Will the federal government's $199 million for the national arts funding body be enough to fix the country's underfunded arts sector?
"It's hard to answer the enough question but this is a considerable investment," Australia Council chief executive Adrian Collette told AAP.
The funding injection is part of the $286 million national cultural policy announced on Monday, with an expanded Australia Council to be re-named Creative Australia.
While the government promises the funding is sufficient to restore cuts made under the coalition, Collette said regardless of the dollar figure, the money was not an emergency stopgap - it represented an ambition to build long-term capacity.
One smaller arts organisation, Brisbane's Metro Arts, is already saying more is needed.
"We remain hopeful that there will be more meaningful funds to support this policy in the May budget," chief executive Jo Thomas said at the Metro Arts season launch in Brisbane on Wednesday night.
"This time now, here, feels really urgent. I think we're on shifting sands," she said.
Here are some of the dunes to navigate: the new Creative Australia will hand out cash to the arts sector and engage with philanthropic and corporate donors.
With the recent controversy about so-called "greenwashing" by fossil fuel companies, this could prove to be difficult territory.
For example, late last year, the Darwin Festival parted ways with Santos and the Perth Festival split with Chevron.
The question of who arts organisations should accept much-needed money from is already a live discussion within the Australia Council, Collette said.
Even with the funding body's new brief to engage with the corporate world, politics should not get in the way of government funding, he intimated.
"If one of the organisations we invested in, because of the framing of their values, decided not to take sponsorship money, we would respect that greatly," he said.
It's likely there will be even more politics coming to the boardrooms of arts organisations, with the cultural policy's foreword calling for young artists to take up seats at the decision-making table.
"The boards of such institutions cannot be filled by businesspeople and by bureaucrats to the exclusion of creative practitioners and peers," the foreword states.
Collette said board makeup is also a live question and arts bodies should not settle for only corporate and business skills.
"You need people with strong artistic experience, you need people with strong creative industry experience ... but it's the mix that's exciting," he said.
