marcus westbury

Earlier this year, the Federal Government called for submissions in response to their draft discussion paper on the forthcoming National Cultural Policy. Being quite time-deprived at the time i hastily cobbled together a response – somewhat compiled from other things that i written in the past and probably desperately in need of a good editor. [...]

  JUST before Easter, Arts Minister Simon Crean announced that advertising guru and philanthropist Harold Mitchell (pictured) would undertake a major review of private sector support for the arts in Australia. The review will look at the range of existing government programs and incentives for philanthropic support for the arts in Australia and abroad, such [...]

[I've been incredibly slack at updating the blog of late, i put it down to travel, parenthood, and general need-to-make-a-livingness. However, that does leave me with a bit of a backlog of old scribblings to post here over the coming weeks. The piece below was originally in The Age on the 31st of January and [...]

This graph is a breakdown of Australia Council arts funding last year by artform. Despite recent scare campaigns that have suggested that Australia was somehow in the throes of doing away with the “heritage arts” in favour of “new media” there doesn’t appear to be much evidence of it in the numbers!  Right click “view [...]

National Museum of Australia WHAT HAPPENS when the Federal Government puts a call out to the public to make suggestions about a cultural policy? After a few hours of reviewing some of the submissions, it would be fair to say that the quality and usefulness of the submissions so far have been decidedly mixed. Despite [...]

In response to some recent posts and articles of mine about arts funding and cultural policy,  Nick Herd from the Australia Council pointed me to this comprehensive history of arts policy in Australia prepared by the Parliamentary Library. It’s very useful background reading for anyone thinking of putting in a submission to the National Cultural [...]

There is now an updated 2009-10 version of this data here. I’m basically just posting this here so i can link to it from this discussion over at Larvatus Prodeo. But it’s a reminder though that I’m involved in many debates and discussions about arts funding and policy priorities in Australia at the moment (most [...]