The pre-emptive exit of CEO Lisa Havilah only weeks before the opening of Powerhouse Parramatta was a surprise only because despite everything she seemed untouchable. Even the many like me who had opposed it from the start at least expected her to be there to cop the inevitable attacks once the opening made it clear what an inadequate and inappropriate failure the project actually is. But maybe that is now already so obvious that it was necessary to defenestrate her now to make it absolutely certain she copped the blame. That is of course grotesquely unfair because, enthusiastic bureaucrat that she is, she has only been following orders and the real criminals are in fact a conga line of corrupt Premiers and Ministers. Perhaps, as with the equally flawed Sydney Modern project, the truth will begin to be whispered after the initial blast of fulsome praise dies down.

So what should have happened, and could still happen once the guilty are swept out the door?

Western Sydney has an enormous, long standing and well researched deficit in cultural infrastructure. It also has 26 Coombes Drive, Penrith, a windowless brick and concrete box the shape of a couple of squat Egyptian mastabas fused together, and it is, by any measure, the most significant piece of late-twentieth-century architecture in Western Sydney, equivalent in its way to the Sydney Opera House. Marcel Breuer designed it - his only building in this country - with Harry Seidler minding the site and Bruce Rickard doing the landscaping, back in 1975. It made fans for air-conditioners. It sold in 2017 for $3 million to a private buyer, after the Museum of Contemporary Art’s own director floated turning it into an arts hub for what she called “the capital of the west” and nobody in government bothered to follow it up. $3 million! Somewhere in the same decade, the state government was spending north of $900 million building a new museum on a flood-prone bend of the Parramatta River, a building about half the size of the one it was meant to replace, with nowhere much to put the big machinery.

Just think about that gap for a minute before you read anything else, because it tells you almost everything about how this country decides what culture is worth, and to whom.

I’ve spent a working life inside the apparatus that people politely call “the art world” and less politely call the culture industry, and I have watched this particular manoeuvre often enough to recognise it immediately: an authentic grievance, real and long-documented, gets identified by the people with power to act on it and then gets answered with an act of demolition somewhere else entirely, a corrupt act of looting dressed up as a generous solution. That is the whole Powerhouse story. It is worth telling properly, because the true version does not split neatly into “the West versus the inner city,” however conveniently that bad faith framing has served several premiers.

The deficit was real

Start with what was true and stayed true for decades. Western Sydney is home to roughly a tenth of the national population and is, by most measures, the third-largest economy in the country, and for the whole of that time it had almost none of the flagship cultural institutions that cluster instead around Circular Quay and the CBD fringe, forty and fifty kilometres east. This was not a matter of impression or grievance-mongering. Deloitte Access Economics, commissioned through Business Western Sydney, published a Western Sydney Cultural Infrastructure Report in 2015 that laid the numbers out plainly: a region carrying serious economic weight and a rapidly growing population, chronically under-provided with the buildings, venues and institutional support that culture actually needs to be made and shown. It was not the first document to say so and it would not be the last - Western Sydney University’s Institute for Culture and Society has kept researching the same terrain for years since, and more recent mapping work by SGS Economics with Create NSW has kept finding the same gaps in the same places.

None of this was contested. The Western Sydney Arts & Cultural Lobby - a coalition running from Bankstown Arts Centre and Casula Powerhouse through to Parramatta Artists’ Studios, Penrith Performing & Visual Arts and Urban Theatre Projects - took the Deloitte findings into the 2016 NSW parliamentary inquiry into museums and galleries and made the case in plain language. This is activism that worked. It shifted the argument. By the mid-2010s, no serious person in state politics could deny that the West had been shortchanged for generations, or that fixing it mattered. That is a genuine win, and it belongs to the artists, workers and organisers who spent decades building the case, not to whichever minister eventually stood up at a press conference to claim it.

The false choice

What the Lobby had won was an argument about need. What the Baird government delivered, in 2015, was a solution to an entirely different problem: what to do with a valuable piece of publicly owned inner-city land that was not returning a profit to their croneys. The announcement that the Powerhouse Museum would leave Ultimo for Parramatta arrived before any business case, before a confirmed site, and - this is the detail people forget - before an election. The museum’s own founding director, Dr Lindsay Sharp, told the 2016 inquiry, in terms that still read as understatement, that the driving logic was the market value of a site sitting against the multi-billion-dollar Barangaroo, Darling Harbour and Central Park redevelopment zones, not any cultural plan for what Parramatta needed.

Run the numbers, because they matter more than any amount of rhetoric. Selling Ultimo was expected to raise something in the order of $130 to $250 million. Credible estimates of what actually moving the collection would cost ran from $600 million up to $1.5 billion. The Parramatta build itself has been reported at figures between $915 million and $1.17 billion. Kylie Winkworth of the Powerhouse Museum Alliance - hardly a disinterested party, but certainly a well informed one - put the cost of properly restoring and maintaining the existing Ultimo building at something like $100 to $200 million over four years. Read those figures side by side and the “we can’t afford both” story falls apart on its own arithmetic. It was always possible to keep a working, internationally regarded museum in Ultimo and fund something serious in the West, for considerably less than was eventually spent achieving neither goal particularly well. This was never a zero-sum contest between the city and the suburbs. It was dressed up as one because that framing was politically useful and the real one - a land deal wearing a cultural policy as a costume - was not, in fact was little more than stealing public assets.

What actually got built

The thing that exists now at Parramatta is not what was promised, on the government’s own numbers. The 2019 parliamentary inquiry called the business case for the move “inadequate” and recommended restoring the Ultimo building to its former condition instead - advice that was heard and then filed away. The site chosen is flood-prone. The finished building is reported to run at roughly half the floor area of the Ultimo museum it replaces, without the storage capacity for the big historic machinery, meaning much of what the Powerhouse actually holds is now going decay in a closed store at Castle Hill where the public will never see it. And in 2021, to make room for it, the government tore down Willow Grove, a nineteenth-century villa on the site, over the objections of heritage groups and against a CFMEU green ban by construction workers refusing to touch the site, in the direct line of descent from the BLF bans of the 1970s.

That last detail matters more than it’s usually given credit for. The people fighting to save Willow Grove and the people who had spent the previous decade demanding real cultural investment in Western Sydney were, to a significant degree, the same networks - the same unions, the same heritage advocates, often the same individuals. This was never Ultimo sentimentalists lined up against a deserving West. It was a coalition of people who wanted the West properly served, watching government demolish one heritage building to build an inadequate replacement for another, and calling that a win for Western Sydney because it was easier to sell that way.

A better site, a better idea

Which brings us back to Coombes Drive. Penrith sits further west again than Parramatta, on the line, close to the growth corridors running out toward the new airport and up toward the mountains, in a position that actually reduces the distance culture has to travel to reach the people it is meant to serve, rather than shifting the destination one ring further along the CBD’s orbit. For most of Western Sydney’s population, Parramatta still means travelling east, toward the centre, not away from it. It solved half a problem and called it the whole solution.

The Torin Building, sitting there heritage-listed and half-forgotten since 2009, is not just a nice piece of real estate. It’s an argument in concrete. Credit should go to the artist Billy Gruner who first alerted me and others, including Liz Anne McGregor, to this almost forgotten gem. Acquire the building and the block around it - there’s room to do this properly, with parking and a nearby railway station, staged new-build galleries, the kind of expandable precinct that Parramatta’s cramped, flood-exposed site was never going to allow - and you have the physical basis for an institution that doesn’t have to be a diminished copy of what already existed at Ultimo. That’s the deeper point buried in all of this. The Powerhouse’s founding template - applied arts, industrial design, engineering history - was a specific nineteenth and twentieth-century museum category, built for a specific site and collection. Transplanting a shrunken version of that model to the West and calling it generosity was itself a failure of imagination, not an act of it. What the West was owed, and still is, is something bigger than a relocated brand: a genuinely broad cultural institution combining a proper art museum, a contemporary gallery, and space for the full range of what culture actually looks like now - built on its own terms, in a building that already has some claim to greatness, rather than assembled as an afterthought to a property rort. Times have moved on and this is a chance to build a genuine contemporary cultural institution, third time lucky after the abysmal failure of the Sydney Modern extension of the Art Gallery of NSW and the looming Powerhouse Parramatta embarrassment.

So: restore the Powerhouse at Ultimo, on its own site, properly funded, and stop treating that as some sentimental or reactionary demand - it’s the cheapest and most straightforward part of the whole equation. Treat the Parramatta building, once it opens, as what it is, an expensive mistake, not a monument to be defended out of embarrassment, and be willing to sell or repurpose it rather than propping it up because too much has already been spent to admit otherwise. And put the money that’s left, along with whatever the Parramatta site eventually returns, into Coombes Drive: buy the block, expand the building, build the institution Western Sydney was actually promised in 2015.

Who did this, and why

The honest answer is that more than one motive was operating, and they weren’t in competition with each other. There’s a straightforward profit-capture story, a valuable inner-city site adjoining some of the largest redevelopment zones in the country, freed up for sale under cultural cover, which is precisely what Lindsay Sharp and a string of 2016 inquiry submissions argued at the time. There’s an equally plausible electoral-timing story, an announcement made before a state election, before a business case, before even a confirmed site. That looks a great deal like a desperate Western Sydney vote grabbing press release that a museum plan was built around afterwards, rather than a thought out cultural policy. And there’s a third story, less conspiratorial and in some ways more damning: plain institutional momentum. Once close to a billion dollars had been committed and an international design competition run, no government, Coalition or Labor, found it politically survivable to admit the whole thing had been a mistake, however clearly the evidence said so. It is the sunk cost fallacy enacted on an enormous scale.

That last point is why it matters that this wasn’t Labor’s idea to begin with. The Baird government announced it, Berejiklian and Perrottet carried it forward with Harwin like Toad of Toad Hall in the drivers seat. The Minns government elected in 2023 inherited it with its own Pyrmont/Ultimo branch having passed a motion demanding exactly the reversal the party then declined to deliver in office. That’s not evidence of a single villain or a single corrupt transaction, it’s something more familiar and in some ways harder to fix, a decision that outgrew any one government’s willingness to be the one that admitted it was wrong. Bureaucracies protect their own momentum. Sunk cost becomes its own political constituency. Nobody has to be venal for that to happen; they just have to find it easier to keep going than to stop.

Undoing it doesn’t require a royal commission. It requires the same thing the original demand for cultural investment in the West always required: somebody in government willing to look at what actually serves people, rather than what’s already been announced, and to admit that a building at Coombes Drive, sitting there since 1976, was always the better answer than the one they gave us.

In fact selling Powerhouse Parramatta and putting the proceeds into restoring the Powerhouse and and developing the Torin Factory and its surrounding block would be an enormous win/win for a visionary government and they might even come out of it with a profit. And finally the West might get a good bit of the infrastructure it definitely needs and still won’t be getting after years of drama around the Powerhouse Parramatta.

“Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” - Paul Gauguin

It says a lot that the first and only exhibition of the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (KSCA) is a ten year retrospective of work that has all happened outside the conventional exhibition based art world. Called The Art of Adaptation: Culture Changes Everywhere it finishes on August 2 at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, having first been seen at Manly Museum and Art Gallery.

How on earth did we get here? When I look at KSCA and what it’s done over the last decade, and the fact that it exists at all, I’m amazed that what began as an offhand remark on a poster has grown into something so extraordinary. Although I get a lot of credit for it, I definitely do not deserve it because almost all of the work has been done by other people. It would never have gone beyond my poster without them. And yet that in itself illustrates the whole underlying philosophy - or rather the science, almost - of what happened. Just as human beings descend from a Devonian bug 400 million years ago, so KSCA has grown from a few words on a fiction presented as fact at Cementa13.

It’s not as if artist collectives are particularly novel. In fact artist collaborations are now common, but actual groups that sustain themselves over time are comparatively rare. One of the few that comes to mind is the Art & Language collective that emerged in Britain in the late 1960s, with a New York branch thriving briefly in the early 1970s before its dissolution in 1977. Art & Language barely lasted as long as KSCA has managed to last, and it was racked with conflicts - ideological disputes, factional battles, the usual casualties of vanguardist conceptualism running headlong into the contradictions of collective practice. KSCA, by contrast, has had members come and go but continues on nonetheless. That’s why I call this the ten-year introspective rather than retrospective. We need to ask: what made it work and what hasn’t worked? Or rather, what things have we yet to achieve?

1. Organic Growth and the Death of the Heroic Artist

The reason KSCA avoided the factional warfare that destroyed Art & Language and similar conceptual collectives is precisely because we never had long-term goals in the conventional sense, no manifesto demanding theoretical purity, no vanguard position to defend. Like everything we’re about, cultural adaptation means we’re constantly adapting to circumstances, and over these ten years circumstances have changed enormously, both for individuals and socially. KSCA grew without a singular visionary - despite what the origin story might suggest - and without rigid programmatic goals. This model of collaborative, non-hierarchical cultural production differs fundamentally from the conceptualist collectives of the 1970s, which for all their radical rhetoric often replicated the authoritarian structures they claimed to oppose.

The institutional art world loves the myth of the heroic individual artist, because that’s what makes for marketable brands and speculative commodities. But KSCA operates on a different principle altogether: the artist as one skill set among many, embedded in communities where expertise is distributed rather than concentrated in anointed genius. When Gilbert Grace proposed manifesting my fictional projects from the Cementa13 poster, and when Alex Wisser’s desire to establish a land-based residency meshed with those fictions, and when other artists and writers piled on board, what emerged was genuinely collaborative - not in the tokenistic sense of “community consultation” that the art world likes to perform, but in the sense that no single person controlled the direction or owned the outcomes. This is precisely why it has survived. The institutional definition of art - it’s art because we say so, because we can exhibit it, because it fits our business model - simply doesn’t apply when you’re working with farmers on hydrology projects or running workshops on biochar with communities experimenting with carbon sequestration.

2. Practice Before Theory: Acting Without Permission

“Often, people act without reading the relevant texts.” - Franco “Bifo” Berardi

Bifo Berardi’s droll observation has particular resonance for what KSCA has been doing. It challenges the vanguardist assumption that theory must precede action, that working-class self-activity or any form of cultural intervention requires intellectual authorisation from the academy or the art world. Berardi suggests that practice can emerge organically from material conditions without requiring theoretical literacy, and this aligns precisely with autonomist Marxist and anarchist traditions that privilege collective action and material conditions over theoretical correctness.

KSCA members, myself included, tend to do both theory and practice, but we do practice first and then theorise about it afterwards. We explain it and analyse it after we’ve done it. This isn’t anti-intellectualism - far from it. It’s a recognition that real-world effectiveness matters more than art world validation. When we worked with Ruy Anaya de la Rosa from Biochar 4 Sustainable Soils, or when we staged the Capertee Valley Hydrology Project, or when Laura Fisher and Lucas Ihlein ran Land Studio camps bringing together artists, farmers, catchment coordinators, and academics, we weren’t implementing a predetermined theoretical framework. We were responding to actual conditions, actual people, actual landscapes. The theory emerged from reflection on what worked and what didn’t, not as a blueprint handed down from above.

