Arts Grants Must Be Tested For Financial Viability

Taxpayers were billed over $200 million last year to fund the Australia Council for the Arts, a federal government body which exists to give tax dollars to artists.

Worryingly, there is no obligation for grant recipients to prove their art is financially viable. Instead they are given on the basis of other factors such as:

- Contribution to diverse cultural expression
- [Increasing] the experience by Australians of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts and culture.
- Vision, ideas and artistic rationale

So as long as you can talk yourself up and incorporate another culture in the process, you could be well on your way to collecting up to $50,000.

If Australians are being forced to hand over more than $200 million a year to fund artists, don’t we deserve the right to know it’s going to be well-spent, rather than paying for things that nobody actually wants? Or worse yet, things that taxpayer-funded bureaucrats want?

Sign our petition below to demand that all Arts grants must be tested for financial viability!
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As taxpayers of Australia, we demand that the Australian government implement a policy requiring all Arts grants to be tested for their ability to generate revenue from paying customers.

Australians are among the most heavily taxed people on Earth and we can no longer afford to pay over $200 million a year to subsidise Arts programs which have no realistic chance of generating revenue. This must end and be replaced with a fair test of the likelihood of commercial success for grants recipients across the country.

We do not seek to limit the Arts community in Australia, we seek to build a fairer system for determining whether taxpayer subsidies are warranted on a case-by-case basis.

The Australian Arts community is capable of producing commercially successful works and standing on its own two feet, it should not depend on taxpayer subsidies given out without a proper test of viability.

Sign Below!