When Mitch Tambo took to the Sidney Myer Music Bowl stage to perform Silent Night in the Gamilaraay language on Christmas Eve, he summed up the highs and lows live music has experienced in the past three years.

As he told The Age, Tambo spent the first two years of the pandemic making gardens out of recycled car tyres. It’s a long way from there to Carols by Candlelight on national television. And other jobbing musicians who walked away at that time will most likely never make it back. “We just rock up and provide entertainment, and that’s the first thing to go and the last to come back,” was how Tambo put it.

If there is an expectation that what one arts funding advocate called “the original gig economy” will simply dust itself down and “rock up” again in 2023, then the situation in Melbourne described in the forthcoming Live Music Census should bring us down to earth. Having been largely wiped out by the pandemic, live music now faces its own cost of living crisis.

As inflation bites across the economy, venues are struggling with rising costs and performers with inadequate remuneration. The squeeze on discretionary spending combined with lingering fears of COVID-19 are also keeping punters away.

A report released by the Victorian Music Development Office at the beginning of 2020 described the state’s music industry as one “that runs to a large degree on luck, timing and public sentiment, and where many of the places where security could be previously maintained are eroding”. The pandemic and the impact of bushfires and floods on the festival circuit have shown it is time for a clearer strategy.

The state government’s commitment to a Live Music Major Events Fund, grants for musicians and changes to licensing and planning to promote live music venues are welcome, but with a Labor government in Canberra committed to a National Cultural Policy – due out at the end of this month – comes an opportunity to co-ordinate reform.

At the Woodford Folk Festival, Arts Minister Tony Burke talked about quotas for Australian content and putting an end to “captain’s picks” (such as Guns N’ Roses getting $600,000 from the RISE arts rescue fund). Restoring the Australia Council’s peer-reviewed role after years of Coalition cuts and neglect would be a step in the right direction.

Live music is a business as well as an art form, and one that has experienced a significant skills drain to other sectors and overseas markets. The campaign by Musicians Australia to set a minimum rate of $250 per gig for performers should be seen as the starting point for a discussion of pay and conditions that takes in the possibility of employment insurance for work that is intermittent. But investment in skills development for technicians and event staff is also needed. A tax offset would support the growth of live music and provide an injection of confidence across the economy.

The pandemic compelled the sector’s various interest groups to co-operate, but the discussions as well as those on artists’ mental health, diversity and prevention of discrimination need a venue where all stakeholders can work together. A national music development agency – “Music Australia”, as some have suggested calling it – could be a forum not only for negotiation, but also for better research into which initiatives are working, which aren’t and where the areas of greatest need are.