This is fundamentally at odds with how the institutional art world operates, particularly the Australian art world that forever has one eye on the centre of imperial power, wherever that may be at the time. The art world demands that you explain your practice in advance, that you provide the intellectual justification before you’re granted permission to act, and you must act within a template of colonial culture. But KSCA has thrived precisely because we had almost no future plans and didn’t know where we were going. We responded intuitively to opportunities and obstacles, adapted to changing circumstances, learned from failures. The observation that people “act without reading the relevant texts” becomes, in this context, a defence of ad hoc self-activity and cultural production that doesn’t wait for institutional authorisation. It’s art as verb, not noun.

3. Prefiguring the Future: Cultural Adaptation in Cataclysmic Times

I don’t think anyone in 2013 conceived of a world like it is now. It didn’t seem possible. And yet we are looking at a world in which the United States may well not exist in a few more years, in which all of the major institutions of western culture face threats of some sort or another - the United Nations, the EU, you name it, everything is showing difficulties of some sort. We are in one of those cataclysmic moments of human history, a bit like the end of the Second World War where a totally different configuration of the world is in the process of coming about.

I would argue that groups like KSCA prefigure that in many ways while also echoing a deep human past of anarchist collectivism and mutual aid described by Dave Graeber, in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, as making up most of human history. We don’t set out to be prophetic, but I think we are reacting to conditions which we are sensing just a bit ahead of everybody else. I don’t want to mystify that, because it just seems to us to be naturally doing what we’re doing. And yet we are now engaged in a type of cultural production which covers a hugely broader range of human activities than conventional art has covered in the past. When Lucas Ihlein and Kim Williams worked with sugarcane farmers, Yuwibara custodians, and Australian South Sea Islanders in Mackay on Sugar vs the Reef? (2014-2019), they were operating in territories that the art world barely acknowledges exist. When Diego Bonetto conducts foraging tours and creates wild food maps, he’s not making objects for exhibition and sale; he’s intervening directly in how urban communities understand their relationship to landscape and food systems. When Erika Watson creates Grazing Blankets or Leanne Thompson creates Weaving Water, they are teaching landscape literacy at a micro and intimate level, building knowledge that expands to daily choices and practices across urban areas or greater landscape management tools.

This expanded definition of art - taking its lead from Donald Brook’s observation that creative and experimental acts have been occurring far longer than the institutions that currently define art - is what allows KSCA to adapt to catastrophic times. We’re not waiting for the museum to validate what we do. We’re working with the people and communities who are already adapting, already experimenting with regenerative agriculture, already trying to repair damaged hydrological systems, already figuring out how to live in a world where the old certainties have collapsed.

4. Beyond the Gallery: The Real Audience

KSCA engages in cultural production that spans a far broader range of human activities than conventional art practice, and we’ve been driven to create a set of different social conditions to support this work. Once you step outside the art world echo chamber, it becomes clear that it’s just another segment of the mass audience. Like all audience segments, it has its own expectations, preferred behaviours, and privileged forms of coded communication, but essentially it’s become a status-enhancing form of entertainment. Seen in that way, there’s nothing special about making art objects and exhibitions; they’re simply a niche form for a very small audience of collector-speculators whose attitudes in Australia tend to be narrow and conservative.

Other easily defined audiences - farmers, regional communities, environmental activists, people interested in permaculture or natural sequence farming - are enormous by comparison and organised in politically effective ways. When Cementa stages its biennial festival in Kandos, it’s not primarily addressing the Sydney or Melbourne art world (though they come). It’s addressing the community of Kandos itself, the broader regional context of the Central West of NSW, and the networks of people across Australia who are interested in what happens when contemporary art culture engages with real-world contexts beyond the gallery.

The Cementa festival, which emerged alongside KSCA and shares many of the same people and principles, has given over 240 artists the opportunity to explore socially engaged forms over six iterations. This isn’t community art in the patronising sense that the arts funding bodies understand it - bringing high culture to the regions, civilising the provinces. It’s something closer to what happened in the Green Bans movement in the 1970s: artists working as equals alongside people with other forms of expertise, towards outcomes that matter in material terms, not just symbolic ones. When you’re working on hydrology or soil carbon or heritage conservation or food systems, the effectiveness of your intervention is measurable. Either the water flows differently, or it doesn’t. Either the soil carbon increases, or it doesn’t. Either the heritage is protected, or it’s bulldozed.

5. Intuition, Uncertainty, and the Long Game

“No one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going.” - Oliver Cromwell

Echoing Cromwell’s paradox KSCA has thrived without predetermined destinations. This isn’t the same as lacking direction. It’s a recognition that in times of rapid change, rigid planning is a liability. Intuition functions as a generative force rather than a limitation. We sense what needs doing, we do it, we reflect on the results, we adapt. This is cultural adaptation in practice, not as metaphor.

The alternative - the institutional model - requires that you know in advance what you’re going to make, why you’re going to make it, who it’s for, and how it will be exhibited, distributed, and commodified. You need to write the grant application, provide the supporting documentation, demonstrate the outcomes in measurable terms that fit bureaucratic frameworks. All of this kills exactly the kind of adaptive, responsive, experimental practice that KSCA represents. By operating largely outside those frameworks (though not entirely - we’re pragmatists, not purists, and we’ll take the money when it’s available and useful), we’ve maintained the freedom to follow our intuitions, to make mistakes, to change direction when circumstances change.

Over ten years, this has meant that KSCA has become something none of us could have predicted from that original poster. It’s become a network, a set of relationships, a way of working, a repository of knowledge and experience. It’s become, in effect, what Donald Brook might have called a cultural seed bank - preserving and propagating memes for cultural adaptation that the institutional art world has no interest in preserving because they don’t fit the exhibition-and-sale business model.

Conclusion: Building Resilient Cultural Infrastructures

So what can KSCA’s first decade teach us about building resilient, adaptive cultural infrastructures for an uncertain future? First, that resilience comes from distribution, not concentration. KSCA survives because it’s not dependent on any single institution, any single funding source, any single heroic individual. Second, that adaptation requires experimentation, and experimentation requires permission to fail. The institutional art world punishes failure; KSCA learns from it. Third, that effectiveness matters more than validation. We’re not waiting for the museum to tell us our work is important. We’re working with communities who tell us whether what we do is useful or not.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, that the role of the artist in times of crisis is not to make beautiful objects for contemplation, but to participate in the urgent work of cultural adaptation - to help communities imagine and enact different ways of living, different relationships to land and water and each other. This has been my argument since the early 1970s, and KSCA is one of the most successful examples I’ve seen of what it looks like in practice. Not because I invented it - I didn’t - but because a group of people took a fiction seriously enough to make it real, and then kept making it real through a decade of extraordinary change. That’s not prophecy. That’s just paying attention, and doing the work.

The great ideological trick of capitalism is to turn accident into virtue. It takes luck and rewrites it as a character trait. A person ends up with ten billion dollars and we are asked to believe that this sum is evidence of brilliance, discipline, vision, courage, or some superior human substance. The fact of accumulation is presented as proof of deservingness. The pile itself becomes the argument. Yet if we step back from the mythology and look at how fortunes actually form, the story is much less heroic and much more geological.

Billionaires do not produce their wealth in the simple, moralised way they claim. Their fortunes accumulate through vast convergences of luck, infrastructure, law, labour, extraction, monopoly, inheritance, timing, and social cooperation. In that sense they are less like creators than like sites. They are deposits.

This is not a metaphor designed merely to provoke. It is a way of seeing more accurately. Gold seams, iron ore bodies, gas fields, and coal deposits are concentrations of value formed by natural processes over time. No prospector creates the ore. No mining executive makes the mineral deposit. At most they discover, claim, organise extraction, and try to secure legal title. Their skill may affect the pace and form of removal, but the underlying resource exists prior to them and independently of them. The value is there because of long processes in which they played no part. That is much closer to the truth about billionaire wealth than the fairy tale of the self-made man.

Take any modern fortune and strip away the vanity attached to it. What remains? Not an isolated individual making value ex nihilo, but a dense social field. There are workers whose labour actually builds, ships, cleans, drives, codes, assembles, teaches, repairs, and maintains the world in which profit can be extracted. There is public infrastructure paid for collectively – roads, ports, rail, electricity grids, sewerage, telecommunications networks, courts, schools, universities, and hospitals. There are legal systems enforcing contracts and property claims. There are publicly funded research systems producing the science and technology on which private platforms and industries feed. There are colonial seizures of land, historical expropriations, cheapened nature, fossil energy, and the unpaid or underpaid reproductive labour that makes wage labour possible in the first place. There are markets constituted by states, consumers educated by public systems, and a social peace often purchased by generations of struggle from below. None of this is made by the billionaire, yet none of their fortune can exist without it.

The billionaire arrives late and claims all the credit for himself. I’m sure you know the type, you may even have had the misfortune to work with someone like that.

The mythology of entrepreneurial genius depends on a fraudulent narrowing of vision. It asks us to stare only at the owner at the top of the chain and ignore the chain itself. If a tech billionaire becomes obscenely rich, we are directed to admire disruption, innovation, appetite for risk. We are not invited to consider the publicly funded internet, state-backed research, generations of collective technical knowledge, mineral extraction for hardware, global supply chains disciplined by brutal labour conditions, or the armies of workers moderating content, packing orders, cleaning offices, and transporting goods. If a property billionaire appears, we hear about acumen and foresight, not zoning decisions, transport systems, publicly created land values, migrant labour, tax concessions, planning corruption, or the simple brute fact that land is finite and socially necessary. If a mining billionaire grows rich, the absurdity becomes even clearer. Here we have the most literal version of wealth as deposit, yet even there the ideology insists on personal greatness rather than asking why private individuals should control what lies in the ground at all. It’s rather like a real estate agent selling your house and keeping almost all the money, paying you just a few percent commission.

Fortunes accumulate where conditions allow them to accumulate. That is the point. The person is not the source but the attachment point. Billionaires are nodal phenomena in larger systems of appropriation. Their talent, where it exists, lies less in creation than in capture. They occupy a strategic place in the circuitry of value and secure a legal and cultural story that allows them to siphon off an outrageous share of what everyone else makes possible. It is like arriving at a goldfield with armed surveyors, a compliant state, and a propaganda machine, then declaring that the gold is proof of your character.

The language of meritocracy exists to protect this fraud. Meritocracy is useful not because it explains reality but because it moralises inequality. It transforms structural advantage into personal desert. The child born into capital, elite education, useful networks, and social confidence is retroactively described as excellent. The person who happens to found a platform at the exact moment broadband, venture capital, cheap computing, and deregulated global finance converge is declared a visionary. The one who speculates successfully during privatisation, housing inflation, or a resources boom is called disciplined. Failure, meanwhile, is assigned to the moral deficiencies of those who had less room to move. Meritocracy is simply theology for a market society that wants to pretend its winners are chosen by justice rather than by the normal operations of class power and contingency.

Luck is not incidental to extreme wealth. It is fundamentally what it is. The timing of a birth, the location of a family, the health of a body, the absence of catastrophe, access to education, the historical moment of a boom, the random encounter with an investor, the accident of regulation, the failure of competitors, the existence of a pliant labour force, the inheritance of assets, the receipt of good press, the immunities granted by race, class, gender, or nationality – all of these shape the field in which accumulation occurs. No honest account of billionaire wealth can exclude them. The richer the fortune, the more absurd it becomes to explain it by personal exertion alone. Plenty of people work hard. Plenty are intelligent. Plenty take risks. Very few become billionaires. The difference is not moral superiority. It is inheriting a position in a system structured to deliver extraordinary rewards to a tiny minority under very specific conditions.

Once we understand this, the analogy with mineral deposits stops seeming extravagant and starts seeming inadequate only because billionaire fortunes are, in one sense, even less legitimately private than ore bodies. A mineral deposit is at least physically localised. A fortune, by contrast, is accumulated social power drawn from everywhere. It condenses the labour of millions, the contributions of generations, the stability produced by public institutions, and the wealth of ecosystems treated as free inputs and free sinks. It is a crystallisation of collective life in monetary form. To say that such a concentration belongs absolutely to the individual who currently commands it is not only economically false but politically obscene.

If that is so, then the consequences follow. Extreme wealth should be treated as a public resource. Not metaphorically, not sentimentally, but institutionally. We already understand, in principle, that certain concentrations of value cannot be left to unrestricted private ownership. Water systems, mineral reserves, energy grids, and critical infrastructure are too consequential. They shape the life chances of everyone and the ongoing failures of privatisation demonstrate once and for all the necessity of public ownership of critical systems. The same is true of giant fortunes. A billionaire fortune is not a private trinket or lifestyle preference. It is command over labour, land, housing, media, politics, culture, food systems, logistics, and technological development. It distorts democracy simply by existing. It allows private whim to overrule public need. It buys newspapers, parties, think tanks, universities, urban form, and collective attention. It functions as a rival sovereignty.

So it should be socialised.

This does not require the melodrama that defenders of wealth always invent. It requires clarity about what is already the case. If a mineral deposit is subject to licences, royalties, environmental controls, and public claims, then a billionaire fortune should be treated similarly, though in more stringent form because the underlying resource here is social labour itself. The holder of the fortune might receive a capped commission, a managed allowance, or some limited form of compensation for administrative contribution, much as landholders or rights-holders may receive royalties from extraction. But they should not enjoy dynastic command over wealth they did not personally create and could never have created alone.

One can object that this would punish success. But success at what? At organising production? At taking advantage of market structures? At securing monopoly position? At lobbying for favourable rules? At inheriting? At branding oneself as indispensable while others do the work? Even where there is genuine initiative, why should that justify permanent private ownership of a socially generated surplus on a scale large enough to subordinate entire populations? The jump from contribution to absolute entitlement is precisely the ideological sleight of hand that must be broken.

One can also object that without the lure of immense wealth innovation would cease. This is one of capitalism’s laziest superstitions. Human beings made art, tools, science, agriculture, cities, navigation systems, and political movements long before the invention of venture capital mythology. Most useful work is not driven by the prospect of becoming a billionaire. Teachers do not teach for it. Nurses do not nurse for it. Writers do not write for it. Engineers, carers, builders, farmers, and researchers mostly operate within systems of obligation, curiosity, skill, necessity, and social recognition. Innovation depends on material support, free time, education, collaboration, and shared infrastructures. Extreme wealth often hinders rather than helps, because it diverts talent toward speculation, monopoly, surveillance, advertising, tax avoidance, and the enclosure of common knowledge.

