A fellow artist asked sincerely this week where the Australian arts money has gone. The short answer is that it hasn't gone anywhere. The funding regime is doing what it was designed to do: engineered and false scarcity.

Per-capita federal cultural spending fell 18.9% in real terms between 2008 and 2018 (A New Approach), and Australia now sits 26th of 33 OECD countries on culture as a share of GDP. This is not a function of constraint. Treasury still finds $16.3bn a year for fossil fuel subsidies, an uncapped 30% Location Offset for Hollywood, and $268bn-plus for AUKUS. Revive's four-year 'new money' amounts to roughly 0.08% of the submarine bill. Fabricated scarcity here is a tool or an instrument, the way a knife is an instrument — not for cutting but for the threat of cutting, which is the more useful function and requires no actual blade.

What is anthropologically interesting is the slow architecture by which the regime is sustained. The efficiency dividend has been compounding on every GLAM institution for 35 years. Core funding has been replaced by tournament-style project grants with 10–15% success rates. Black Friday 2016 defunded over 60 small-to-medium organisations while the Majors were ring-fenced; most never returned. Average creative income sits at ~$23k, unchanged since the 1980s (Throsby, 2024). Job-Ready Graduates doubled humanities fees and has not been reversed. QCA, SCA, the ANU School Of Music, TasTAFE's visual arts stream — all structurally demoted or gutted. When peer assessment yields a result the government finds inconvenient, as with Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino in February, it turns out one Murdoch column, one Senate Dorothy Dixer, and a phone call from Tony Burke to Adrian Collette can collapse a board's decision in six hours. The arm's-length principle holds for as long as it produces compliant outcomes.

State governments are running the same playbook with local branding. Art Gallery NSW: dozens of redundancies and a state allocation cut under Minns. Create NSW: a quarter of the workforce gone. Australian Design Centre, founded 1964: closing in June. Creative Victoria has cut its Creative Enterprise Program by 16% and defunded eight organisations, including the 45-year-old Australian Print Workshop. Tasmania's own ministerial brief calls its arts funding 'dangerously low.' Queensland caps any funding increase at 10%, which is a real-terms freeze dressed as growth. What we are watching is not failure. It is policy — a calculation made decades ago about what kind of country Australia would be, quietly executed while we are told the cupboard is bare.