor Party has announced a suite of arts and cultural policy elements that align with the calls from the sector’s peak bodies. There is a focus on artists themselves and First Nations arts, rather than commercial projects.

Foremost is the plan to develop a national cultural policy with a strong vision for the arts that restores initially at least the last Labor government’s cultural policy work Creative Australia (2013), the product of six years of consultation and development from 2007.

Labor’s announcement promises a speedier implementation this time.

The approach supports the role of the Australia Council and the principle of arms-length funding for the arts. There’s also an apparent commitment to reinstate the cultural ministers’ council that underscored arts planning and cooperation between the federal and states and territories and all three levels of government, defunded under the LNP.

The Labor Party’s industrial relations policies include a commitment to lifting the minimum wage which will help artists. There’s also a plan to develop an insurance scheme of some kind which the sector has been calling for.

The ALP arts policy would have been strengthened by a commitment to at least exploring what a universal basic income would look like for the arts sector, traineeships for artists and artist in residence schemes to create paid opportunities for artists whose incomes have been declining for decades.