The deeper issue is democratic. A society cannot claim to believe in political equality while tolerating private concentrations of wealth so large that they function as alternative governments. Every billionaire is a standing constitutional crisis. Their existence means that some people possess vastly greater effective rights than others – the right to shape public debate, the right to evade ordinary constraints, the right to purchase expertise, the right to survive mistakes that would destroy everyone else, the right to turn private preferences into public realities. This is not a regrettable side effect of prosperity. It is oligarchy.

Redistribution, then, is not theft. It is not even best understood as generosity. It is more like disaster recovery. It is the return of social wealth to social use. The conventional language of taxation is too mild for the scale of the issue. Tax can skim the edges while leaving the commanding heights intact. What is required is ongoing structural redistribution – steep wealth caps, public funds built from private fortunes, democratic control over key sectors, inheritance limits, social ownership mechanisms, and institutions that continuously return accumulated surplus to housing, healthcare, education, climate repair, the arts, transport, and the material conditions of collective autonomy.

This is not a technical question alone. It is a question of what sort of society we think we live in. If we accept the billionaire as natural, then we also accept the underfunded hospital, the impossible rent, the collapsing school, the privatised utility, the gutted public broadcaster, the exhausted worker, and the burnt landscape as natural. We accept organised deprivation alongside grotesque excess and pretend that both are products of fairness. But if wealth is publicly produced, then poverty is politically imposed. The billionaire and the homeless person are not opposite outcomes of merit. They are linked outcomes of the same system of capture.

That system survives because it has a massive media operation that colonises “common sense”. It teaches people to admire accumulation even when accumulation is plainly built from their own dispossession. It invites workers to identify with owners, tenants with landlords, debtors with creditors, the governed with the hoarders of power. Breaking that spell requires more than resentment. It requires a change in description. Billionaires are not titans. They are deposits. Their fortunes are not sacred extensions of the self. They are concentrated social minerals, formed by impersonal and collective processes, then fenced off by law and flattery.

And once we see that, the conclusion is straightforward. We should treat great fortunes as we would treat any resource essential to collective life. We should survey them, regulate them, extract from them, socialise them, and use them according to democratically determined need. The current holders may be permitted a modest royalty if that soothes the transition, but their claim to sovereign possession should be rejected absolutely. No one makes a billion dollars. A social order makes it, then allows someone to keep it.

The task is not to plead with the rich to behave better. It is to abolish the conditions under which accidental concentrations of social power can masquerade as personal virtue. Wealth comes from all of us. It should return to all of us. That is not envy, it is simply political geology.

“Creative” has become one of the most misused words of our times.

When people say “creative” they almost always mean something the art world has trained them to mean: a special class of object, made by a special class of person, validated by a special class of institution. It is a marketing category. The class nature of this definition was the insight underlying my essay New Artist written for the National Gallery of Victoria’s 1973 exhibition Object & Idea. The word had been captured by an industry whose real business is producing scarcity and status, and the capture has been so complete that we now struggle to see creativity where it actually happens - in the endless, collective, mostly anonymous work of changing how we live.

This insight was at the beginning of what was ultimately called social practice and eventually led to the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation whose tenth anniversary is being celebrated in an exhibition that has just moved from Manly Museum to the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre.

Strip away the mystification and creativity is simply cultural adaptation. A culture is a set of tools, habits, stories and techniques for surviving in a particular place at a particular time. When conditions change - and they always change - someone has to invent the adjustment. The people who do that inventing are the real artists, whether or not they ever go near a gallery. P.A. Yeomans, the Australian engineer who developed keyline design, reshaped the way land could hold water and fertility; he changed the way people see and use landscape more profoundly than any painter of it. That is a creative act of the first order, and the fact that our institutions have no way of recognising it tells you everything about what those institutions actually value.

Is creative different to adaptive? The honest answer is that it isn’t. The distinction is ideological. The art market needs novelty severed from function - novelty as pure positional good, something to collect and speculate on. Adaptation is novelty with a job to do. The moment an invention is useful, embedded in ordinary life, taken up by communities and modified by them, it stops being legible as “art” and becomes invisible. The most successful creative work disappears into culture. The least successful hangs on a wall.

Consider repair, which is probably the most genuinely creative act most people ever perform. To repair something you must understand it, not as the marketing department presents it but as it actually is, as material, structure and function. You have to diagnose, improvise, substitute, redesign on the fly with whatever is to hand, whether it’s old machinery or a wedding dress that has been handed down through generations. The person who keeps a forty-year-old tractor running knows that machine more intimately than the engineers who drew it, because they know it in time, through every failure. Repair is applied criticism: it finds the weak point, the bad weld, the corner the manufacturer cut, and answers it. That is why manufacturers hate it. An economy built on planned obsolescence has to criminalise this kind of intelligence, and it has tried - through glued-shut casings, proprietary fasteners, software locks, warranty threats.

The right-to-repair movement is not a consumer hobby, it is a struggle over who is permitted to be creative: the corporation, once, at the point of sale, or the community, continuously, for the life of the object. Every repair café, every shed full of salvaged parts, every grandmother’s mending basket is a small assertion that the answer is the community. It is worth noticing that this knowledge was never lost among the poor. Mending, making do, cannibalising one machine to keep another alive - these were dismissed as the shameful marks of poverty precisely when the economy needed everyone to buy new. They are about to be revalued as the essential skills of the century, and the people who kept them alive deserve to be recognised as the custodians they always were.

The same logic scales up to buildings, streets and whole districts, which is where heritage comes in although heritage is a word almost as damaged as creative. Officially it means a list, a plaque, a facade preserved in aspic while everything behind it is gutted for profit. That version of heritage is the art market’s logic applied to architecture: the building as isolated object, valued for rarity and provenance, severed from use. Real heritage is something else entirely. It is the accumulated adaptive intelligence of everyone who ever built, altered, extended and inhabited a place, a record of solutions to the problems of a particular climate, economy and community. A shearing shed, a corner pub, a row of workers’ cottages: these encode generations of decisions about ventilation, materials, sociability and work. To keep them in use is not nostalgia, it is refusing to throw away the answers and the embodied energy.

Australia learned this lesson from an unexpected direction. When the NSW Builders Labourers Federation imposed its green bans in the early 1970s, refusing to demolish The Rocks, Kelly’s Bush and dozens of other places, it was construction workers - not architects, not the National Trust in its polite bourgeois niceness, and certainly not the art world - who articulated the most sophisticated cultural position in the country: that the people who build and inhabit a city have a right to decide what it becomes, and that a livable environment matters more than a developer’s balance sheet. Working in alliance with resident action groups, the union effectively invented modern urban environmentalism. It was among the most consequential creative acts in Australian history, and it was performed collectively, by labourers, as an exercise of solidarity. No prize was awarded. None was needed.

Adaptive reuse is heritage in its active, creative mode. The woolstore that becomes housing, the power station that becomes a museum, the church that becomes a childcare centre - each is a negotiation between what a structure was and what a community now needs, and it demands more invention than a greenfield build, not less, because the constraints are real and cannot be bulldozed. It is also the only defensible way to build in a warming world. Every existing building is a store of embodied energy and carbon already spent; demolition throws that away and spends it all again. The greenest building, as the saying goes, is the one already standing. Yet our tax settings, depreciation schedules and planning systems still reward knocking things down, because the growth economy books demolition and reconstruction as two lots of GDP and books careful adaptation as almost nothing. The accounting is the ideology.

Which brings us to maintenance, because adaptation is not an event, it is a process. Nothing stays adapted. Soil has to be built continuously, software patched, seed saved, skills passed on, relationships repaired. Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the artist in residence at New York Sanitation Department for over fifty years saw this long ago: after the revolution, someone has to pick up the garbage on Monday morning. Maintenance is the creative act in its ongoing tense, and Ukeles’ insight was explicitly gender politics. Culture divides labour into innovation and development - heroic, male-coded, celebrated, the thrusting avant-garde gesture, the attention grabbing ribbon-cutting - or maintenance and care, coded feminine and therefore treated as no work at all. The trick was performed centuries ago: define the sustaining of life as women’s nature rather than women’s labour, extract it unpaid in the household, and the habit of not counting it follows the work wherever it goes. So when maintenance is waged - cleaning, nursing, aged care, childcare, early education - it drags the discount with it, classified as unskilled precisely because women were once assumed to do it for free. The pandemic made the inversion impossible to miss: the workers declared essential, the ones whose absence stops a society within days, disproportionately women and migrants, turned out to be among the worst paid in it. They were applauded from balconies and then again shortchanged in every pay case since.

Meanwhile the highest incomes flow to those who maintain nothing, who speculate on assets other people build, clean and repair. A rational society would rank its maintainers - of bodies, of children, of country, of soil, of infrastructure - among its most valued members and pay them accordingly; ours ranks them last and calls the ranking meritocracy. The hierarchy that puts the gallery artist above the carer, the repairer, the maintainer is the same hierarchy that puts speculation above production, ownership above labour, and men’s work above women’s. It is one system of value, applied consistently, and it is wrong at every level.

Follow the argument to its end and it arrives at economics. A growth economy is structurally hostile to repair, reuse and maintenance because it is measured by throughput: extract, manufacture, sell, discard, repeat. Obsolescence is not a defect of that system, it is the engine. But on a finite planet the throughput economy has a terminus, and we can now see it from here. What replaces it - willingly or otherwise - is a circular economy: one in which materials cycle rather than flow to landfill, in which durability is designed in rather than engineered out, and in which prosperity is measured by how well things and people are sustained rather than by how fast they are replaced. Call it steady-state, call it degrowth, call it sufficiency; the label matters less than the recognition that quantitative expansion must end while qualitative development continues.

And here is the point: a circular, no-growth economy is a maintenance economy, and a maintenance economy runs on exactly the forms of creativity this essay has been describing. Its central workers are the repairers, the retrofitters, the re-manufacturers, the fixers of soil and rivers and buildings and machines. Its heritage practice is universal adaptive reuse. Its design brief is longevity, repairability and eventual disassembly. None of this is austerity. Ending growth in material throughput does not mean ending growth in skill, knowledge, care, culture or pleasure. Those can expand indefinitely, because they cycle rather than deplete. The so-called creative industries, meanwhile, remain largely an appendage of marketing, employed to manufacture the dissatisfaction and self hatred that keeps consumption moving. The genuinely creative work of the next fifty years is the design and construction of the circular economy itself: the largest collective artwork any culture has attempted, made by millions of hands, most of them unacknowledged.

If we are serious about the century we are actually in, we need to rebuild the meaning of the word. Creativity is not self-expression for sale. It is the collective capacity of communities to imagine new ways of living, to implement them, and then, crucially, to maintain them. The imagining gets the applause. But it is the repairing, the reusing and the maintaining that will keep us alive. An economy that finally learns to count them as wealth is the adaptation everything else depends on.

The relentless ramping up of security hysteria continues, calculated to distract us from real crises like Zionist genocide in Palestine on one hand or government inaction on living standards on the other. Just as no aspect of life is now untouched by neoliberal financialisation, so too increasingly no aspect is untouched by securitisation. The general population must now be kept in a permanent state of alarm and low level harassment.

In a move that is essentially the privatisation of political surveillance, buying or selling a home in Australia now passes through a machinery most people didn’t know was being built. The “Tranche 2” amendments to the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act took effect on 1 July 2026, and with them around 80,000 new businesses - lawyers, accountants, conveyancers, real estate agents, and dealers in precious metals and stones - become AUSTRAC reporting entities for the first time. It is one of the largest expansions of the regime since it began in 2006. Your agent must now identify and verify you, establish your source of funds, and - with no monetary threshold and within three business days, or 24 hours where terrorism financing is suspected - file a report on you if something feels off.

The official story is tidy. Property is one of the most common vehicles for money laundering in Australia, these professions are “gatekeepers,” and Australia was one of the last FATF hold-outs yet to regulate them. All of that is true. Dirty money does move through real estate, and the reform closes a gap the sector exploited for two decades. A left critique that pretended otherwise would be dishonest.

But notice what the reform actually installs, and ask the harder question: does the machine do the thing it claims to?

The most rigorous answer we have is damning. The financial-crime scholar Ronald Pol, reviewing the global system, found that anti-money laundering enforcement has less than 0.1 percent impact on criminal finances, while compliance costs exceed the criminal funds recovered by more than a hundred times over. Authorities intercept roughly $3 billion of an estimated $3 trillion in criminal funds generated annually, at a compliance cost of some $300 billion. Pol’s conclusion is worth sitting with: if the system recovers so little while costing so much, it is reasonable to ask whether the real target is legitimate enterprise rather than criminal enterprise. He called it, not idly, the world’s least effective policy experiment.

So if the ostensible purpose barely registers, what is being produced instead? Infrastructure. A permanent, expanding architecture of identification, monitoring, and suspicion attached to everyday economic life. This is what critical security scholars call securitisation, and its signature move is precisely this creep. The amorphous, undefined boundaries of “terror” and “security” turn exceptional measures into the rule of everyday life; measures introduced as responses to extraordinary events become normalised even where their effectiveness is disputed. The “counter-terrorism financing” label does enormous work here. There is no serious claim that first-home buyers in the western suburbs are financing terrorism. Yet the terrorism framing with its emergency logic, its shortened reporting clocks, its aura of unquestionable necessity, is the wrapper that makes routine financial surveillance feel not just acceptable but overdue. The threat is invoked to justify an apparatus that then operates overwhelmingly on the ordinary.

And the apparatus does not fall evenly. This is where a community-based lens matters most. The same counter-terror-financing standards that produced this expansion have, globally, driven “de-risking” where banks place whole customer categories under routine surveillance and drop those no longer within their “risk appetite.” The consequences land on the least powerful: NGOs, charities, and civil-society groups pushed toward financial exclusion, and, as the critical-security literature documents, racialised and Muslim communities made the hyper-visible target of state suspicion, with ordinary spaces reworked into sites of monitoring. Risk-based policing has a way of displacing risk onto marginal groups while its effectiveness against actual threats remains questionable.

There is also a straightforward political economy to it. A system that recovers almost nothing but costs hundreds of billions is not a failure to everyone, it is a market. A vast compliance industry of software vendors, consultants, and screening platforms now sells services to those 80,000 newly captured firms, and the cost flows downstream to every buyer and seller as a new transactional toll. This is the neoliberal pattern in miniature: an activity that was once simply done - helping someone buy a home - is converted into a regulated, data-generating, rent-extracting process. Every transaction becomes a site of identity capture and compliance expenditure. The security rationale and the monetisation are not in tension; the first legitimates the second.

None of this means “do nothing.” Illicit wealth parked in housing is real, and it is part of what prices ordinary people out of shelter - a genuine community harm. The left objection is not to scrutinising the powerful; it is that these systems are built to scrutinise everyone while the largest flows, structured by the very professionals now nominally deputised, keep moving.

