One of the few industries lacking a national advocacy platform, the arts was stunned when a political move was made to undermine the key policy and investment body — at precisely the implementation point of its most rigorously developed strategic plan in 40 years.
For the first time in Australian history, public investment in the arts was about to foster the complex national ecology as a whole, offering a long-term foundation of support for vital organisations, as well as relevant and sector-responsive funding and development programs.
Instead and without warning, the work of the Australia Council was deliberately disrupted by crippling budget cuts lacking an evidence-led approach.
Adding insult to injury, a parallel fund called the National Program for Excellence in the Arts (NPEA) was announced. It possessed none of the Australia Council's transparency or expertise, and explicitly excluded individual artists and operational costs for organisations. It thereby unleashed unprecedented destabilisation of a scale unparallelled in any other industry.
The Australia Council is still reeling, and arts leaders from around the country are scrambling to save their organisations and support their colleagues following the Council's drastic cancellation of entire funding rounds. Meanwhile these same leaders have written millions of words to submit over 2200 documents to the weighty Senate Inquiry on the Impact of the 2014 and 2015 Commonwealth Budget decisions on the Arts — the biggest ever response to such an inquiry.
Unsurprisingly, given the number of notable suicides in the community, there has been a strong focus on health and wellbeing, with frequent publications and forums this year across cities and regions.
At stake here is the nature of Australian culture and the public experience of it, both now and into the future. Art is publicly funded because it is a public good. A primary purpose of government is to support, uphold and champion the public good — to understand it, to be sensitive towards its complexities, and to develop expert approaches to its development.
Through highly competitive means, governments fund independent organisations because they achieve what government cannot: expert, engaged and agile approaches that ask new questions, reinterpreting the world back to us, making life as complex, challenging and beautiful as it can possibly be.
Art is honest and adventurous. Art is therefore political, exposing the assumptions, tensions and values that make up a nation. Sustaining an engagement with art takes courage. Likewise, it takes courage to stand by the proven expertise of artists — or indeed,