Thursday, 5 March 2026

 Gabrielle DE VIETRI (Richmond) (17:30): (1575) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Creative Industries, and the action I seek is to produce a clear vision to reinstate Melbourne as the cultural capital of Australia. In just a few months eight major arts organisations have been suddenly defunded, facing decisions to cancel, scale back or even close up after decades of work. With Writers Victoria funding axed, we will be the only mainland state without a government-supported writing body. Next Wave, responsible for kickstarting countless careers, has been stripped of funding. La Mama’s four-year funding was cut to two, and the Abbotsford Convent, fought for and secured by my community, has lost all support.

The pool that our arts organisations rely on was already so tiny – $81 million for the whole sector – and now Labor is cutting that to $59 million this year, a 30 per cent cut. With that come job losses, hundreds of them – the technicians and curators and producers and administrators that keep our arts organisations, festivals, galleries and public art spaces running. They are overworked and sacked and demoralised. The artists who create the joyful, unexpected, challenging work that makes our city wonderful are already among the lowest paid workers in our state, and they are being pushed further and further to the margins. Victoria has the most artists per capita, yet we are second last in terms of what we spend on the arts. We claim to be the cultural capital of Australia, a UNESCO City of Literature, yet the Premier did not even send a representative to the Premier’s Literary Awards, let alone go herself. Budgets reflect priorities, and while Creative Victoria’s funding is cut to $59 million, this government has spent comparable sums in a single day on other priorities – six times that upgrading the corporate stand at the grand prix, for example.

People do not flock to Victoria for our corporate hospitality; they come for our creativity, for our stories, for our cultural life. The amount needed to sustain the independent arts is a tiny fraction of the state budget, yet it determines whether artists and arts workers survive or not. Last week APAM, the Australian Performing Arts Market, was held in Perth. Victoria was the only state not to support artists to attend. For four decades our independent arts sector has shaped the national landscape, fostering experimentation and bold new voices. There is no point to building a new NGV if our arts community is unable to fill it. We do not know who the next Tracey Moffatt or Patricia Piccinini or Mike Parr or Abdul Abdullah will be, but we do know that without meaningful investment and a clear vision from this government the next generation of artists may never get the chance to share their art with the world.