The question to keep asking, as this regime beds in, is the oldest one in policing: who is actually being watched, and who is not. Why are some financial transactions under surveillance but not others? If they can see ours, why can’t we see theirs? Why can’t we move to a system like that in Norway where all income tax returns are open to public scrutiny? Now that would be an interesting reform because, as I’m sure ASIO is arguing for the current changes, why do you need privacy if you have nothing to hide?

I’m not prone to writing submissions to Royal Commissions - although I was once dragged before a Royal Commission into organised crime because of my union links - but these are strange times. A submission like this is a literary form in itself so I used AI to assemble and distil my copious notes into the correct formal structure, while relishing the irony that I’m addressing a Royal Commissioner that I once shared a house with.

1. Who I Am

My name is Ian Milliss. I am an Australian artist who has worked in this country since the 1960s. I am not Jewish. I make this submission as a non-Jewish Australian with a long personal relationship with members of the Jewish community, and with deep concern about what this Commission is and is not being asked to hear.

I make this submission in the knowledge that anyone who has experienced or witnessed antisemitic conduct, or has views on antisemitism and social cohesion in Australia, may make a submission — regardless of whether you are Jewish, from another community, an organisation, a friend or an observer. I exercise that right.

2. My Personal History With Jewish Australia

When I arrived in the Australian art world in the 1960s, the people who were most generous to me — who opened doors, offered encouragement, and took a young artist seriously — were very often migrants: post-war refugees and economic migrants, and many of them were Jewish. Some had survived the Nazi death camps. I remember, with a horror I have never lost, the occasional glimpse of tattooed numbers on their wrists. Yet these people were invariably warm, kind, and profoundly supportive. I will be grateful to them for the rest of my life.

These men and women were not passive survivors. They were builders. They were central to establishing cultural organisations across Australia and were a genuine vanguard of modernism in this country. They were vital to transforming Australian cultural life — in the visual arts, in music, in literature, in publishing, in architecture — into something that could engage seriously with the world.

I say this so the Commission understands that I hold the Jewish community, and the long history of Jewish contribution to Australian life, in the deepest respect. What I am about to say does not come from hostility. It comes from that same tradition of honest, courageous engagement.

But I am also compelled to say this: those founding figures — many of them shaped by the worst that human hatred can do — would, I believe, be appalled by much of what is being done today in their name and in the name of their community. Their successors in institutional power have taken a tradition of cultural generosity and civic courage and turned it, in significant measure, toward the enforcement of a foreign government’s political interests.

3. A Critical Distinction the Commission Must Make

This Commission must be careful to distinguish between the Jewish community and the policies and actions of the Israeli state. Commissioner Bell herself acknowledged in her opening remarks that criticism of the policies that may be pursued by the government of Israel from time to time is not, of itself, antisemitic. I ask the Commission to hold this distinction firmly throughout its work — not as a courtesy, but as an analytical necessity.

What I have observed is that some of the most powerful Jewish institutional voices in Australia have worked systematically to collapse this distinction — treating any criticism of Israeli government policy, any acknowledgment of Palestinian suffering, any solidarity with those under bombardment, as evidence of antisemitism. This is not a defensible analytical position. It is a political strategy. And it has caused, and is causing, profound damage to Australian social life, to our cultural institutions, and to the livelihoods of Australian artists, journalists and educators.

I ask the Commission to interrogate this phenomenon with the rigour and independence its importance demands, and to hear evidence on it, rather than simply accepting the testimony of peak Jewish bodies at face value.

4. The Evidential Standard of This Commission

The Commission’s terms of reference include assessing the impact of antisemitism on the daily life of Jewish Australians including with respect to security, physical and mental health and wellbeing. This is a legitimate inquiry. But inquiry requires evidence, not only testimony.

A Royal Commission — the highest form of public inquiry in Australia — must ask: what do the data show? What is the actual prevalence of antisemitic incidents? How does it compare with other forms of racially and religiously motivated harassment in Australia? What proportion of reported incidents constitute serious threats, as against low-level offence or the exercise of legitimate political speech?

I am concerned that the evidentiary standard applied so far has been insufficiently rigorous — that feelings and assertions have been treated as established fact, and that the Commission risks becoming a vehicle for political conclusions that are not supported by the evidence. I urge the Commission to hold all testimony, from all communities, to the same standard of proof.

5. The Real Crisis: Moral Injury Across Australian Society

5.1 What Moral Distress and Moral Injury Mean

There is a well-documented psychological phenomenon that this Commission has not been asked to examine, but which is causing profound and measurable harm to millions of Australians. That phenomenon is moral distress, and when it becomes persistent, moral injury.

Researchers at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program have defined moral distress as distress that arises because personal experience disrupts or threatens one’s sense of the goodness of oneself, of others, of institutions, or of higher powers, or one’s beliefs or intuitions about right and wrong, or good and evil. When that distress becomes sufficiently persistent, it constitutes moral injury — a condition now officially recognised as a clinical category by the American Psychiatric Association.

Moral injury has been defined as a trauma-related syndrome caused by the physical, psychological, social and spiritual impact of grievous moral transgressions, or violations, of an individual’s deeply-held moral beliefs due to bearing witness to, or learning about, inhumane acts which result in the pain, suffering or death of others, and which fundamentally challenge the moral integrity of an individual, organisation or community. Prolonged moral distress leads to anxiety, depression, burnout, and severely impaired physical and psychological wellbeing.

5.2 The Scale of Moral Injury in Australia

Millions of Australians are experiencing exactly this. They are bearing daily witness, in real time, to mass civilian casualties, the destruction of hospitals, schools and entire neighbourhoods, the deliberate obstruction of humanitarian aid, and — according to the United Nations — the most severe economic collapse ever recorded in modern data. By 2024, Gaza’s GDP had contracted by 83%, all 2.3 million people had been pushed into poverty, and 70% of all structures had been damaged or destroyed. The UN estimates the crisis has erased 69 years of human development.

Australians are watching this unfold and are simultaneously being told — by institutions, by media, by the framing of this very Commission — that they have no right to feel what they feel. That their grief is antisemitism. That their horror is hate. That their solidarity is extremism. This suppression of legitimate moral response is not a minor social irritant. It is a serious, sustained assault on the psychological wellbeing of a very large number of people.

The scale is not trivial. In August 2025 alone, more than 350,000 Australians took part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations across the country in a single day — with the Sydney Harbour Bridge march attracting up to 300,000 people on 3 August. Australia ranks in the top ten countries globally for the frequency and scale of pro-Palestinian protest since October 2023. To put this in proportion: the entire Jewish population of Australia is approximately 120,000 people — around 0.4% of the population. The number of Australians experiencing moral distress in response to events in Gaza is an order of magnitude greater.

This is not an argument against taking antisemitism seriously. It is an argument that the Commission’s mandate to strengthen social cohesion cannot be fulfilled if it examines only one community’s distress while rendering another’s invisible. The moral injury being suffered by millions of Australians is not less real than fear of antisemitism. It is grounded not in anxiety about what might happen, but in daily confrontation with what is happening.

There is also a critical feedback loop that this Commission must acknowledge: if there has been any measurable increase in antisemitic incidents in Australia since October 2023, a significant part of the explanation lies in the moral fury generated by watching atrocity unfold while being told it is not happening, or does not matter, or that to say so is itself a form of bigotry. Blaming the symptom — heightened communal tension — while refusing to examine the cause does not serve social cohesion. It inflames it.

5.3 The Weaponisation of Cultural Institutions

The Jewish community’s historic contribution to Australian cultural life was built on values of artistic freedom, intellectual independence, and civic courage. It is therefore especially painful to document the ways in which institutional Jewish advocacy has been used — often successfully — to suppress those same values when exercised by others.

The documented cases are numerous and serious. They are not “feelings” or “assertions” — they are matters of court record, public record, and ongoing legal proceedings.

In December 2023, journalist Antoinette Lattouf was dismissed by the ABC after sharing a Human Rights Watch report on Instagram documenting Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. Australia’s Federal Court found in June 2025 that the dismissal was unlawful: the ABC had acted, at least in part, to appease pro-Israel lobbyists who had waged an orchestrated campaign to have her taken off air. The court found her political opinion opposing the Israeli military campaign constituted protected expression under the Fair Work Act. The ABC was ordered to pay $220,000 in total compensation and penalties.

In February 2025, Creative Australia rescinded its commission to Lebanese-Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi to represent Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale, following political and media pressure. The decision caused the immediate resignation of Creative Australia’s board chair and several senior staff. The decision was eventually reversed, but only after significant international embarrassment and lasting damage to Australia’s arts community.

In August 2024, pianist Jayson Gillham had his Melbourne Symphony Orchestra performance cancelled after he introduced a piece dedicated to journalists killed in Gaza. The MSO’s managing director subsequently resigned and former Federal Arts Minister Peter Garrett was appointed to lead an independent review. Gillham’s Federal Court case against the MSO is currently scheduled for final hearing.

The 2026 Biennale of Sydney — Australia’s most prominent international contemporary art event, publicly funded by both the federal and NSW state governments — faced a sustained and coordinated campaign to financially destroy it as punishment for its curatorial direction. The appointment of Hoor al-Qasimi, an internationally respected curator from Sharjah, as creative director provoked over a year of organised opposition from Jewish philanthropists and advocacy groups, on the basis that she had expressed solidarity with Palestinians on social media. Pressure was brought to bear on both levels of government to withdraw public funding entirely. The campaign did not succeed, but the threat it posed — using the leverage of arts philanthropy and political lobbying to financially punish a public institution for hosting non-Israeli, non-Western curatorial perspectives — is precisely the kind of conduct that this Commission should examine as a threat to artistic freedom and social cohesion.

This same period saw the doxxing of over 600 Jewish creatives and academics — itself a serious violation — but the incident arose directly from that group’s own organised campaign to have Lattouf dismissed, and its documented discussion of doxxing and using other ways to target and harm the livelihoods of pro-Palestinian public figures. NSW Police subsequently confirmed that the claim which had helped trigger those discussions — that protesters had chanted “gas the Jews” — was false.

These are only some of the most prominent cases that have include the cancellation of book weeks, the withdrawal of awards and grants, the pulping of books and the imposition of restrictions on applicants. Journalist and editor Nick Feik has written: We’ll never know about the artists, writers and presenters who were silenced, quietly excluded or denied opportunities in the first place. On the other hand, the organised pro-Israel groups backgrounding journalists or haranguing ministers or board members have faced no consequences, despite the chaos they’ve caused.

This is the tradition of those post-war Jewish migrants — the artists, the architects, the musicians, the publishers who helped build Australian culture — being turned against itself. It is being weaponised to silence the very kind of dissent and moral witness that many of those founders embodied. The Commission must name this honestly.

5.4 The Economic Dimension

Moral injury does not exist in a vacuum. It is compounded by the material consequences of the conflict — consequences that are landing directly on Australian households.

Australia’s Treasurer Jim Chalmers warned in April 2026 that Australia will not be spared from the economic shock of the Middle East war, with the IMF revising Australian GDP growth projections downward and the government bracing for higher inflation and slower growth as a direct consequence.

Oxford Economics modelling published in April 2026 found that under a prolonged conflict scenario, the Australian economy could suffer its sharpest quarterly contraction since the 1990s recession, with transport, manufacturing, mining and agriculture most exposed. Commonwealth Bank economists similarly warned of rising fuel costs feeding into headline CPI, with higher energy prices acting as a tax on households and businesses. Westpac modelling suggests even a one-month Strait of Hormuz disruption could raise Australian CPI by approximately one percentage point. Research published in The Conversation found a drawn-out Middle East war could add a further 5% to Australian inflation, affecting the cost of everything from food to construction materials.

When Australians feel the conflict in their grocery bills, their mortgage repayments, their fuel costs and their job security — and are simultaneously told that to question the policies driving that conflict is antisemitic — the damage to social cohesion is not reduced. It is multiplied. Economic grievance and moral distress combine to produce exactly the conditions in which social fragmentation intensifies. If this Commission is serious about social cohesion, it cannot ignore this.

6. What I Ask of This Commission

I respectfully ask the Commission to consider the following recommendations:

• Hear evidence from non-Jewish Australians experiencing moral distress and moral injury arising from witnessing events in Gaza, and formally assess the psychological impact of that distress on social cohesion in Australia.

• Examine the distinction between antisemitism and criticism of Israeli government policy with the rigour and evidentiary independence its importance demands, including through assessment of documented cases where the accusation of antisemitism has been used to suppress legitimate political expression.

• Apply consistent evidentiary standards to all testimony received, regardless of the community from which it comes. Distress must be evidenced, not merely asserted.

• Investigate the documented pattern of organised campaigns by pro-Israel advocacy groups to harm the livelihoods of Australian journalists, artists and educators — a pattern now confirmed by federal court findings — and consider whether this constitutes a form of conduct harmful to social cohesion.

• Commission independent research into the prevalence and impact of moral distress and moral injury across the broader Australian community, as a necessary counterpart to any assessment of the psychological impact of antisemitism.

• Acknowledge the material economic consequences of the Middle East conflict for ordinary Australians, and consider whether a Commission focused narrowly on antisemitism, while ignoring these consequences, risks further eroding the social trust it is tasked with rebuilding.

• Resist any framing that treats the validation of one community’s suffering as requiring the invalidation of another’s. Genuine social cohesion is built on honest reckoning with all of it.

I make this submission in good faith, in the spirit of the Australia I believe in: one capable of honest, complex, compassionate conversation, and one which has never, in my lifetime, been hostile to Jewish people — but which is now being asked to pretend that protecting one community from criticism requires silencing millions of others.

The Jewish Australians who shaped my early life as an artist were better than that. This Commission should be too.

Ian Milliss
Artist
18 May 2026

References and Sources

The following sources are cited in support of this submission. All URLs were verified as of 18 May 2026.

1. Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, Letters Patent, issued 9 January 2026, Australian Government. asc.royalcommission.gov.au/about/terms-reference

2. Ibid. Term of Reference (d): recommendations for strengthening social cohesion and countering spread of ideologically and religiously motivated extremism.

3. Commissioner Virginia Bell AC SC, Opening Remarks, Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, Sydney, February 2026. Reported in The Jewish Independent, 26 February 2026. thejewishindependent.com.au/bell-opens-commission-antisemitism

4. VanderWeele, T.J. and Wortham, J. (2025). “Moral trauma, moral distress, moral injury, and moral injury disorder: definitions and assessments.” Frontiers in Psychology, 4 March 2025. frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1422441/full

5. Harvard Human Flourishing Program. “DSM recognizes moral injury, thanks to Human Flourishing Program research.” Press release, 17 September 2025. hsph.harvard.edu/news/moral-injury-officially-recognized-as-mental-health-condition/

6. Carey, L.B. and Hodgson, T.J., as synthesised in VanderWeele and Wortham (2025), above. Foundational definitions derived from Shay (2002); Litz, B.T. et al. (2009). “Moral injury and moral repair in war veterans.” Clinical Psychology Review 29(8): 695–706; Jinkerson, J.D. (2016). “Defining and assessing moral injury.” Traumatology 22(2): 122–130.

