The Australian arts sector held a crisis meeting in Sydney on Thursday night. More than 120 arts leaders from around the country attended to discuss what to do about one of the gravest threats to Australian culture in decades. Meanwhile, I received an email from a commissioning producer at a Melbourne performing arts centre. “Dark days,” he wrote. Several of his friends in small performing arts organisations are being laid off.

I spoke to one of them on Friday morning, who did not wish to be named. The chaos in the industry after the massive cuts to the Australia Council funding announced by arts minister George Brandis in May’s federal budget was directly responsible.

“There’s really no clear pathway towards multi-year funding, or even project funding for organisations where you need a small subsidy to underwrite management,” she told me. The uncertainty created by the 28% cut to the Australia Council is flowing through to job losses across the sector.

Bad news is starting to filter in. “I have also heard from lots of other people about how their funding is simply running out and they don’t know what is going to happen next year and if they will have jobs,” the producer said. “I think any organisation that went for the Australia Council’s six-year organisational funding round that was cancelled is now looking at laying off staff or folding.”

What was the six-year funding round? Only the Australia Council’s most important funding program for the so-called small-to-medium sector of small, innovative cultural organisations. After more than 400 organisations spent months developing their applications, the entire round was cancelled after Brandis ripped $104.7m from the Australia Council’s funding in the May budget, in order to create his new national program for excellence in the arts.



For those not intimately acquainted with the arts in Australia, it can be hard to get your head around a complex and multilayered industry. The cultural industries employed 311,000 workers at the 2011 census, and account for around 7% of Australia’s economy.

At the core of this vast enterprise, relatively small amounts of federal funding catalyse huge amounts of cultural activity. The Australia Council plays a crucial role, supporting a large and highly innovative cluster of small companies, galleries, publishers, collectives and individual artists.

Small investments in talent at an early stage can pay big dividends. To take just one example, Aussie songstress Courtney Barnett was the recipient of an innovative Australia Council-PPCA recording grant to record her first full-length album. You might have heard it’s done quite well.

The Australia Council currently funds 145 “key organisations” with ongoing operational funding. The list includes some of the nation’s best-known cultural exports: Back to Back theatre in Geelong; Circa from Brisbane; Lucy Guerin dance from Melbourne. It includes every funded literature organisation, scores of galleries, the entire federally-funded community arts sector, and most small Indigenous performing arts companies.

Now all bets are off. The key organisations funding runs out at the end of 2016, and no one has any clue about what will happen – least of all the Australia Council. This crisis has been caused by one man: George Brandis.

A quick list of some of Brandis’s actions makes for sobering reading. As opposition arts spokesperson in 2013, he tried to amend the Australia Council Act to include more ministerial discretion over funding. Since taking office in September 2013, the Abbott government has slashed Commonwealth funding for the arts: the 2014 federal budget saw $87m slashed from the federal arts portfolio and there were further efficiencies in the 2015 budget.

Despite reductions overall, the arts minister has been active in individual funding allocations. One of his first moves was to give $1m to the Australian Ballet School, an organisation with the wife of a former Howard government cabinet minister on its board. “‘I have taken a close interest in the Australian Ballet School and visited their facility on 6 February,” Brandis told journalists at the time.

The minister then gave Melbourne classical music record label Melba Recordings a $275,000 grant. It was not part of any official funding round and the grant was not peer-assessed, but Melba did lobby the minister about funding. The funding was decided in April 2014, but the Melba grant was not publicly announced in any media release or listed in the May 2014 budget papers. The first official acknowledgment was in an obscure attorney general’s department spreadsheet. Melba’s patrons and supporters include a cavalcade of highly-connected individuals, including a former Howard government cabinet minister.

Brandis has also given $1.15m in non peer-reviewed funding to the Australian World Orchestra, a company closely associated with his policy advisor Michael Napthali. Napthali was a director of the orchestra immediately before taking up his role in Brandis’s office, although the ministry insists he was not involved in any Australian World Orchestra funding decisions.

In 2014, the Sydney Biennale controversy blew up. A boycott of the visual arts festival by artists protesting against a sponsor, the Transfield Foundation, attracted wide media attention. The communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, publicly attacked the boycotters and a furious Brandis wrote to the Australia Council’s board, instructing it to develop a policy to deny public funding to anyone involved in a sponsor boycott.

Some speculate that the ill-feeling generated by the Biennale imbroglio fed the growing rift between the arts minister and the Australia Council. If the Biennale was a contributing factor, Brandis kept his plans to himself. By his own admission in Senate Estimates, Brandis consulted no one about the decision to set up the new excellence fund by raiding the Australia Council’s budget. The Australia Council itself only heard about it hours before Joe Hockey’s speech on budget night.

Labor’s arts spokesperson, Mark Dreyfus, calls the excellence program a “slush fund.” The draft guidelines for the program give final say to the arts minister himself, and peer review is rudimentary at best. The guidelines also appear to allow the arts minister to give out grants in secret.

A pattern is emerging: increasing secrecy and personal ministerial control over cultural funding. No wonder artists and arts leaders are worried about the federal cultural policy direction.



But the minister shows no sign of abandoning his cultural crusade. When representatives of the small-to-medium sector travelled to Canberra to express concern about the changes, Brandis declined to meet with them. He met with lobbyists from the major performing arts sector instead.