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 was once $1 million p.a., while the Art Gallery of SA’s support base shifts to the unsustainable life-support of benefactors, and while the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra is today, inexplicably, the least-funded symphony orchestra in Australia. All this while the State Opera’s 2015 box office dipped to record lows.” 

Arts South Australia boss Peter Louca was first to respond to the bleak outlook predicted in Jozeps’ claim of reduced funding for the Adelaide Festival. Refuting the cut claims, Louca stated that the information was inaccurate and that the Festival would, in fact, have its funding increased by an additional $4 million per annum as indicated in the last state budget. However, the Festival’s chief executive Karen Bryant told InDaily on Tuesday that Arts South Australia had indeed informed the festival of forthcoming cuts that will shrink the coffers of next year’s Adelaide Festival. “We have been notified of a $1 million reduction in funding for the 2016-17 year,” she said. “We are still trying to work through what that will mean for the Festival next year. There’s no doubt that a reduction in funding of that size will have to have an impact.”

InDaily questioned SA Arts Minister Jack Snelling about the likelihood of future arts funding cuts, to which he replied: “Like all areas, the arts is not immune to cross-government efficiency targets. We are working with all of our organisations and festivals that we fund as to what impact that may have. Exact details will be clear after the next State Budget.” In Parliamentary question time, Snelling confirmed that Adelaide Festival will indeed receive less funding next year, but he stressed the point that the Government will continue to support the Festival.

Louca said in a statement published on InDaily that “the Government remains committed to supporting our important arts and cultural activities and events, including the 10 other major funded festivals in South Australia, such as the Fringe, Film Festival, Cabaret, SALA and the Come Out Children’s Festival. The future allocation of efficiencies has not been settled and the overall Arts funding won’t be finalised until the Cabinet approve the next State Budget expected in June.”

The news of funding cuts to the Adelaide Festival comes less than a week after the Festival posted record box-office figures, having sold over $2.3 million worth of tickets ahead of this year’s event. In December of 2015, Adelaide was recognised as a UNESCO City of Music, after a Government spearheaded bid which made pledges to support the city’s music scene.

Read Jozeps’ opinion piece in full on InDaily

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