Arts funding has been in the news recently, and few outside the arts ever seem to realise how much is at stake. No other aspect of Australian life is so dependent on such a small proportion of the budget. It is not, however, just a budgetary issue. Like art itself, the questions around it incorporate many of the tensions of the broader society. At present the discussion is invariably accompanied by a comment about the need for more private sponsorship, with the frequent implication that the private dollar is somehow superior, although with little reflection about how it might be implemented, or where it might work best.

The arguments for private funding, moreover, can be so intertwined with the arguments against public funding, that one cannot examine the one without the other. No-one is saying anything very much in favour of public funding at present—for some reason, the artists, though politically active, have been tongue-tied in terms of their arguments—so we need to re-examine some of the reasons why it was instituted in the first place.