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Restructures across all levels of arts funding have deprived institutions of money and led some to scale back their ambitions or even close. By Santilla Chingaipe.
The shrinkage of Australian arts funding
Every week, it seems, there are reports of cuts to arts and cultural institutions. Across Western countries, from the United States to the United Kingdom and Germany, access to public funding in the arts is dwindling.
In Australia, the situation is equally bleak. There have been funding changes at the state, territory and federal level. The Albanese government introduced the five-year national cultural policy “Revive”. New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory have all introduced decade-long arts policies aimed at supporting artists, creatives and cultural organisations.
Yet while many have welcomed these measures, arts advocate Esther Anatolitis argues that there remains a gap between policy and funding commitments.
“This is a time where we need policy and funding to be coming together,” she says, “but there are just so many diabolical priorities for governments that even those governments who are actively prioritising cultural policy are not finding the levels of funding that are so urgently needed.”
Caitlin Dullard, chief executive and artistic director of Melbourne theatre company La Mama, says her company has been forced to pause programming for a year after missing out on Creative Australia funding.
“The catalyst for the decision to close was an unsuccessful outcome at the federal level,” she says, noting the company depended on the government funds. “The four-year funding cycle that we had been in, in one way or another for 50 years – basically most of our lives – we were unsuccessful for the second time in a row.”
Dullard says that while the organisation had missed out on funding in 2020, significant pandemic support had been able to fill that gap. That support is no longer available but has not been replaced.
“The post-Covid era was coming and those grants were drying up, and we hadn’t had an increase from state government for 13 years, and I just talked to the board and said, ‘It’s not viable to be dependent on government funding any longer. The writing’s on the wall. We need to find another way.’ ”
Finding another way is not easy, however, or straightforward.
Brett Adlington is the chief executive of Museums & Galleries of NSW, which supports small and medium-size institutions with development.
Adlington says in NSW many regional galleries and museums missed out on four-year funding from the federal government, despite having been previous recipients.
“We did a lot of advocacy work straight on the back of that with Regional Arts NSW, and the two-year funding was announced a few months back and it did look a lot better than what we were expecting to come our way. A lot of those funding amounts were less than what a lot of organisations had previously received.”
Adlington says there’s been a gradual reduction in the ambition of organisations and that is impacting cultural output.
“A lot of organisations are cutting back on the number of exhibitions they’re developing, so they’re putting shows on for longer, and within those shows they don’t have the capacity to be commissioning artists to develop new works, which they had previously been doing. They’re putting on less engagement programs and programs that work with the community. A lot of them are minimising the work they’re doing with the First Nations communities as well because a lot of that work takes time and money for consultation and things like that.”
Many in the sector point to a confluence of factors that are contributing to a decline in funding: post-Covid emergency funds drying up, the cost-of-living crisis, shifts in audience behaviour, as well as increasing operational costs.
Guy Morrow, a senior lecturer in arts and cultural management at the University of Melbourne, argues that the ongoing impact of efficiency dividends is eroding the positive contributions the arts can make.
“We can think about improvements in social cohesion, mental and physical health, education, economic growth, and these types of externalities that are positive, that actually benefit people. We do tend to instrumentalise the arts when we talk about positive externalities because it’s using the arts as an instrument for these other ends. The arts in themselves need to be valued in terms of their intrinsic cultural value as well.”
The efficiency dividend is a longstanding Australian government policy that is applied to public sector agencies and generally reduces funding to institutions annually.
Introduced by the Hawke government in 1987, the measure is designed to make the public sector more efficient, but Morrow argues it has the opposite effect on arts and cultural institutions.
“Basically, it means that if you take cost disease theory on board and argue along the lines of it, then cultural institutions need more money increasingly over time to run themselves. Whereas efficiency dividends obviously go in the other direction and it does lead to a decrease in the service, whatever that is, rather than the service being provided more efficiently. It’s just that the service can no longer be provided. They’ll shut the gallery two days a week rather than have it open. That’s not providing the service. That’s not more efficient on those two days a week. They’re not opening the gallery.”
La Mama’s Caitlin Dullard has spent the past year advocating for a funding increase and finding other streams of revenue. She says while it was a tough choice to close the theatre for a year, it was the right one.
“I knew that if we died, so many independent artists who relied on us to make their art would have nowhere else to go. There are just not enough opportunities for people to start making their own work. And so it was a hard decision, but in looking at the numbers and being super aware of the need for us and the demand that we’re in – we’ve got hundreds of artists knocking on our door, thousands every year – we knew that we had to put all our resources and energy this year into making it a better situation for everyone. And we’ve done that. So it is now looking to me a much better situation for us next year.”
Dullard says there’s been a shift in audience behaviour since the pandemic.
“We all know in theatre that audience trends have changed. People are booking last minute. People are competing with Netflix. There’s this overwhelming sense of the world being at capacity and not willing to take on any more.”
While La Mama generates its own revenue through ticket sales, it has a model where 80 per cent of the box office goes to the artists creating the work. The remainder, Dullard says, is not enough to put together a show.
“Someone said to me once recently that 10 years ago, to get a piece of theatre up, the budget could work if they reached a certain box office target, which was modest and quite reasonable. Now you can only put prices up so much because people are struggling financially, but the cost of making a show just keeps going up and up, running a company just keeps going up and up. Effectively, there is no budget where a show can pay for itself from audience. It just isn’t feasible anymore, unless you make tickets so extremely high that it becomes inaccessible to the masses. It really becomes an elite thing, which is also not what anybody wants.”
Dullard argues that while arts institutions are feeling the economic pressures, it’s even harder on individual artists.
“It’s so hard and getting harder for an independent artist in this country,” she says. “They still show up, they still make the work. My big fear is losing them. We’re losing people because it just becomes too hard, but the passion and commitment on an individual level is really palpable and hopeful, and we can’t lose that. We can’t not honour that, you know, the seat I’m in. We need to respect that, we need to respond to that, and we need to support that, because they’re there, they’re showing up. We just need the money.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 6, 2025 as "State of the arts".
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