Guidelines released for Catalyst arts fund; industry responds

The federal government has released the guidelines for its new arts funding program, Catalyst—Australian Arts and Culture Fund, which replaces the National Program for Excellence in the Arts (NPEA).

The aim of the program is to ‘fund innovative ideas from arts and cultural organisations that may find it difficult to access funding for such projects from other sources’. The program will ‘give priority to projects involving small to medium organisations’, however, individual artists will not be funded.

The program will distribute up to $12m in arts funding annually, down from $20m previously allocated to the NPEA.

The program will offer funding across three streams: partnerships and collaborations, where funding is conditional on organisations securing funds from other sources; innovation and participation, which is designed to widen access to the arts and encourage diversity and inclusion; and international and cultural diplomacy, which aims to increase the profile of Australian arts and culture abroad, and strengthen international exchanges. Two of the streams—partnerships and collaborations and international and cultural diplomacy—are similar to funding streams previously outlined in the NPEA draft guidelines.

The program also offers an assessment structure similar to the NPEA. Applications will be assessed by a combination of independent and Ministry for the Arts assessors, and the final decision will be determined by the Minister for the Arts or a delegate in the department.

In a statement, Australian Society of Authors (ASA) chair David Day said Fifield has ‘done little more than change the lipstick on the pig of a policy that was bequeathed to him’ by former arts minister George Brandis. ‘The costly duplication of the arts bureaucracy has continued, as has the continuation of the political interference in funding decisions,’ said Day. ‘The ASA, and the arts sector generally, was hoping for something better, and will continue to press for a full restoration of arts funding and a commitment to the principles of peer-reviewed assessment at arms-length from government.’

In an article on the Conversation, University of Queensland creative writing senior lecturer Stuart Glover wrote that the Catalyst program ‘pretends to remedy the basic problems of George Brandis’s proposed NPEA—but really just sweeps up the mess into a slightly neater pile’. ‘For literature, it seems that the proposed Catalyst fund will accept applications from writing and publishing organisations—which the NPEA wasn’t going to do—but even with some NPEA funds flowing back into the pot at the Australia Council, the literary sector will face a net reduction in funds compared to 2013-14,’ Glover wrote.

To see the full guidelines for Catalyst, click here.