Arts and culture in Victoria are in crisis. Funding for artists and small-to-medium cultural organisations has declined 35% since 2022. Artists are leaving the sector. Cultural organisations are closing. Creative Victoria has lost the sector’s trust. Victoria’s reputation as ‘the cultural capital’ has been decimated. And the sector’s viability is at significant and immediate risk.
But arts and culture are not warm-fuzzy optional extras:
- Across Australia, the sector employs four times the number of people employed by the coal mining industry, which receives astronomically higher subsidies.
- Similarly, every $1 million in self-generated turnover creates nine jobs in the arts and entertainment industry, compared to one job for every $1 million generated in the construction sector, and only 0.36 jobs for every $1 million spent on oil and gas.
- In terms of audience spend, recent cultural participation research revealed at least 22 million Australians attended or participated in culture in 2025 (not including children aged under 15), compared to 8.25 million attendees at Australian Rules Football games.
- In Victoria alone, the sector contributed $40.5 billion to the economy in 2022–23 and supported approximately 320,000 jobs, representing almost 9 per cent of total employment.
The countless other benefits of arts and cultural engagement are already well documented. Our work changes minds and saves lives, and it has never been more vital.
Yet those who are able to maintain creative careers are finding it harder to make a living and being censored at previously unimaginable rates. Organisations, funders and donors are losing credibility and viability – their fumbles and failures making mainstream news headlines and creating an increasingly unsafe and fearful culture that is undermining the value and impact of our never-more-important work.
As we head towards a state election in Victoria, the dire state of Australia’s arts and cultural sector also presents a unique opportunity. While our deficits and desperation have never been so high, our differences have been flattened by rising costs, falling or changing income, workforce insecurity, housing affordability, technological disruption, increasing racism, religious intolerance and censorship, and the long-term impacts of the pandemic, as well as a national cultural sector workforce crisis that’s burning more people out of the sector than are joining it, and reducing the capacity of those who remain.
The new Victorian Government could meet this moment with politically- and artform-agnostic strategies that raise the bar all of us, including:
- A whole of government approach that incorporates investment and support for arts and culture across multiple portfolios.
- A review and radical reinvention of Creative Victoria, which has lost the sector’s trust.
- Recommitment to arts and culture as vital public infrastructure, not optional aesthetics.
- Explicit commitment to pluralism and artistic expression over ‘cohesion’ and censorship.
- Immediate reversal of investment in hugely damaging AI data-centres that will create more problems than they solve, and re-investment of that funding into arts and culture instead. With a particular focus on:
- Increased support for small-to-medium organisations and individual practitioners.
- Increased investment indexed to CPI and population growth, so Victoria is no longer among Australia’s lowest-funded states.
- Re-investment in vital peak bodies and service organisations, which have been systemically deprioritised over the past 15 years – leaving decimated pathways and a disconnected sector in their wake, and reducing government access to informed and effective decision-making.
And you can read more about what the sector needs on the Don’t Break Our Arts website.
Build your ballot
Build a Ballot is a fantastic free tool that allows you to rate your support for the issues you care about, and compares your answers with the actual policy positions of every candidate in your electorate. Then you can arrange candidates and parties into your own preference order to create a personalised ‘how to vote’ card to take to the polling booth.
Don’t break our arts
While you’re building your ballot, don’t forget the vote for the arts.
Don’t Break Our Arts is a new campaign to restore cultural funding in Victoria. It’s calling on all candidates to commit to restoring and increasing arts funding.
Our vital cultural sector does so much more for the state than the $45 million it cost to bring three American football games to Naarm/Melbourne this year (‘a city not exactly lacking in football’) or the $90 million it spends every year on problematic horse and greyhound racing (which is more than the $83 million spent on artist grants, the music industry, independent arts organisations, regional arts, multicultural art, film, TV and games combined). Not to mention the millions the State Government is investing into the development of wasteful and dangerous AI data centres, while removing its own safeguards intended to take the politics out of infrastructure projects.
Make sure to sign the petition to restore cultural funding and subscribe for Don’t Break Our Arts campaign updates.
You may also find some useful suggestions in the guide to preparing a cultural policy scorecard I wrote for Overland before the last federal election. While obviously skewed towards a national policy context, the underlying questions needed to analyse state cultural policies and promises still hold true: Who wrote it? How was it written? And what does it contain?
AI policy
I am a concerned and conscientious objector to the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. You can read more about my many objections in my recent piece on raining on the parade of generative AI in the arts (and everywhere else).
If you consume or use my work or writing, you can be sure that the creativity, labour and language that goes into it are either my own or drawn from the wisdom of the clever humans I reference or cite, and that I do not intentionally use Al to research, generate or edit in any part of my writing or publishing processes.
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I undertake the majority of my research, writing, advocacy and sector development work on a self-funded basis.
If my work or writing has been of value to you, I’d appreciate you joining me as an advocate, ally or accomplice from just $2.50/month on Patreon or supporting the crowd-funding campaign to publish my new governance book, Beyond ‘best practice’ boards.
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