News | Australia Council loses $104.8 million in funding

ozco_logo_horizontalNews that the Australia Council will lose around $100 million in funding under the federal budget handed down last night. This money isn’t going to be take away from the arts, instead it will be reallocated to a new ‘National Centre for Excellence in the Arts’. The suggestion at this stage is that the proposed centre will more-or-less duplicate the role of the Australia Council, but instead of funding being allocated by a panel of experts it will be allocated at the discretion of the Arts Minister of the day. Is this partly a response to the artists who boycotted the Sydney Biennale last year?

There are also cuts to the funding of several major arts bodies including Screen Australia ($3.7 million), the National Gallery of Australia ($1.5 million), the National Museum ($600,000) and the National Portrait Gallery ($1.7 million).

Detailed analysis Ben Eltham in ArtsHub

The new fund would appear to be duplicating the Australia Council’s functions. The Council has always placed “excellence” at the top of its goals and priorities. The agency’s 2014 Strategic Plan states quite explicitly that ‘we will strengthen the capacity of artists to make excellent work by identifying and fast tracking the development of exceptional artists to become an internationally acknowledged talent.

The ploy to sequester funding from the Australia Council and move it into the minister’s ambit also appears to defy the long-standing convention of cultural policy in Australia, of arms-length funding. The idea of expert panels of artists and creative professionals judging the merits of arts funding applications has been the cornerstone of the Australia Council’s operations for four decades.

Minister Brandis has long appeared hostile to the principle of arms-length funding. In 2013, during the debate over the Australia Council’s governing legislation, Brandis attempted to insert a clause into the act that would have allowed the minister to exert discretion on individual funding decisions. The amendment was voted down.

There is also some analysis from Peter Tregear (Head of Music at ANU) in The Conversation

We will have to wait for the details, but the media release speaks of “investment of to support endowments, international touring and strategic projects, with an emphasis on attracting private sector support” that will “allow for a truly national approach to arts funding and will deliver on a number of Government priorities including national access to high quality arts and cultural experiences”.

If that suggests a degree of ministerial discomfort – if not criticism – of our traditional “arms-length” approach to arts funding, this is made clear by a further announcement that it, alongside the already existing Visions of Australia and Festivals Australia programmes, will now be run directly from the Arts Ministry. This is to ensure “that government support is available for a broader range of arts and cultural activities” and a “wider range of arts companies and arts practitioners”.

Ouch.