Shadow Arts Minister pledges to undo $105 million of Abbott-Turnbull Government cuts to arts spending.

They say no news is good news, but that didn’t quite ring true for artists across Australia on Tuesday, as the 2016/17 Federal Budget failed to announce any significant news, good or bad, about arts funding. The absence from this year’s budget papers was a stark contrast to last year’s, which shocked the arts sector by dividing Government spending on the arts between the established Australia Council and the Catalyst Fund (formerly ex-Art Minister George Brandis’s National Programme for Excellence in the Arts). 

There had been a hope that the budget announcement earlier this week would address the overwhelming outcry from Australian artists over the division of arts subsidy, which has had a devastating impact on arts organisations, particularly on the small to medium scale, throughout the country. However, a new glimmer of hope has now been offered by Shadow Minister for the Arts, the Honourable Mark Dreyfus QC, who has pledged to return the money siphoned to the Catalyst Fund from the Australia Council, should Labor win the upcoming Federal election.

In a statement issued yesterday, Dreyfus labelled the interference of the Abbott-Turnbull administration...