ArtsPeak, the Confederation of Peak National Arts Organisations has written to the PM advocating for vision in arts policy.

With the 2016 Federal Election on the horizon, the Co-Conveners of ArtsPeak, the peak Australian advocacy body for arts and culture, penned an open letter to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull expressing their concern about the Government’s support of arts and culture. Tamara Winikoff OAM, Executive Director of the National Association for the Visual Arts, and Nicole Beyer, Executive Director of the Theatre Network Victoria, write that since 2014, “We have witnessed sector budget cuts, funding administration changes and destabilising implementation that we believe is detrimental to the sector. These changes were made without clearly articulated priorities or a framework which would make evident the government’s cultural vision and rationale.”

ArtsPeak has been vocal in the past, approaching State Government leaders with a plan to bail out local artists following the cuts to the Australia Council in 2015.

In their most recent missive, they explain that Arts Minister Senator Mitch Fifield’s Catalyst programme (a reboot of the former Arts Minister Senator George Brandis’s National Programme for Excellence in the Arts) would have been received positively “if it had been...