7. Campbell, S.M. et al. (2016). “A Broader Understanding of Moral Distress.” American Journal of Bioethics 16(12): 1–2. See also: Epstein, E.G. and Hamric, A.B. (2009). “Moral distress, moral residue, and the crescendo effect.” Journal of Clinical Ethics 20(4): 330–342. Summarised in: Whitehead, P.B. et al. (2015). “Moral distress among healthcare professionals.” AACN Advanced Critical Care 26(2): 89–97. PMC/NIH: PMC5605145.

8. Palestine Action Group, national rally data, 24 August 2025. Reported in: Times of Israel, “Tens of thousands march in Australia, demand end to Gaza war”, 24 August 2025; Xinhua, “Pro-Palestine demonstrations held across Australian cities”, 25 August 2025. Sydney Harbour Bridge march, 3 August 2025: World Socialist Web Site, 25 August 2025. wsws.org/en/articles/2025/08/25/ztrs-a25.html

9. Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), analysis of global protest data 2023–2025, as reported in SBS News, “Australia in top 10 countries for pro-Palestine protests”, 29 September 2025. sbs.com.au/news/article/australia-in-top-10-countries-for-pro-palestinian-protests-data-reveals/6g4nkqzpd

10. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Census of Population and Housing 2021. Jewish population figure approximately 120,000. abs.gov.au. See also: Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), Annual Antisemitism Report, December 2025. ecaj.org.au

11. Antoinette Lattouf v Australian Broadcasting Corporation [2025] FCA (Justice Darryl Rangiah), judgment delivered 25 June 2025. Penalties awarded 24 September 2025. Reported in: International Federation of Journalists, “Australia: Journalists censored for reporting on Gaza”, 29 September 2025. ifj.org/media-centre/news/detail/category/press-releases/article/australia-journalists-censored-for-reporting-on-gaza

12. Creative Australia, statement rescinding Khaled Sabsabi’s Venice Biennale commission, 13 February 2025. Reported in: ArtReview, “The Cancellation of Khaled Sabsabi Reveals Australia’s Conservative Turn”, 2025. artreview.com/the-cancellation-of-khaled-sabsabi-reveals-creative-australia-conservative-turn-venice-biennale-golden-lion-antisemitism-michael-dagostino-opinion-amelia-winata/

13. Melbourne Symphony Orchestra cancellation of Jayson Gillham, 11 August 2024. Reported in: Variety, “Melbourne Orchestra Cancels Jayson Gillham Concert Over Gaza Comment”, 14 August 2024. variety.com/2024/music/news/melbourne-orchestra-cancels-pianist-jayson-gillham-gaza-death-comment-1236106385/. Federal Court case: Fakta, “Jayson Gillham Battles Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Over Free Speech”, May 2026. fakta.co/gillham-mso-legal-battle-gaza

14. 2024 J.E.W.I.S.H creatives and academics doxxing incident, 8 February 2024. Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_J.E.W.I.S.H_creatives_and_academics_doxxing_incident. NSW Police forensic finding re “gas the Jews” claim: cited therein. See also: Times of Israel, “After Oct. 7, mass doxxing has Australian Jews wondering what happened to their country”, 14 July 2024. timesofisrael.com/after-oct-7-mass-doxxing-has-australian-jews-wondering-what-happened-to-their-country/

15. Feik, N. (2025). “The Lattouf case and the ongoing chilling effects.” Substack, 28 June 2025. nickfeik.substack.com/p/the-lattouf-case-and-the-ongoing. Additional named cases: poet Omar Sakr; author Ren Wyld; University of Melbourne student disciplinary proceedings. See also: Independent Australia, “The ABC’s Antoinette Lattouf ‘issue’”, June 2025.

16. Oxford Economics. “The economic impact of a prolonged Iran war in Australia.” April 2026. oxfordeconomics.com/resource/the-economic-impact-of-a-prolonged-iran-war-in-australia/

17. Commonwealth Bank of Australia. “Middle East conflict: assessing the impact across politics, economies and commodities.” March 2026. commbank.com.au/articles/newsroom/2026/03/iran-conflict-economic-impact.html

18. Chalmers, J. (Treasurer of Australia), statement, April 2026. Reported in: Accounting Times, “Australia ‘won’t be spared’ from economic shock of Middle East war, says Treasurer”, April 2026. accountingtimes.com.au/economy/australia-wont-be-spared-from-economic-shock-of-middle-east-war-warns-treasurer

19. Westpac IQ. “Middle East Conflict: an initial view for Australia and New Zealand.” March 2026. westpaciq.com.au/economics/2026/03/middle-east-conflict-note-3-march-2026

20. Verikios, G. (Griffith University). “War could add an extra 5% to prices in Australia — but there’s one sector that shields the economy.” The Conversation, 30 March 2026. theconversation.com/war-could-add-an-extra-5-to-prices-in-australia-but-theres-one-sector-that-shields-the-economy-279328

21. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). “Gaza’s economy collapsed 83% in 2024, pushing all 2.3 million people into poverty.” November 2025. unctad.org/news/gazas-economy-collapsed-83-2024-pushing-all-23-million-people-poverty

22. Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, Submissions page. asc.royalcommission.gov.au/share-your-story/submissions. Submissions accepted until 14 June 2026.

23. Jerusalem Post, “Sydney Biennale sparks row over Israel genocide accusations”, March 2026. jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-889472. See also: Combat Antisemitism Movement, “Publicly-Funded Sydney Biennale Opens With Exhibits Claiming Israel Is Committing Genocide”, March 2026. combatantisemitism.org/cam-news/publicly-funded-sydney-biennale-opens-with-exhibits-claiming-israel-is-committing-genocide/

When people ask about the future cultural directions of the world, they usually mean one of two things: what new styles the culture industry will package for us next, or how to keep existing institutions looking relevant while everything else burns.

I am not very interested in either question. The real question is much rougher: what kinds of cultural practice help people understand the world they are actually in, and help them adapt to it without becoming more obedient, more isolated, and more stupid?

So what you are going to get is not much prediction. I learned long ago that you cannot predict the direction of cultural movements because their apparent forward movement will always be sideswiped and mangled by something you barely saw coming out of the corner of your eye.

You could say my entire generation was sideswiped by climate change and many still have not fully absorbed the likely destruction of human civilisation as we know it. That is the frame everything I will say sits within.

Rather than prediction, this talk is more like Robinson Crusoe or Moby Dick: a way of grappling with a complex, uneven reality by assembling lists, fragments, examples, and working propositions. You will be getting a lot of lists!

But the parts of the argument are simple enough. For starters the future of culture will not be led by the official art world. It will be shaped by breakdown, mutual aid, ecological pressure, open-source improvisation, migration, anger, and the practical intelligence of communities forced to invent new ways of living.

For a long time I’ve argued, to the irritation of many perfectly nice people, that art in the grand institutional sense is mostly a business category. There is a business called art. There are markets, career paths, rituals of validation, mythologies of genius, collectors converting money into prestige, museums converting prestige into tourism, universities converting debt into aspiration. But the really significant cultural activity, the activity that changes how people see and think and act, has always had a much wider field. It happens in social movements, in technical improvisations, in local publications, in organising traditions, in farming experiments, in vernacular media, in open-source collaboration, in communities trying to solve actual problems under pressure.

If that sounds too political, that is because culture has always been political whenever it mattered. It changes how people see, what they value, what they believe is possible, and therefore what they are prepared to organise for. Culture is upstream of politics — not because it is superior to politics, but because politics cannot move very far without a shift in perception and desire.

The Commons and Its Destruction

And here I want to bring in something that may seem distant but in fact is the very core.

Peter Linebaugh spent decades tracing the history of the commons and their destruction. In precapitalist England a person could gather wood from the forest for fuel and shelter, graze cattle on common pasture, glean fields after harvest.

These were customary rights, built into the fabric of daily life. Their destruction through enclosure, criminalisation, and violence was the precondition for capitalism.

The point of enclosure was not just to transfer property. It was to remove people’s means of subsistence and force them into wage labour.

Linebaugh makes a crucial point about what the commons actually was. It was not only natural resources. Elinor Ostrom who in 2009 was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Economic Science, demonstrated the same thing from another direction. Her work on commons showed that despite right wing glorification of personal greed, people are quite capable of managing shared resources collectively without either private ownership or heavy-handed external control, provided they have rules, relationships, accountability and local knowledge.

In other words, commoning is not a relic. It is a practical human capacity. It is a way of working together. The word itself comes from obligations held in common, from what we owe each other rather than what we own.

The Enclosure of the Cultural Commons

Now think about what happened to culture. The art world underwent its own enclosure. What was once a commons of shared human creative capacity — making things, telling stories, singing songs, decorating spaces, organising rituals, passing on skills — was enclosed by institutions, markets, and credential systems. It was turned into a private property regime.

You need a degree to call yourself an artist. You need a gallery to show your work. You need a critic to validate it. You need a collector to pay for it. You need a museum to consecrate it. Each enclosure created another gatekeeper, another toll booth between human imagination and its social use.

Dave Graeber understood this very clearly. In his Debt:The First 5000 Years and elsewhere he argued that baseline communism — the ordinary assumption that people cooperate, share, and help one another as a matter of course — is not some impossible ideal but the actual substrate of everyday life.

Every time you lend a hand without calculating an exchange rate, every time you teach someone something because they need to know it, every time you cook for others, repair something together, or pass on a skill, you are acting on principles prior to the market. Capitalism did not invent cooperation. It enclosed it, monetised it, and then pretended it had created it.

That is exactly what happened to culture. Shared creative capacity became a commodity and then we were told the commodity was the real thing. We were told that art happens in galleries, music happens in concert halls, knowledge happens in universities. To add insult to injury, corporate propaganda and the most insipid and meaningless corporate slop was then branded as “popular culture”, exactly what it is not, it is in fact corporate culture. Everything else is despised as amateurism, folklore, hobby or background noise, yet the background noise is where most culture actually lives.

The Art World as Bureaucracy

So here is the thing I have been saying in one form or another for fifty years: the official culture sector is no longer the main site of cultural invention. At best it is a lagging indicator. At worst it is a laundering and extractive mechanism. It takes social conflict, ecological grief, and political urgency, turns them into manageable content, and sells them back as enlightened experience. It has become extremely good at the cosplay of radicalism. It can host the aesthetics of dissent while remaining structurally tied to property, tourism, extraction and elite reassurance.

That does not mean nothing good happens in institutions. Obviously it does – look round you here. But institutions now mostly try to control, sanitise, neuter, package and absorb energies generated elsewhere.

The real adaptive intelligence of culture is leaking out through communities, collectives, informal networks, practical collaborations, and people who would never think to call themselves artists. I have said before that the real artists may be innovative farmers, union organisers, media tacticians, archivists, neighbourhood repairers, and people who use communication creatively to produce actual change. I still think that. In fact I think it is truer now than when I first said it.

Graeber’s work on bureaucracy makes a complementary point. Administrative systems are not merely inefficient. They are often designed to suppress initiative and fragment responsibility. The art world is one such bureaucracy. It manages creativity rather than enabling it. It produces careers rather than culture. It rewards compliance rather than invention. It is a machine for selecting which forms of expression can circulate safely without threatening the underlying property relations.

But what is replacing the art world’s vacuous simulacrum of culture is not one triumphant new movement. It is a messy field of distributed cultural adaptation: mutual aid networks, community media, autonomous education, First Nations ecological knowledge, open publishing, co-operatives, regenerative agriculture, local archives, repair cultures, neighbourhood kitchens, tenant organising, solidarity economies, and experiments in living that begin as necessity and become intelligence.

This is not nostalgia for the 1970s. The conditions are much worse now. Climate breakdown, forced migration, platform capitalism, authoritarian drift, and the general exhaustion of neoliberal legitimacy are forcing a broader rediscovery of things that should never have been abandoned.

Climate Change as Crime Against the Commons

We also need to be quite hard-headed about climate change here. Climate change is not just an unfortunate side effect of modernity. It is a crime against the commons. The air is a commons. The oceans are a commons. Watersheds, soils, forests, stable seasons, biodiversity, the conditions that make agriculture possible, the metabolic exchanges between species — all of these are common inheritances that no corporation created and no state has the moral right to destroy.

Fossil capital has treated the atmosphere as an open sewer and then called the resulting catastrophe development. That is not just bad policy. It is systematic theft from the present, from the future, and from every other form of life with whom we share the world.

Once you see climate change that way, culture starts to look different too. It is not there to decorate the emergency. It is there to help us understand what has been stolen, what must be defended, and what new forms of life have to be built in the ruins.

Collaboration as Survival Strategy

And this is where collaboration comes in. Collaboration is not a technique. It is a necessity.

I want to be pointed about this. Collaboration is not a nice add-on to artistic practice. It is not a funding criterion to be ticked off. It is not a workshop you attend. Under present conditions, collaboration is a survival strategy.

The problems we face — ecological collapse, social fragmentation, housing stress, the enclosure of every remaining commons by platform capitalism — are too large, too complex, and too urgent for individual heroic production. The fantasy of the lone genius artist is not merely historically false. It is politically disabling. It models a way of being fundamentally incapable of responding to collective crisis.

A few weeks back an old friend of mine, Graham Pitts, died. Graham was a playwright, author and community cultural worker. He was legendary as one of the founders of Sidetrack Theatre and his plays had reputedly been among the most seen Australian plays ever, yet barely registered by the middle class theatre audience. And he had been actively involved in the East Timor issue.

The Timorese Association of Victoria, marking his passing, put this more clearly than most art writing ever manages. They said he did not arrive as a saviour. He arrived as a collaborator. He sat with people, listened to memories of mountains and massacres, and asked what story wanted to be told there. The important thing is not the sentimentality of that wording but the shift of agency it describes. He did not arrive with content. He helped create conditions in which collective voice could become legible. What Graham did, the tribute said, was radical: “he introduced us not as victims, but as artists.” And then this: “He understood that art is not a gift bestowed from above, but a door held open from within.”

That is what collaboration looks like when it is real — not a panel discussion, not a curated conversation, not a token consultation, but an actual redistribution of creative agency. The future cultural worker looks less like a solitary genius and more like a useful person in a complicated group. Someone who can listen, connect, visualise, communicate, map systems, build trust, circulate knowledge, analyse media, and help groups act more intelligently.

