The October federal budget may not pour buckets of cash on the arts sector, the Albanese government’s special envoy says.
Susan Templeman is winding up a series of regional town hall meetings on the government’s national culture policy with a final event in Darwin on Friday.
“None of us want to make any promises that we can’t keep,” she said.
Ms Templeman told AAP she has been upfront with the fact the government will base its long-term funding priorities on the policy document, which is due in December.
“This is about putting a policy in place so that as we move forward, beyond the October budget to the first May budget, we can identify potentially what some priorities are, and work towards there being some progress.”
That could mean the federal government is into the second year of its term before the sector is able to make up significant ground lost under the coalition.
The previous Morrison government cut arts funding by about $190 million, or 20 per cent, in its last budget.
“There’s been a huge amount of money taken away from the arts, and we know we’ve got a lot of catching up to do,” Ms Templeman said.
Yet arts policy barely figured in the most recent federal election, and most of Labor’s promises did not come with dollar signs.
Its biggest promises were $80 million for a national Aboriginal art gallery and $84 million for the ABC, and Ms Templeman said she did not know whether the upcoming budget would fund those pledges.
At meetings held across Australia since early July, Ms Templeman said the short-term nature of arts grants emerged as a consistent issue.
She said the sector is also being held back by a shortage of skilled workers after people quit during the pandemic, from lighting and sound technicians to directors and curators.
The closure of training programs at TAFEs and regional universities is also a problem.
The arts policy process has received more than 200 submissions so far, and Ms Templeman said the government is well placed to meet its tight December deadline.
Labor’s last overarching culture plan, Creative Australia, took six years to develop and was scrapped by the coalition within six months of the 2013 election.
Submissions to the National Cultural Policy close on August 22.
