Read the Signals
The funding architecture is telling us something. It’s time to listen - and act.
Victoria’s 2026-27 Budget, delivered last week on 5 May, commits $81.1 million to the creative industries. Screen incentives and major venue maintenance account for more than 80 per cent of it. Music and regional touring together come to less than $6 million. For independent artists, small organisations, and community-level cultural life, the signal is clear: this money is not for you.
But the Victorian Budget is not the only signal. It is one signal of many, and they are all saying the same thing.
The signals are everywhere
A New Approach’s latest Big Picture data shows that government investment in arts and culture across Australia has not kept pace with population growth. The population grew 27 per cent between 2007-08 and 2023-24; cultural expenditure grew 19 per cent. Per capita spending in real terms is lower now than it was seventeen years ago. On a GDP basis, Australia ranks 25th out of 31 OECD countries for government investment in recreation, culture and religion - roughly a quarter below the OECD average.
The composition of that spending is shifting too. Capital expenditure: buildings, renovations, restorations, has risen from 11 per cent of total cultural spend in 2007–08 to 18 per cent in 2023–24. Per capita recurrent expenditure, which funds the actual running of organisations and programs, has declined 14 per cent over the same period. More money for buildings; less money for what happens inside them.
Federally, the Revive national cultural policy restored some core operational funding, but the 2025-26 Budget’s most significant new arts initiative was $8.6 million for Revive Live, supporting grassroots music venues. No new funding was announced for small-to-medium organisations, independent artists, or the structural challenges facing the broader ecology. The next national cultural policy consultation is now open, but the fiscal environment in which it will land is tighter than the one that produced Revive.
In Victoria specifically, two consecutive budgets confirm this architecture. The 2025-26 Budget committed $475 million to major cultural institutions and $50 million to screen - together more than 95 per cent of the $552 million headline. The 2026-27 Budget follows the same pattern. And behind the budget numbers, the recent funding announcements from CV have shattered basic assumptions about the reliability of government support.
Internationally, the UK’s Mapping Museums research documents over 530 museum closures since 2000, with finance the most commonly cited trigger. Two-thirds of UK museum directors reported budget shortfalls in 2024. Local authority museums have been hit hardest - 139 closures, an 8 per cent decline - as councils under fiscal pressure cut non-statutory services first. The pattern is consistent: when money tightens, culture is the first thing governments stop protecting.
None of these signals is temporary. None of them is going to reverse in the next budget cycle. Taken together, they describe a structural reconfiguration of the conditions in which arts organisations exist. Advocacy for increased public investment remains essential and should continue. But waiting for the funding environment to change before acting is not a strategy. It is a way of running out of time.
What is needed now
The signals are not telling us to give up. They are telling us to take agency.
Agency begins with a question most organisations are not yet asking openly: is our current form still the best way to deliver our purpose? An organisation’s purpose may be permanent. Its current form - its governance, its business model, its scale, its relationship to its community - may not be. The community programs, the knowledge, the relationships, the trust: these can survive the parent organisation and be carried forward in new structures, new partnerships, new ways of working. But only if someone has the clarity to separate what must endure from what is simply inherited habit.
The sector is full of organisations whose purpose is as vital as it ever was but whose form no longer serves that purpose well. Some need to merge. Some need to spin off their most valuable work into new, more focused structures. Some need to end with dignity, releasing their resources and community trust into forms that can carry them forward. And some need to be reinvented entirely, to be redesigned around their core purpose as if they were being created today.
Right now, none of these options is well supported. There are no peer networks for leaders navigating existential organisational questions. No practical frameworks for merger, recombination, or managed wind-down adapted to the Australian context. No public narrative that treats transition as a skilled act of stewardship rather than a mark of failure. And critically, the funding architecture actively discourages organisations from even raising the question - because signalling difficulty to a funder risks triggering the very withdrawal of support that makes the situation terminal.
Most organisations in difficulty can see only two options: persist or collapse. That is not a real choice. The question is whether we build the infrastructure that expands the options available at the moment when they feel most constrained.
Earlier this year I published REGENERATE, making the case for dedicated transition infrastructure in the Australian arts and cultural sector. It proposes three interconnected layers - shifting the narrative around transition, building peer networks and communities of practice, and developing practical tools and services - that would give the sector the capacity to navigate structural change with skill and intention rather than in silence and isolation.
This article is not a reiteration of that argument. It is a response to the accumulating evidence that the argument is urgent. The signals keep arriving. The question is whether the sector reads them clearly enough to act.
Choosing agency
Real hope, comes from solidarity, agency, history, and new energy, not from false optimism. The shift that matters is from feeling acted upon to feeling capable of acting.
That means breaking the silence. Every organisation that names what it is navigating -honestly, to its peers - makes it easier for the next one to do the same. That is how cultures change.
It means building peer networks, not waiting for someone else to build them. The international evidence is consistent: what leaders in difficulty most need is the experience of not being alone. Confidential peer connection, learning from others who have navigated similar terrain, support that does not carry the risks of disclosing difficulty to funders. This does not require large funding. It requires someone to convene it.
And it means doing the purpose work. Every organisation in the sector would benefit from a rigorous conversation - with its board, its staff, its community —-about the relationship between its enduring purpose and its current form.
· What would this organisation look like if it were invented today?
· What models could it learn from?
· What can exist independently of the institutional structure that currently holds it?
The budget does not determine the ecology. The ecology is built by everyone who works in it. The signals tell us what government will fund. The question now is what we will build.
An invitation
I am convening the conversations and building the networks that this moment demands. Not a program design. Not a policy submission. The actual infrastructure: the rooms where leaders can speak honestly, the peer connections that break the isolation, the practical work of figuring out how to deliver purpose differently. Conversations are happening - in Melbourne, in regional Victoria, across state lines -that would not have been possible twelve months ago. But they need to go further and faster, and they need more people in them.
If you lead an organisation navigating structural change - or know that it should be - I want to hear from you. If you sit on a board privately asking questions it cannot yet ask publicly, this is the conversation you have been looking for. If you work in philanthropy or government and recognise that your own frameworks make good transitions harder, there is a place for you in this work too.
Choose agency. Take action now. The sector does not need another analysis of why things are hard. It needs people who are willing to build something different -together, openly, starting from wher e we actually are.