That may sound less glamorous than the old mythology, but it is far more demanding. It also means something many artists still hate hearing: anonymity may not be a failure. Embeddedness may not be a failure. Practical usefulness may not be a failure. If you work seriously with audiences outside the minute art world, you often sacrifice the comfort of elevated identity. But that identity was always dubious. If your work only matters when a gatekeeper says it matters, it probably does not matter enough.

And there is a second reason collaboration matters. It prefigures the kinds of society we will need. You do not solve climate breakdown, housing collapse, energy transition, food insecurity, or democratic decay by producing more branded individual posturing. You solve them, if they can be solved at all, by learning how to coordinate, share, maintain, argue, and build with people unlike yourself. Collaboration is not a style. It is rehearsal for survival.

Rebuilding the Commons

So here is the political programme, if you want one. We must protect and recreate the Commons, of every sort. We need to stop defending culture as a sector and start rebuilding it as a commons. And we need to recognise maintenance and repair as the equal of innovation.

Rebuilding the commons means something concrete. It means open tools, shared archives, community-controlled media, free publishing, data access, technical literacy, local memory, and the means to produce and circulate knowledge without asking permission from either the market or the bureaucracy.

It means treating the means of cultural production the way commoners treated the forest — as something shared, maintained collectively, and held in trust. It means fighting the new enclosures — platform enclosures, data enclosures, credential enclosures, copyright, landlordism in both physical and digital space — with the same ferocity that people once resisted hedges, fences and eviction.

It also means reclaiming older commons that have been stolen in more recent decades. Public ownership matters here. Not as a dreary bureaucratic fetish, but because some infrastructures should never have been turned into extraction machines. Water, energy, public transport, housing, communication systems, libraries, archives, education, health, and key digital infrastructures are too important to be left to private monopolies organised around shareholder return.

Reversing privatisation is not nostalgia. It is climate policy. It is cultural policy. It is democratic policy. A privatised grid will not plan a just energy transition. A privatised housing system will not produce stable communities. A privatised media system will not sustain an informed public. A privatised internet will not protect a commons of knowledge.

We have spent forty years being told that private ownership is efficient and public provision is obsolete. What we actually got was asset stripping, degraded service, higher prices, diminished accountability, and a social imagination trained to expect less from collective life. The ideological triumph of privatisation was not just economic. It taught people to think of everything as a personal consumer choice rather than a shared condition. That is why rebuilding the commons is also a cultural struggle. We have to recover not only institutions but habits of mutual expectation.

Enclosure was never just about land. It was about destroying a way of life — a way of working together, negotiating conflict, managing limits, and reproducing community without permanent subordination to outside authority. The enclosure of the cultural commons has done exactly the same thing. It has destroyed collective confidence in our own creative capacity and replaced it with a market for individual publicity.

The alternative is not some impossible utopia. It is already visible in every workshop, kitchen, library, union office, tool shed, garden, local server, pirate archive, community radio station, and informal school where people share resources and knowledge because life would otherwise become unliveable. The task is not to invent the commons from scratch. The task is to recognise, defend, extend, and federate the commons that already exist inside the ruins of the old order.

Repair Culture and Heritage

This brings me to repair culture, because I think it is one of the most undervalued cultural forms of our time. For years I have had the URL repairculture.com sitting there as a project I never quite managed to do anything with. It kept nagging at me because I increasingly felt that repair and maintenance were not peripheral matters but central ones.

During COVID, while writing about the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her long involvement with New York sanitation workers, that intuition sharpened. Ukeles understood something the avant-garde mostly refused to understand: that maintenance is not the opposite of culture. It is one of culture’s deepest forms.

Modern capitalism celebrates innovation because innovation can be branded, patented, hyped and sold. Maintenance is much less photogenic. It is repetitive, collective, often feminised, often badly paid or unpaid, and generally invisible until it stops. But this is exactly why it matters so much. Maintenance is what keeps life going. Repair is what interrupts the logic of disposal. In a society trained to worship novelty, repair becomes a quiet insurrection.

And in climate terms it is far more than symbolic. Repair is a direct material response to extraction. Every object repaired is one less object manufactured, shipped, marketed, purchased and discarded. Every building maintained is one less building needlessly demolished and rebuilt at enormous ecological cost. Every skill of mending, patching, conserving, retrofitting and adaptive reuse is a practical refusal of the carbon logic of planned obsolescence. Repair culture says that value is not exhausted at the point of sale. It says that continuity, care, durability and stewardship are forms of intelligence.

That is also why heritage needs to be rescued from the heritage industry. Heritage is not simply a collection of beautiful old objects or officially approved monuments. Heritage is a living set of practices by which communities remember, maintain, rework and transmit what matters to them. It includes buildings, certainly, but also songs, craft skills, local knowledge, rituals, ways of growing food, stories about place, and ways of repairing damage without surrendering to amnesia.

If heritage is reduced to tourism branding or frozen reverence, it becomes useless. But if heritage is understood as a living cultural activity, it becomes part of adaptation.

A maintained building is not just a conserved artifact. It is embodied carbon not wasted. It is social memory still inhabitable. It is material evidence that demolition and replacement are not the only model of progress. A repaired tool, a restored hall, a community-run archive, a revegetated creek line, an oral history project, an old rail corridor kept public rather than sold off — these are all forms of heritage work. They are also climate work. They enlarge competence. They deepen attachment. They teach continuity across generations.

This matters because the dominant development model is one of perpetual erasure. Knock it down. Build again. Upgrade by replacement. Extract, consume, discard. That same logic has governed people as well as objects: casualise the worker, demolish the neighbourhood, privatise the utility, digitise the memory, call it innovation. Repair culture pushes in the opposite direction. It asks what can be kept going, what can be cared for, what should remain public, what can be adapted without being obliterated. It asks whether a society can become adult enough to value maintenance as highly as spectacle.

I would go further. In the next decades, the politics of repair will become inseparable from the politics of survival. Communities that know how to maintain water systems, buildings, local archives, seed stocks, soils, machinery, public space, and relations of mutual aid will be more resilient than communities that know only how to consume services delivered from elsewhere. Repair culture is not quaint. It is civilisational infrastructure.

AI and the New Enclosure

All of this becomes even more pressing in relation to AI. We are watching another enclosure battle happen in real time. AI could become part of a new commons, or it could become one more mechanism for concentrating power, deskilling labour, privatising knowledge, and enclosing the social intelligence on which it feeds.

The first thing to say is obvious but usually buried: AI systems are built from collective human labour and collective human culture. They are trained on languages, images, histories, archives, habits of reasoning, and immense quantities of publicly produced or socially produced material.

In other words, they are already parasitic on the commons. The question is whether that common inheritance remains common, or whether a few firms use it to build toll booths around cognition itself.

The open-source tradition suggests one possible path. If people can inspect systems, modify them, share them, and understand the provenance of their training data and code, then AI can contribute to a commons of knowledge, tools and collective problem solving. It can help communities analyse information, translate, publish, map damage, preserve archives, support accessibility, and circulate expertise more widely. Used that way, it could extend capacities that are otherwise monopolised.

But that is not the path corporate AI is taking. The dominant tendency is enclosure: proprietary models, opaque datasets, private compute, automated surveillance, synthetic scarcity, and the use of public knowledge to create private empires. This is a familiar pattern. Capitalism socialises the inputs and privatises the outputs. It takes from the commons, then invoices the commons for access to what was already ours.

So when I talk about AI as a developing commons, I do not mean naive techno-utopianism. I mean a field of struggle. It means arguing for open standards and open source models where possible, transparent training data, democratic governance, strong public digital institutions, and protections against both labour displacement and cognitive enclosure. It means libraries, schools, universities, public broadcasters, archives and local governments should not be passive customers of corporate AI. They should be active participants in building public-interest digital infrastructure.

China has grasped some parts of this in its own contradictory way through strategic open-sourcing and state coordination, while the Anglo-American model remains obsessed with enclosing everything in the desperate hope of maintaining monopoly rents. But the deeper issue is not East versus West. It is whether intelligence itself becomes a commons or a franchise.

And here again public ownership matters. If energy grids, transport networks, water systems and communication infrastructures are socially foundational, then so increasingly are the computational systems through which knowledge is accessed and organised. Leaving all of that to private firms would be like handing the public library system to landlords and then acting surprised when reading becomes expensive and stupid.

Conclusion: Culture as a Verb

Let me end with the simplest point, because after all the abstraction it is still the most important one.

Community is not a noun. It is a verb. An action. A choice.

Culture is the same. Culture is not a product, not a sector, not an industry, not a prestige badge. It is the collective, experimental, quarrelsome, generous, ongoing process by which people figure out how to live together. It is what we owe each other. It is obligation before ownership, mutuality before exchange, care before price.

If that is true, then the art world is not the future of culture. Increasingly it is the heritage industry of a collapsing idea. What is disappearing is not human inventiveness, but the fantasy that culture belongs to a specialist priesthood licensed by markets and institutions. What could emerge instead — if we fight for it — is a broader understanding of culture as the distributed process by which communities adapt, remember, repair, resist, and sometimes become worthy of survival.

That process must also include respect for other life. The commons never belonged only to humans. Rivers are not raw material. Forests are not scenery. The atmosphere is not a dump. Species are not decorative extras in an economic drama whose only serious actors are corporations and states.

Any culture adequate to climate change will have to abandon the old human supremacism that assumed the rest of life existed merely as resource. We share this world with other beings whose own forms of dwelling and continuity deserve respect. A politics of the commons that ignores that is not a politics of the commons at all.

So my proposition is this.

To the artists: stop defending your identity and start increasing your usefulness.

To the organisers: stop treating culture as decoration and treat it as your local operating system.

To the policy people: stop funding spectacle and start funding capacity, maintenance, repair, public ownership and common access.

To the technologists: stop pretending extraction is innovation and start building tools that enlarge the commons rather than fencing it.

To the heritage sector: stop embalming the past and start helping communities keep what matters alive.

And to all of us: stop asking whether culture can survive the future. The real question is whether there will be a survivable future without a far more democratic, mutual, repaired, publicly held and adaptive culture than the one we have now.

Don’t defend culture as a sector. Rebuild it as a commons.

This is the detailed version of my post last week. It contains more facts and figure beyond the basic argument.

I. The Perfect Commodity

Start with a thought experiment. If you were designing the ideal product for late-stage capitalist accumulation, what would it look like? It would be non-discretionary — governments would be legally and politically compelled to purchase it, regardless of budget conditions or public opinion. It would be immune to consumer preference, seasonal trends, or the vicissitudes of taste. It would be self-destroying on delivery, so that each unit consumed immediately generates demand for replacement. It would be sold at monopoly prices to a captive buyer — the state — with no competitive tendering worth the name. Its production would be shielded from public scrutiny by national security classification. And its manufacturers would maintain a revolving door with the very bureaucracies that procure it, ensuring that the line between supplier and regulator dissolves entirely.

The product I am describing is, of course, weapons. And the industry I am describing is the global armaments complex — which has spent the past decade delivering returns, growth rates, and political insulation that make every other sector of the capitalist economy look sluggish and exposed. This is not a coincidence. It is the logical terminus of a particular political-economic project: neoliberalism, pushed to its most extreme and predatory form, in which the state is not rolled back but weaponised, and in which war — real, manufactured, prolonged, and globally distributed — becomes the primary mechanism for the extraction of public wealth into private hands.

The argument I want to make here is not a conspiracy theory. Conspiracies require intentional coordination. What I am describing is something more dangerous: a structural logic, an incentive architecture so powerful that it does not require anyone to plan it. Rational actors at every node of the system — arms manufacturers, Pentagon procurement officers, congressional defence committee staffers, think tank analysts, foreign policy strategists, Wall Street fund managers — respond to incentives that systematically reward conflict and punish peace. The system does not need a master puppeteer. It merely needs capitalism to do what capitalism does: follow the money.

And the money, right now, is in war.

II. The Numbers

Let us begin with what is beyond dispute. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, global military expenditure reached USD 2.718 trillion in 2024 — the highest figure SIPRI has ever recorded, representing a 9.4 per cent increase over the previous year, the steepest annual rise since at least 1988.¹ This was not an aberration. Military spending has increased every year for a full decade, climbing 37 per cent between 2015 and 2024. The global military burden — the share of world GDP devoted to military expenditure — rose to 2.5 per cent in 2024, with the average military burden of countries in active high-intensity conflict sitting at 4.4 per cent.

The United States remains, by a spectacular margin, the world’s largest military spender, at USD 997 billion in 2024 — accounting for 37 per cent of all global military expenditure.² NATO members collectively spent USD 1.506 trillion, equal to 55 per cent of the world total. Europe’s military spending surged 17 per cent in a single year, with Germany up 28 per cent, Poland up 31 per cent, and Romania up 43 per cent. Israel’s military spending increased 65 per cent in 2024 alone — the largest year-on-year rise since the Six-Day War — and has grown 135 per cent over the decade.³

For the manufacturers of the materiel that this expenditure purchases, these are not statistics but revenue projections. Consider the numbers from the investor perspective. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Rheinmetall — Germany’s largest arms maker — has seen its share price climb more than 1,000 per cent.⁴ The company reported 2025 revenue of €9.94 billion, up 29 per cent year-on-year, with its defence division growing 50 per cent in 2024 alone. Its order backlog stands at €55 billion and is projected to exceed €135 billion by end of 2026. The company’s CEO, Armin Papperger, declared to investors that ‘an era of rearmament has begun in Europe that will demand a lot from all of us’ — and then, without pausing, added that it ‘brings us at Rheinmetall growth prospects for the coming years that we have never experienced before.’⁵ There is no cognitive dissonance in that sentence. For Papperger and his shareholders, the era of rearmament is not a tragedy to be managed. It is a business opportunity to be maximised.

The broader financial sector has reached the same conclusion. The S&P Aerospace and Defence Index has risen nearly 90 per cent since the Ukraine conflict began — substantially outperforming the broader S&P 500, which itself returned roughly 50 per cent over the same period.⁶ Defence-focused investment funds multiplied from four in 2022 to twenty-seven by 2025, as institutional capital recognised what was becoming undeniable: conflict is the most reliable growth driver in the contemporary economy. Between 2018 and 2023, the top five US defence contractors — Lockheed Martin, RTX/Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing Defence, and General Dynamics — spent nearly USD 300 million on lobbying and employed more than 600 former Pentagon officials.⁷ This is not lobbying in any conventional sense. It is the systematic purchase of the policy environment that generates the contracts.

US arms exports reached a record USD 318.7 billion in fiscal 2024 — a 29 per cent jump over the previous year — with direct commercial sales by American defence contractors rising to USD 200.8 billion, up from USD 157.5 billion the year before.⁸ Major transactions included USD 23 billion in F-16 jets and upgrades to Turkey and USD 18.8 billion in F-15 fighter jets to Israel — a country simultaneously under investigation for war crimes in Gaza. Between 2020 and 2024, Ukraine became the world’s largest arms importer, accounting for 8.8 per cent of global imports, up from 0.1 per cent in the preceding five-year period — a 9,627 per cent surge.⁹ Nearly half of all arms delivered to Ukraine over this period came from the United States. The US share of global arms exports rose to 43 per cent over this period, up from 35 per cent in the five years prior.

