Artists and supporters are now mobilising to demand the return of Catalyst funds to the Australia Council and a return to the status quo—a single federal arts funding body insulated from ministerial interference. Labor (yet to announce its election arts policy) has promised to return unspent Catalyst funds, the Greens all of them. The big challenge for artists is how to convince voters of any persuasion of the extremity of the crisis and how it will sooner than later affect them too. We can endlessly recite figures that prove what this government ignores—the substantial jobs’n’growth and innovation which art generates. For all that, the arts and, unbelievably, creativity have not figured in Turnbull’s policy announcements.

The issue is principally ethical: the Government and Arts Minister Fifield’s treatment of the arts has been dictatorial, disrespectful, divisive, non-consultative, secretive and opportunist—in a word, un-democratic, not least in its plundering and diminishing of an independent statutory authority, the Australia Council. The moral case has to be put, that a government that does not believe in the integrity and creativity of artists cannot be trusted by Australians as valuing art. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull can only gain the trust of voters by returning to the funding status quo. Beyond protest we all need to think big about the place of the arts in this country. Read more.