(N.B. This is another of my blog posts comparing the 2010 and 2011 versions of the ABS report Arts and Culture in Australia: A Statistical Overview. The first one is here.)
In this post, I’m looking at government funding of arts and heritage and comparing it to 2010’s effort. Again it’s a complex and slightly confusing picture, not least because some of the figures reported for the 2008-2009 year do not always tally between the respective reports. For the purpose of this post, I’ve used the figures cited in the 2011 report wherever possible.
First the overall picture of Federal, State and Local government funding:
As with my 2010 post, I’ve made funding increases over 6% green, and decreases over 6% red.
Cultural heritage and ‘other’ museums had a significant funding boost in 2009-2010, particularly at Federal and Local levels. This appears to have been at the expense of large cuts to Federal environmental heritage funding (local government funding of environmental heritage is not provided in the report). Meanwhile, there has been an increase of state funding of art museums, partially offset by a cut to local government funding in this area.
As with last year, there are significant (and inconsistent) year-on-year changes in funding at state level:
The big increase in Art Museum funding in NSW appears to be a return to ‘usual’ funding levels, since the 2008-2009 amount was a 32% decrease from 2007-2008 (see table in previous blog post). The drop in Art Museum funding in Qld is also in the context of a far larger increase in the previous year. The ACT has had large funding increases across the board (again balancing cuts from the previous years in some instances.)
It’s possible that state funding cycles are highly variable when looked at on a year-by-year basis like this, hence the erratic numbers – perhaps comparing three-year averages might give a more clear picture of what’s going on.
Another point to note is that while state funding of environmental heritage is relatively static in the aggregate, the individual state breakdowns show some clear winners and losers. I should point out that no states saw cuts to environmental heritage last year, and a couple had reasonably large increases, so the funding picture for environmental heritage may not be as bad as it first appears. However, when taking the federal funding into consideration too, it does look like environmental heritage has had a pretty severe funding blow.