Palantir, the data-analytics and battlefield-AI company whose software is embedded in Ukrainian military operations, watched its market capitalisation grow from roughly USD 13 billion at the end of 2022 to over USD 443 billion by mid-2025 — a gain of approximately 3,200 per cent in under three years.¹⁰ Anduril Industries, another AI-enabled autonomous systems developer active in Ukraine, saw its valuation jump from USD 14 billion in 2024 to USD 30.5 billion in 2025. These are not outliers. They are the leading edge of a structural transformation in which technology capital has recognised that the most lucrative customer in the world is a government at war, and has repositioned accordingly.

III. Manufactured Conflict

None of the above statistics constitute, by themselves, a case for the manufacture of war. Correlation is not causation. Wars have always benefited arms makers; the observation is as old as Eisenhower’s farewell address. What is structurally distinct about the current moment is the degree to which the interests of the arms industry have become coextensive with US foreign policy, and the degree to which conflict prolongation — rather than conflict resolution — has become the operational objective.

Seymour Melman understood this half a century ago. His 1970 work Pentagon Capitalism described a new kind of economic formation in which the Pentagon had become not merely a buyer of weapons but a state management system that planned production, allocated contracts, and sustained a parallel economy insulated from market competition.¹¹ By 1965, the Army Research Office was openly advertising for bids on a study of methods for achieving a ‘Pax Americana’ — a formal document requesting advice on how to ‘maintain world hegemony.’¹² Melman identified what he called the ‘permanent war economy’: a system in which military production became the engine of Keynesian stimulus, providing jobs, investment, and demand management that the civilian economy could not supply, at the cost of progressively degrading that civilian economy’s productive capacity. His critique was economic as much as political: the military economy drained engineering talent, depressed civilian manufacturing, and created a form of capital accumulation that produced nothing of social value.

What Melman could not fully anticipate was the degree to which this state-capitalist formation would be subsequently relaunched as neoliberalism’s hidden engine. The ideological project of neoliberalism, from Thatcher and Reagan onward, was the rollback of the state: deregulation, privatisation, the dismantling of the welfare state, the subordination of all social provision to market logic. But military spending was the one arena where this logic was entirely suspended. Pentagon budgets were not subjected to cost-benefit analysis. Defence contractors were not exposed to competitive markets. The revolving door ensured that oversight was performed by former employees of the overseen. In this single, enormous sector of the economy, the state grew without restraint, public money flowed without accountability, and the ideology of market discipline was simply not applied.

This is neoliberalism’s hidden socialist core. Military spending is, at its base, a form of Keynesian stimulus: government expenditure creating demand, sustaining employment, and generating economic activity that the private sector cannot or will not produce. The difference is that Keynesian stimulus in the form of healthcare, education, housing, or public infrastructure creates durable social goods — improved life expectancy, educated workforces, lower transport costs, reduced inequality. Military Keynesianism creates weapons, which are consumed in conflict and leave nothing behind but wreckage. The investment return to society is negative by design.

The question, then, is who decides when and how conflicts are initiated, prolonged, or resolved — and whose interests govern those decisions. The answer, increasingly, is the same institutions that profit from the answers they give.

The revolving door between the Pentagon and the defence industry has been extensively documented, and the statistics are no longer surprising but remain worth stating plainly. According to the Project on Government Oversight, at least 380 high-ranking Department of Defense officials and military officers had moved into the private sector as lobbyists, board members, executives, or consultants for defence contractors by 2018.¹³ A 2022 report from Senator Elizabeth Warren’s office found 672 instances of former government officials, military officers, and members of Congress working as lobbyists, board members, or senior executives for the top twenty defence companies — with 91 per cent in lobbying positions directed at the very departments they had previously led.¹⁴ In the five years prior to 2023, over 80 per cent of retired four-star generals and admirals — 26 of 32 — went on to work in the arms sector.¹⁵ The number of prime defence contractors has shrunk from 51 at the end of the Cold War to just five today. This concentration of power, combined with the systematic colonisation of oversight by industry, creates what the Observer Research Foundation has identified as a ‘closed oligarchy of influence’ in which ‘private corporations gravitate towards situations that generate more profits.’¹⁶

When the Raytheon CEO told investors in 2023 that he was ‘very encouraged’ by a proposed USD 886 billion Pentagon budget, and that the company’s only challenge was ‘getting it out the door at this point,’ he was not speaking in code.¹⁷ He was describing the operational reality of an industry whose product is guaranteed by the state, whose market is secured by foreign policy, and whose competition is a carefully maintained oligopoly. When Lockheed Martin’s CEO told investors they should ‘anticipate heightened emphasis on national security prioritisation from Congress’ and that ‘the near peer threats posed by China and the Russian invasion of Ukraine is driving the national defense strategy,’ he was not analysing geopolitics.¹⁸ He was reporting on the mechanism by which conflict translates into contract backlog.

IV. The Extraction Model

There is a concept in ecological economics called externality: the costs of production that are not borne by the producer but dispersed onto others — the atmosphere, the waterway, the community downwind of the factory. The fossil fuel economy externalises atmospheric damage. The armaments economy externalises something more comprehensive: the entire social, infrastructural, and humanitarian cost of the conflicts it supplies.

Consider the structure of the transaction. A government — let us say the United States — appropriates public funds from tax revenue. It allocates a portion of those funds to Ukraine, designated as ‘military assistance.’ Under this designation, the funds do not flow to Ukrainian civilian reconstruction, to diplomatic efforts, or to the social needs of a population under bombardment. They flow to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman as payment for weapons and ammunition. The weapons are shipped to Ukraine. They are fired. They destroy things — Russian military equipment, Ukrainian territory, human bodies on both sides. The weapons themselves are now consumed. The manufacturers receive new orders to replace what has been expended. The public treasury, supplemented by debt, funds the next round.

The profit is privatised. The destruction is socialised. The mechanism is identical to the fossil fuel extraction model: a private company extracts value from a public resource (in this case, the public budget and the willingness of populations to accept the framing of conflict as necessary), sells a product, and externalises the damage onto the populations of the Global South and the Eastern European borderlands who live with the consequences. The armaments economy does not merely produce weapons. It produces the conditions — geopolitical instability, threat inflation, prolonged conflict — in which weapons are indefinitely required. This is not a side effect. It is the business model.

The self-destroying nature of the product is, from an investor’s perspective, its most elegant feature. A washing machine, once sold, lasts ten years. A smartphone requires replacement every three to five. A missile, once fired, is gone in seconds. The replacement cycle for munitions in a sustained conventional conflict is measured in days. Ukraine was consuming artillery shells faster than the combined Western industrial base could produce them. The US has provided approximately USD 66.9 billion in military assistance since February 2022, with total support approaching USD 125 billion.¹⁹ From the beginning of the conflict, the shift from direct aid to sales accelerated as the political climate changed — in August 2025, for instance, the US approved a USD 825 million sale of Extended Range Attack Munitions to Ukraine, with funding sourced from NATO allies and US Foreign Military Financing programmes.²⁰ Aid becomes sales. The public purse funds both. The manufacturer is paid either way.

This is an extraction economy in the most precise sense of the term. What is extracted is not oil or lithium but political consent and public money. The raw material is the fear and insecurity of populations subjected to a continuous media environment of threat inflation. The refinement process is the foreign policy apparatus — the think tanks, the intelligence assessments, the congressional testimony, the presidential speeches — that translates diffuse anxiety into specific procurement decisions. And the product, once refined, is shipped immediately to the point of consumption, where it destroys itself and generates the conditions for further extraction.

V. Neoliberalism’s Terminal Form

I want to be precise about what I mean when I call this neoliberalism’s terminal form, because the term risks sounding like rhetoric. I mean something structural and observable.

Neoliberalism as a political project has always contained a fundamental contradiction. It requires the state — to enforce contracts, protect property, discipline labour, and maintain the conditions for capital accumulation — while simultaneously attacking the state as inefficient, parasitic, and inimical to freedom. The resolution of this contradiction, historically, has been the selective deployment of state power: ruthless in protecting capital, withdrawn from protecting labour or providing social goods. The deregulation of finance. The privatisation of public utilities. The gutting of welfare. The crushing of unions. All of this is neoliberalism as advertised.

But the one form of state intervention that neoliberalism has never dismantled — and has in fact continuously expanded — is military spending. No neoliberal government has ever proposed cutting the Pentagon. No austerity programme has ever targeted defence contracts. The structural adjustment programmes imposed by the IMF on the Global South — dismantling public health systems, eliminating food subsidies, privatising water — have never been applied to the armies of the states that enforce them. In the United States, the military budget has grown under every administration of both parties, without interruption, for decades. This is not an oversight. It is the system working as designed.

Military spending is the one arena where neoliberal states can practice unlimited Keynesian stimulus without naming it as such. The expenditure is ideologically laundered as ‘national security’ rather than ‘government intervention.’ The jobs it creates are understood as the product of patriotism rather than public investment. The contracts it awards are presented as procurement rather than subsidy. But functionally, economically, mechanically, the US defence budget is the largest public works programme in human history — and its beneficiaries are not the communities in which its soldiers live and die, but the shareholders of five corporations that have consolidated control over the entire supply chain of American violence.

The consolidation is itself a story of neoliberal logic applied to a sector that was supposed to be immune to it. The Cold War-era defence industrial base comprised over fifty prime contractors competing for Pentagon business. The mergers and acquisitions wave of the 1990s — encouraged by the Clinton administration’s ‘Last Supper’ meeting in which defence industry executives were explicitly told that consolidation would be rewarded — produced the current oligopoly of five.²¹ Competition was eliminated. Prices rose. Quality deteriorated — the F-35 programme, which has absorbed over USD 400 billion in development costs, remains plagued by reliability problems decades after its inception. But the profits are guaranteed, the contracts are classified, and the revolving door ensures that the officials who would otherwise demand accountability are on the payroll.

Meanwhile, the ideological work of manufacturing the threat environment that justifies this expenditure is performed by a network of think tanks, policy institutes, and media outlets that are themselves funded, directly or indirectly, by the defence industry and the governments it supplies. The ‘near peer competitor’ framing — China and Russia as existential threats requiring unlimited deterrence spending — is not derived from dispassionate strategic analysis. It is derived from the institutional needs of an apparatus that requires a threat to justify its existence and a conflict to justify its growth. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the threat environment temporarily contracted, defence spending fell — and the industry lobbied ferociously for new enemies. The ‘War on Terror’ provided them. When the War on Terror’s legitimacy eroded, China and Russia obligingly stepped into the frame.

There is no need to posit that anyone planned this. The point is that the incentive structure selects for exactly this outcome. People who argue for diplomatic resolution of conflicts do not get Pentagon contracts. People who identify new threat vectors, new enemy capabilities, new theatres of potential conflict, get funding, prestige, and career advancement. The discourse is shaped by money, not by the other way around.

VI. The Hosts and the Parasite

In biology, there is a distinction between parasitism and mutualism. A mutualistic relationship benefits both parties. A parasitic relationship extracts value from one organism to the benefit of another, at a cost to the host. The most successful parasites are those that manage their extraction carefully, taking enough to sustain themselves without killing the host — at least not immediately. The most destructive are those that have lost this regulation, that extract without limit, and that kill the host in the process.

The relationship between the armaments economy and the societies that fund it is approaching the second model. The UN Secretary-General’s 2025 report on military expenditure noted that the surge in global military spending is directly undermining progress on the Sustainable Development Goals.²² Every dollar diverted to weapons procurement is a dollar not spent on healthcare, housing, climate adaptation, or the social infrastructure that makes democratic life possible. This is not a metaphor. It is a budget line. The countries spending 4.4 per cent of GDP on military expenditure in 2024 — those with active high-intensity conflicts — are systematically disinvesting from the conditions of their own social reproduction.

Australia is not exempt from this analysis, though it often behaves as though it were. The AUKUS submarine agreement, the most expensive procurement decision in Australian history, commits this country to spending that will exceed USD 368 billion over the life of the programme — for submarines that will not arrive until the 2040s, built to serve a threat environment defined by US strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific. The decision was made without meaningful public debate, without independent strategic assessment, and without any serious consideration of the opportunity costs. The same political culture that insists there is no money for social housing, for aged care, for dental care, for the arts, for climate transition, has committed to a generational expenditure of public money for weapons systems designed to project force in a maritime theatre thousands of kilometres from any credible threat to Australian territory. The argument that this represents ‘Australian sovereignty’ is precisely backwards. A sovereign nation makes its own strategic assessments. Australia has outsourced its strategic assessment to Washington, and is now paying for the privilege.

The broader pattern is one of host societies being progressively consumed by the extractive apparatus they house. The United States, whose defence budget now approaches USD 1 trillion annually, has not won a major war since 1945. Its infrastructure is collapsing. Its public health system is a scandal. Its educational institutions are defunded. Its cities are in crisis. But its defence contractors are reporting record backlogs, its generals are cycling onto corporate boards within months of retirement, and its foreign policy apparatus is reliably generating the conflict environments that sustain demand. Melman saw this clearly in the 1970s: the military economy destroys the civilian economy’s productive capacity by draining its engineering talent, its capital, and its political attention. The country that invented mass production has watched its manufacturing base hollow out for fifty years while its weapons programmes absorb the engineers and the investment that might have rebuilt it.

This is what the terminal form looks like: not dramatic collapse, but progressive immiseration of the host while the extractive apparatus continues to grow. The parasite does not announce itself. It simply redirects nutrients, quietly, systematically, in ways that feel like normality until the damage is too advanced to ignore.

VII. What Is To Be Said

I have argued, across the preceding pages, that the global armaments industry is not a response to conflict but a generator of it; that the incentive structures of neoliberal capitalism systematically select for conflict prolongation over conflict resolution; that military spending is the one form of Keynesian stimulus that neoliberal ideology permits while simultaneously concealing its nature; and that the societies funding this apparatus are being progressively consumed by it, in a relationship that increasingly resembles parasitism rather than mutualism.

I want to be clear about what this argument does not claim. It does not claim that all wars are manufactured from nothing. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is real, and the suffering it has produced is real. The argument is not that conflict is fabricated ex nihilo but that existing tensions are systematically cultivated, prolonged, and weaponised by an apparatus whose incentives align with war rather than peace. The question is never simply ‘is this conflict real?’ The question is always ‘who is served by its continuation, and who has the power to shape the conditions of its resolution?’

