Is a fresh wind blowing for the arts in Australia?
This week at the Sydney Opera House, the NSW minister for the arts, John Graham, is holding a summit for Australia’s creative industries, to look at how the tax system might help make the arts a more viable undertaking for artists and organisations.
We need it. Left as it is, the nation’s not-for-profit performing arts sector will not survive. The whole system is teetering on the edge of artistic and financial viability.
According to Creative Australia, only one in five professional artists in Australia this year will make the $48,000 – deemed the minimum livable wage – by working in the arts. On average they will earn $23,000 from their artistic work, and only $54,000 when all their other non-artistic jobs are added in. Sustaining a career as an artist is increasingly out of reach financially, to say nothing of the inner fortitude and sense of purpose that it takes.
And our performing arts organisations? Most of us are stuck between the rock of structural deficit, and the hard place of artistic purpose. A quick scan of the annual reports of many organisations will show ongoing deficits or diminishing output – or both. The spate of artistic and executive directors departing in 2024 and 2025 speaks to the internal tensions around the sustainability of these organisations. Smaller cast sizes, fewer productions, less artistic variety, diminished cultural reach, fewer jobs for artists: that’s the business model now.
And it all begins – or ends – with policy. Like our roads, hospitals, universities, schools and power grids, our cultural infrastructure is the responsibility of government – not corporate sponsors and philanthropists, which are increasingly relied on by our biggest institutions.
The world has changed dramatically, but the performing arts in 2025 are still operating on Windows 99
And in the case of the performing arts, policy has been made for most of the past 25 years by accident, neglect and ministerial fiat. Until Labor unveiled its admirable federal Revive policy in 2023 there had not been a comprehensive rethink of the national policy settings for the performing arts since the Nugent report in 1999. Commissioned by the Howard government and backed by an extra $70m in funding, Nugent addressed serious concerns about financial sustainability, governance, audience accessibility, and reductions in artistic output and ambition – concerns very similar to those we face today.
But here’s the thing – even after Revive, the basic structures put in place by the Nugent report remain: a favoured list of institutional companies which has barely shifted in 25 years; a shrinking second tier of small-to-medium companies; no serious practical recognition of the vital importance of freelance artists and independent companies; governance structures at odds with the particular nature of arts organisations; and funding levels that are based on a business and artistic environment which is 25 years old.
The system is no more sustainable, financially or artistically, than it was before the Nugent report. The world has changed dramatically, but the performing arts in 2025 are still operating on Windows 99.
The NSW summit aims to do comprehensive policy work on the financial environment for the arts. The ideas on the table are good ones: an offset scheme similar to the screen sector; clearer deductibility arrangements for freelance artists, and better deductability rates to encourage more donors; fringe benefits tax concessions to bring the arts into line with the public benevolent institutions we compete with for staff; place-based tax incentives to gather creative business and artists; tax exemptions for grants and awards, and more.
These are good reforms which should be taken up at the federal level too; they could save a lot of organisations from going broke. But is solvency really the best we can hope for when it comes to the artistic and cultural life of the country? And will it be enough to sustain the artists and the artforms themselves?
The Wrong Gods by S Shakthidharan at Belvoir St theatre in May this year. ‘The knowledge and craft that makes an artist is passed down from the generation before.’ Photograph: Brett Boardman Photography/Belvoir
With or without these tax changes, the eternal choice for every arts organisation is either to beef up the artistic task and go broke, or diminish the artistic task and stay solvent. Let’s take the obvious example here: cast sizes on our stages are getting smaller and smaller. On the one hand that means lower costs to organisations; on the other it means an asymmetrical diminishment of the artistic potential of a work, to say nothing of the job losses.
And where do we go after all these excellent one-woman shows so many of us find ourselves presenting? Take enough pieces off a plane and it might still look like a plane, but if it can’t fly it’s just a bus with wings.
We cannot trade off any more than we already have without risking the basic purpose of the arts. We have probably traded off too much already. Every dollar not spent on artists making art contributes to the growing loss of knowledge, purpose, virtuosity and livelihood that are the lasting currency of these artforms. If so few dollars continue to flow to the creatives, there will be no artists or art left in the arts.
The real goal of arts policy shouldn’t be to keep organisations solvent; it needs to keep each artform alive for the next generation. Artistic talent doesn’t spontaneously come to fruition. The knowledge and craft that makes an artist is passed down from the generation before. A good artist needs as much lifelong training and practise as a good sportswoman.
Let’s stay with that sports metaphor for a minute. The West Indies used to be the greatest cricket team in the world. Viv Richards’ 291 on the way to a team innings of 687, Brian Lara’s 501 not out – these are legendary moments from a legendary team. But two months ago, Australia bowled out the entire West Indies team for 27.
If we leave the country’s arts policy settings as they are, we’ll be bowling ourselves out for 27. The ideas that come out of the NSW cultural tax summit might just keep us in the game – but where to from there?
