Getting wild out West – Western Sydney's long unhappiness at arts funding neglect

‘Western Sydney has long been unhappy with the tiny share of arts funding – both national and state – it receives. Across Australia there are many hundreds of small to medium arts and cultural organisations that play a pivotal role in supporting Australia’s cultural life. They need to be seen as every bit as important a part of Australia’s cultural infrastructure as the major performing arts companies or the major art galleries and museums. They are essential infrastructure for our arts and culture and they are the level of arts and cultural infrastructure closest to the very grassroots of our country – the Australians who vote, who get unhappy and who change governments. They rarely do it because of matters related to arts and culture but sometimes matters related to arts and culture, added to other concerns, can help tip things over the edge. More than a few of these organisations are based in the great mixed expanse of urban, suburban and outer-suburban Australia which is Western Sydney’.

When I finally left the public service 16 months ago there were a couple of things I had been working on that I thought were really important and would have loved to have progressed further. At the time I was responsible in the ACT, NSW and Queensland for funding from the suite of Indigenous culture programs that supported languages, culture and visual arts (and indirectly Indigenous broadcasting).

One of the projects I considered so important was consolidating and expanding funding support for Indigenous languages maintenance and revival in Western NSW, which was already well underway because of its strong community base.

Indigenous cultural funding in Western Sydney
The other, which was not underway at all, was getting more funding from the Indigenous cultural programs of the Australian Government into Western Sydney. This has one of the most dense concentrations of Aboriginal population in Australia but not a matching level of funding from these national programs, which would be ideal for this. There had been a history of not many applications coming from the region – or of the few applications there were not meeting the funding guidelines.

Beyond the obvious sights like the Harbour Bridge lies a whole world - the great mixed expanse of urban, suburban and outer-suburban Australia which is Western Sydney.

There had been some initial informal discussion with Blacktown Arts Centre and with some of the Ministry for the Arts regional staff about how to help make this happen but at that point the Indigenous Culture branch of the Ministry was disbanded and programs disbursed across the Ministry. Coupled with the continued steady dismantling of the network of regional staff in the Indigenous Culture Branch, much of the work ground to a halt.

With the unravelling of national arts funding which has produced the #freethearts response this has probably become less and less likely. It's one of my great regrets that national support couldn't have been focused on what was happening in Western Sydney.

Education - what does free mean?

At Whitlam’s memorial there was much mention, particularly by Cate Blanchett, of what his reforms to tertiary education had meant – for her personally but for Australia overall as well.

This was timely given the current attempts to make education far more expensive and to push the cost back onto individuals rather than Australia as a whole.

Broad-based access to education is critical to building  a highway to the future

It is sometimes argued that the reforms of the Whitlam Government benefited only middle class children, making free an education that their parents would otherwise have paid for, with the cost picked up by the taxpayer instead.