What the Next Cultural Policy Could Actually Change
The consultation for Australia’s next National Cultural Policy is open. Hundreds of submissions will arrive. Most will argue, rightly, for more funding. Many will advocate for specific artforms, communities, or regions. Some will propose new programs or structural reforms. Almost none will name the thing I want to talk about.
Because the organisations most affected by it can’t afford to say it out loud.
Right now, across Australia, arts organisations are making existential decisions in private. Whether to close. Whether to merge. Whether to keep going against odds that everyone on the board knows are unsustainable. They are doing this without support, without language, and without any policy framework that acknowledges what they’re going through. If they speak publicly about their situation, they risk the very outcomes they’re trying to manage: funders withdraw, donors redirect, staff start looking elsewhere. So they stay quiet. And the consultation, like every policy process before it, will hear from a sector that sounds more stable than it is.
That silence is the gap the next cultural policy has a genuine opportunity to address. Not with more money alone - though the sector needs more money - but with something no Australian cultural policy has ever attempted: a framework for how we navigate institutional transition well.
What Revive built, & what it left out
Revive was a significant recommitment. It restored operational funding to Creative Australia, established new bodies like Music Australia and Writing Australia, and reasserted the centrality of arts and culture in national life. That mattered. In a policy landscape where the arts had been progressively marginalised, Revive was a statement of intent.
But Revive was, structurally, a creation-and-sustaining policy. It assumed a sector that needs to be maintained, supported, and grown. It had no framework for what happens when organisations reach the end of their current form — when the model that worked for twenty years no longer does, when a merger could create something stronger than either organisation alone, when an ending done well could release knowledge, relationships, and resources into the ecology rather than losing them.
In the three years since Revive launched, the structural pressures on the sector have intensified. Victoria’s funding announcements have shattered assumptions about state government support. Federal per capita arts spending in real terms is lower than it was in 2007–08. Post-pandemic audiences have not fully returned. The average practising professional artist earns $23,200 per year from their creative work — half the minimum wage. The organisations holding the sector’s generative core — the small-to-medium companies, the independents, the community-embedded institutions — are under a kind of pressure that existing policy was not designed to address.
A policy category that doesn’t yet exist
Internationally, something is shifting. The United Kingdom’s Decelerator has built a model for supporting civil society organisations through endings that preserves knowledge, protects communities, and creates space for what comes next. European networks like IETM are investing in research on the relational and temporal fabric that sustains cultural work. North American organisations are developing models of creativity as social infrastructure. These are not marginal experiments. They represent a growing recognition that healthy cultural ecologies need the capacity to manage their full lifecycle — not just birth and growth, but transition, recombination, and emergence.
Australia is absent from this conversation. We have no transition funding mechanisms. We have no training for arts officers in how to have transition conversations with funded organisations. We have grant conditions that actively prevent well-managed endings — operational funding that restricts the use of reserves for transition purposes, reporting frameworks that treat any deviation from growth as failure. Organisations in difficulty face a binary: persist or collapse. That is not a real choice, and it is producing real harm — knowledge lost, communities severed, workers abandoned, and opportunities for genuine renewal missed.
Transition infrastructure is not an argument against more funding. A sector with more money will still need the capacity to navigate structural change with intelligence and care. It is also not a managed contraction strategy — the concern that building a language for endings gives funders permission to withdraw. The response to that legitimate fear is not to avoid the subject but to build infrastructure that is genuinely independent of funder interests and explicitly focused on the needs of organisations and communities.
What this moment makes possible
The next National Cultural Policy is being written at exactly the moment when these questions have become unavoidable. The consultation is asking what the sector needs. Here is an answer that almost no one in the sector can afford to give publicly, offered on behalf of the many leaders, board members, and communities who are living it.
This is also what I am asking people to include in their own submissions. If the argument resonates — if it reflects something of what you are witnessing — use it. Adapt it. Make it yours. The more voices that name this gap, the harder it becomes for the next policy to leave it unaddressed.
Three things the next National Cultural Policy should include
1. Dedicated transition funding mechanisms. Creative Australia and state arts bodies should establish explicit, accessible funding for organisational transition: end-of-life grants, merger support, recombination facilitation, and emergence support for new organisations. These should be available without requiring the public disclosure of difficulties, and structured to support the time, expertise, and process costs of transitions — not simply bridge funding to extend unsustainable operations.
2. Training and mandate for arts officers. Government arts officers at all levels should receive training in how to engage helpfully with organisations navigating transition — how to raise the topic, how to listen without triggering panic, and how to connect organisations with peer support and practical resources. This requires explicit permission from government leadership to have these conversations, and a shift in the relationship from pure accountability to genuine strategic support.
3. Reform of grant conditions that make good transitions impossible. Operational grant conditions that restrict the use of reserves for transition purposes should be reformed. Transition planning should be recognised as a legitimate and fundable activity. And the policy should explicitly name transition — endings, mergers, recombinations, and emergence — as a normal part of how a healthy cultural ecology functions, not as evidence of failure.
The sector’s silence on transition is not dishonesty. It is a rational response to a policy environment that punishes honesty. The next cultural policy can change that environment - not by forcing disclosure, but by building the frameworks, the funding, and the professional infrastructure that make honest conversations safe and productive. That would be genuinely new. And it would make everything else the policy attempts more likely to succeed.
You can read my submission here.