SA Arts Minister announces Adelaide Festival and other organisations will face cuts in the next financial year.

The South Australian Government looks set to slash future arts funding, putting multiple organisations at risk including the state’s largest annual event, the Adelaide Festival of the Arts. Leading figures in South Australia’s arts sector have been locked in a game of media ping-pong this week, as accusations of cuts and quickly published rebuttals have shuttled back and forth in the past few days.

The facts are murky, but the rumours began last week when Adelaide’s InDaily published an opinion piece that claimed South Australia’s Weatherill Government was planning to cut back funding resources available to arts organisations. Rainer Jozeps, a long-time arts administrator, penned a piece labelling South Australia’s politicians as “limited and unimaginative”, adding that the city’s past as a “honeypot of creativity and cultural enterprise” has been lost.  

“The Weatherill Government wants Adelaide and its regions to be ‘vibrant’,” Jozeps wrote. “All this while it strips $1 million from the [Adelaide] Festival’s 2016 budget, while the internationally renowned Australian Dance Theatre’s funding dips scandalously below $300,000 when it...