• Proposed funding cuts to NSW’s art galleries and museums are yet another move shrinking the Australian arts sector, industry insiders say.
• The Art Gallery of NSW and Australian Museum are facing cuts they say could affect the quality of art, exhibitions, staff, and performances inside galleries and museums.
• “We’ve seen over the past couple of years cuts to lots of federal arts bodies, particularly small to medium-sized organisations,” a spokesperson for arts union MEAA told Business Insider Australia.
• Visit Business Insider Australia’s homepage for more stories.

Proposed funding cuts to NSW’s art galleries and museums, first reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, are emblematic of the wider decimation of the Australian arts sector, according to industry groups.

Australia Council for the Arts funding has declined by nearly 20% since the last government left office in 2013.

A spokesperson for the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, Australia’s leading union and industry advocate for Australia’s creative professionals, told Business Insider Australia that the arts sector has seen $100 million in funding cuts in the past half-decade.

Budget forecasts show that Sydney’s major culture institutions could be hit hard by further cuts to their operation funding which would affect the quality of art, exhibitions, staff, and performances inside galleries and museums.

NSW Treasury has proposed cutting $9 million annually from the Art Gallery of NSW’s budget from June.

The Australian Museum is facing a cut of around $13 million only months after opening after an investment of $57 million in renovations, and the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences would have to find savings of almost $10 million annually.

Struggling to recover from the impacts of COVID-19, the NSW cultural institutions have been impacted by a wider hemorrhaging of funds from the Australian arts sector, occurring for years but thrown into stark relief by the global pandemic.

While $135 million in taxpayer funding was awarded to Australia’s live performance sector in March 2021, the MEAA spokesperson said it’s another example of the Morrison government’s approach to supporting the arts: “way too late and way too little.”

The Public Service Association, which represents staff at those the institutions in line for cuts, told the Sydney Morning Herald they were worried there were already not enough skilled people to deliver exhibitions, adding it’s also concerned with the growing reliance on temporary and casual staff among Australia’s cultural institutions — a factor that added to employment uncertainty in the broader arts sector.

It said many of its members had been classed as temporary workers despite working for four years or more.

“The Berejiklian government is all about splashing cash on development, but never about investing in delivery,” PSA head Stewart Little said of the Berejiklian government in specific, which is “turning these galleries and museums into empty and expensive mausoleums.”

The MEAA spokesperson said it’s reflective of the “lack of deference” to the arts at a state and federal level.

“We’ve seen over the past couple of years cuts to lots of federal arts bodies, particularly small to medium-sized organisations,” they said.

“It’s not surprising museums are seeing cuts too.”

They said there continues to be a contradiction between how the public views the arts and how the government sees the arts.

“A whole range of surveys say that Australians agree the arts is important to Australian culture and that it’s a really important industry,” they said.

But for the last two elections the Morrison government hasn’t gone into the election with any sort of arts platform at all, and they’ve stripped money from the arts, they said.

“Over the last half-decade, there’s been $100 million in funding cuts from the arts.”

And then during the pandemic, there was “no sector of the economy that’s been more impacted by the pandemic than the arts.”

And when the government did come through with support for the sector, it was “way too late and way too little.”

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