The answers to those questions, when honestly pursued, consistently point in the same direction. The people who profit from war are not the people who fight it. They are not the people who live in its theatre. They are shareholders in Düsseldorf and Connecticut, lobbyists in Washington, former generals on corporate boards, fund managers adding defence ETFs to their portfolio. And the people who pay are the public — through taxes, through debt, through the social goods that are not provided because the money has gone elsewhere, through the diplomatic alternatives that are not pursued because the institutional apparatus has no interest in pursuing them.

The armaments economy is capitalism in its most honest form: a system that converts public resources into private profit, externalises its costs onto the most vulnerable, and constructs an ideological apparatus to naturalise its operations as necessity. War is not the failure of this system. War is the system working. The perfect commodity, destroying itself on delivery, generating its own demand, extracted from the commons, privatising the profit and socialising the wreckage.

Whether this is a phase or a terminus depends, as it always has, on whether enough people can see the mechanism clearly enough to refuse it. The data are not encouraging. But data are not the only thing that moves history.

Notes

1. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), “Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2024,” SIPRI Fact Sheet, April 2025.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Rheinmetall AG, Annual Report 2024; Fortune, “Rheinmetall’s Stock Has Soared Over 1,000%,” 16 March 2025.

5. CNBC, “Rheinmetall Sees Sales Growth of Up to 45% in 2026,” 11 March 2026.

6. Observer Research Foundation, “Capitol Consensus: Where War Is Business,” September 2025.

7. Ibid.

8. Al Jazeera, “US Hits Record Arms Sales in 2024 Driven by Ukraine Demand,” 25 January 2025.

9. Observer Research Foundation, “Capitol Consensus: Where War Is Business.”

10. Ibid.

11. Seymour Melman, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970).

12. Seymour Melman, “How the Military Economy Works: The System,” in Haberkern and Lipow, eds., Neither Capitalism nor Socialism (1976), repr. at marxists.org.

13. Project on Government Oversight, “Brass Parachutes: The Problem of the Pentagon Revolving Door,” 2018.

14. Senator Elizabeth Warren, “Pentagon Revolving Door Report,” April 2023; OpenSecrets, “Revolving Door Lobbyists Help Defense Contractors Get Off to Strong Start in 2023,” May 2023.

15. William D. Hartung, “When 80 Percent of US Generals Go to Work for Arms Makers,” Responsible Statecraft, October 2023.

16. Observer Research Foundation, “Capitol Consensus: Where War Is Business.”

17. OpenSecrets, “Revolving Door Lobbyists,” citing Raytheon CEO Gregory Hayes investor call remarks, 2023.

18. Ibid., citing Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet investor call remarks, Q1 2023.

19. Observer Research Foundation, “Capitol Consensus: Where War Is Business.”

20. Ibid.

21. The ‘Last Supper’ meeting, convened by then-Deputy Secretary of Defense William Perry in 1993, explicitly encouraged defence industry consolidation. See Patrick Tyler, “Perry Invites Pentagon’s Biggest Suppliers to Dinner,” New York Times, 28 July 1993.

22. United Nations Secretary-General, “The Security We Need: Rebalancing Military Spending for a Sustainable and Peaceful Future,” September 2025.

There is a question that does not get asked in polite political company, not because it is unanswerable but because the answer is too uncomfortable for the politicians that would have to ask it. The question is this: what if war, at this stage of capitalist development, is not a problem to be solved but a product to be sold? What if the Western military-industrial complex has arrived at a point where it does not merely profit from conflict but actively requires it — not through conspiracy or malice, but through the cold, structural logic of investment, incentive, and accumulated political power?

This is not a fringe position. It is the implication of the publicly available evidence, read without the customary deference to the institutions that generate it. The global armaments industry is one of the fastest-growing major sectors in the world economy. The companies that manufacture weapons are posting record revenues, record backlogs, and record share prices. The politicians who oversee defence procurement are cycling onto the boards of the companies they procured from, within months of leaving office. The think tanks that advise governments on what to buy are funded by the companies that manufacture what gets bought. And the conflicts that drive this expenditure are managed — never resolved, always extended, permanently on the verge of the next escalation — by governments whose strategic advisers have a direct financial interest in the management continuing.

To state this plainly is not to say that every war is invented in a boardroom. It is to say something more verifiable and in some ways more troubling: that the entire institutional apparatus surrounding Western defence policy has organised itself around incentives that reward conflict and punish peace. Diplomatic resolution is bad for backlog. Ceasefires are bad for munitions contracts. Stability, in the language of the defence investor, is called “idle capacity.” The system does not need to manufacture wars from nothing. It only needs to ensure that the ones that exist are never quite resolved.

Capitalism has always found ways to grow through destruction. What is new is the scale, the institutional sophistication, and the degree to which the armaments economy has become the primary engine of state expenditure in the world’s dominant power. The United States now spends approaching one trillion dollars a year on its military — more than the next ten countries combined. That money does not vanish. It flows, with extraordinary reliability, to five corporations that have consolidated control over the entire supply chain of American military power. Lockheed Martin. RTX. Northrop Grumman. General Dynamics. Boeing Defence. These are not companies in any ordinary market sense. They are guaranteed revenue streams, publicly financed, politically protected, and insulated from the competitive discipline that neoliberalism preaches to everyone else.

This is the central hypocrisy of the contemporary political-economic order. Neoliberalism, as an ideology, demands that the state withdraw from the economy: no subsidies, no industrial policy, no protection from market forces. This ideology has been applied, with genuine ferocity, to every sector that serves ordinary people. Public housing. Public health. Public transport. Public education. Public arts funding. All of these have been subjected to the discipline of the market, found wanting, and progressively defunded. But military spending is exempt. No neoliberal government has ever proposed applying market discipline to defence contracts. No structural adjustment programme has ever targeted a weapons manufacturer. The state that cannot find money for dental care can always find money for submarines.

The reason is not difficult to identify. The arms industry is the one sector of the economy where a certain kind of Keynesian logic has survived intact, embedded inside the ideology that formally repudiates it. Military spending is public investment: government money creating demand, sustaining employment, generating economic activity that the private sector cannot or will not produce. The difference is that normal Keynesian investment — in hospitals, schools, infrastructure — produces durable social goods that improve people’s lives. Military Keynesianism produces weapons, which are consumed in conflict and leave nothing behind but wreckage. The investment return to society is negative by design. But the return to shareholders is excellent, which is all the system ultimately requires.

The self-destroying nature of the product is, from a business perspective, its most important feature. A refrigerator lasts ten years. A housing estate lasts a century. A cruise missile lasts approximately ninety seconds. The replacement cycle for munitions in a sustained conventional conflict is measured in days. This is not a bug in the system. It is the system’s most elegant property: a product that must be endlessly replaced, sold at monopoly prices, to a buyer — the state — that cannot refuse. The arms industry has solved the problem that haunts all of capitalism: the problem of durable goods. It has found the product that annihilates itself, and in annihilating itself, creates the market for its own successor. And it has done so at the expense of the public purse, not the private one.

Australia is a case study in miniature of how this logic operates at the level of a middle power. This country has committed to spending AUD 368 billion on the AUKUS submarine programme over thirty years — a cost that has already blown out by 34 per cent from original estimates, for submarines that will not arrive until the 2040s, to meet a threat environment defined in Washington. This is not Australian strategic policy. It is Australian strategic subordination — the purchase, at enormous public expense, of alignment with a patron whose arms manufacturers will supply most of what is bought. The same government that tells us there is no money for dental care, for social housing, for a national transition to renewable energy, has committed to a thirty-year weapons programme whose costs exceed the entire annual GDP of many countries. The claim that this represents hard-headed strategic realism should be met with the contempt it deserves.

The Australian version of the revolving door is not a rumour. It is a matter of public record. Christopher Pyne held the defence industry portfolio and then the defence portfolio between 2016 and 2019. He discussed his post-political career with a major defence consulting firm while still a sitting minister. Nine days after leaving parliament, he had accepted a position. He subsequently became chair of the advisory boards of NIOA — Australia’s largest domestic small arms and munitions company — and the Australian Missile Corporation. He sits on the board of a body armour and unmanned vehicle manufacturer. His firm lobbies government on behalf of defence clients. A Senate inquiry was triggered by his appointments. Nothing changed.

Kim Beazley, former Labor Defence Minister and two-time opposition leader, joined the board of Lockheed Martin Australia — the world’s largest arms manufacturer — upon completing his term as US Ambassador, staying until he became Governor of Western Australia. The Western Australian government then expanded the Governor’s role and increased its budget specifically to enable Beazley to advocate for the defence industry in his capacity as a vice-regal representative. Upon completing his governorship, he returned to working for Lockheed Martin as an advisor. He subsequently joined the board of Luerssen Australia, the German naval shipbuilder that won a AUD 3.7 billion contract to supply patrol vessels to the Australian Navy while Beazley was governor. This is not corruption in any legal sense. That is precisely the problem. It is all entirely legal, all entirely normalised, and all entirely invisible to the democratic scrutiny it would receive if the sector involved were, say, public housing or the arts.

The think tank that advises Australian governments on defence strategy — the Australian Strategic Policy Institute — receives funding from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Thales, BAE Systems, Boeing, and Elbit Systems, among others. It has consistently advocated for higher defence spending, more confrontational postures toward China, and the acquisition of specific systems manufactured by its sponsors. It has received nearly one million dollars from the US State Department and Defence Department in a single financial year. If a think tank advising on, say, climate or housing policy received equivalent funding from the industries it was recommending policy toward, the conflict of interest would be considered disqualifying. In the defence sector, it is considered normal.

The same political class that presided over the death of Australian automotive manufacturing — on the grounds that the state should not subsidise industries unable to compete on the open market — has maintained a completely different standard for defence. When Holden requested AUD 275 million in government support to keep manufacturing through to 2022, the Abbott government refused. The industry died. Up to 100,000 jobs were lost across the supply chain. Australia became the only G20 economy with no passenger vehicle manufacturing whatsoever. This decision was presented as the rigorous application of market principles. At the same moment, the same government and its successors were committing hundreds of billions in guaranteed, non-competitively tendered, publicly subsidised contracts to defence manufacturers. The contrast is not a policy inconsistency. It is a policy clarity: the Australian state will support the industries it is politically and structurally embedded in, and will abandon the ones it is not.

The cost of this to ordinary Australians is not abstract. It is the dentist they cannot afford, the public housing they cannot find, the aged care that is chronically underfunded, the arts that are perpetually being cut, the climate transition that is perpetually underfunded. Every dollar of the AUD$368 billion committed to submarines is a set of choices not made — not made about housing, not made about health, not made about the futures of the young people who will inherit the fiscal consequences of decisions they had no part in making. These are not competing claims in some neutral allocation process. They are political choices, made by people with structural interests in the outcome, without meaningful public debate, in a policy environment whose supposed independence is funded by the industry that benefits.

The armaments economy, in its current form, is extraction: private profit drawn from the public purse, with the social costs of the conflicts it supplies externalised onto the populations of the countries where the weapons are used. It is a system that converts public fear into private revenue, that transforms democratic governments into reliable procurement agencies for companies whose business model depends on the continuation of the very threats the governments are supposed to manage. It is, in the most precise sense, a parasite on the body politic — one that has become so embedded in the organism’s own institutions that the host can no longer tell where its own immune system ends and the parasite’s interests begin.

The question of whether this is capitalism’s terminal form or merely one of its periodic disfigurements is worth sitting with rather than answering too quickly. What can be said with confidence is that a society that spends a trillion dollars a year on weapons while its public infrastructure decays, its housing becomes unaffordable, and its public institutions are gutted is not a society that has its priorities in order. It is a society whose priorities have been captured — legally, institutionally, and ideologically — by an industry that profits from the perpetuation of the conditions it claims to be managing.

The first step toward changing this is simply naming it. The armaments economy is not national security. It is a business. The conflicts it supplies are not inevitabilities. They are opportunities, managed by institutions whose incentives reward their continuation. The politicians who cycle through the revolving door are not serving the public interest. They are serving the clients who will pay them when their public service ends. And the think tanks, the strategic institutes, the policy advisers who construct the threat narratives that justify the expenditure — they are not independent analysts. They are, with some honourable exceptions, the ideological production arm of an industry that needs enemies the way other industries need customers.

None of this requires a conspiracy. It requires only that we take capitalism seriously — that we follow the money and ask, without deference, whose interests the system actually serves. The answer, in the case of the global armaments economy, is not ambiguous. It serves the shareholders of five American corporations, the politicians who will join their boards, the think tanks they fund, and the governments that have outsourced their strategic thinking to people with a direct financial stake in the answer. It does not serve the soldiers who fight the wars, the civilians who live in their theatres, the taxpayers who fund the procurement, or the societies that are being systematically stripped of the social investment they need by a political class that has found, in the permanent emergency of national security, an inexhaustible justification for misallocating public wealth.

The perfect market has found its perfect product. We are paying for it, and we will keep paying for it, until we decide that naming the mechanism plainly is the precondition for changing it. Until then we are just the sheep being shorn of our wealth on an ongoing basis.

We are getting used to censorship in the arts where Palestine is concerned, but two recent cases have made the logic of it unusually clear. First, Creative Australia CEO Adrian Collette has reportedly said the agency will increasingly favour work framed around ‘social cohesion’ and ‘cultural understanding.’ Anyone who cares about artistic freedom should hear the warning in that. Once funding is tied to officially approved ideas of cohesion it is always about suppressing political dissent.

The second case makes that plain. A mural by Scott Marsh in South Brisbane, using John Farnham lyrics containing the phrase ‘river to the sea’, was investigated and partially painted over. Whether the censors understood the reference is beside the point. Political panic is now so extreme that even a 38-year-old song lyric becomes suspect if it brushes against Palestinian solidarity and Israel’s effort to normalise the destruction of Gaza.

So let’s consider flower painting.

For about twenty years I have kept the URL letathousandflowersbloom.com registered, not because I planned to become a florist, but because I noticed a recurring historical pattern. When repression deepens, when defeats accumulate, when states and cultural bureaucracies begin demanding usefulness, loyalty, uplift or silence, politically aware artists are often pushed back into forms that appear minor, harmless or weak. They are expected to stop thinking and start decorating. Flowers are one of the classic assignments.

But flowers are not necessarily innocent. Sometimes they are what political art looks like after the door has been kicked in.

The title was never innocent either. ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom’ is inseparable from Mao’s invitation to intellectuals to speak freely—an invitation that functioned as a trap for identifying dissidents and crushing them. It remains one of the great modern examples of the gap between apparent permission and actual repression. The phrase sounds generous, pluralist, even lyrical. In practice it was lethal. That seemed reason enough to keep the URL in reserve.

This should not be surprising. Repression rarely works only through direct censorship. More often it works through attrition, exhaustion, marginalisation, institutional risk management, and the endless insistence that artists be ‘responsible’, ‘constructive’, ‘inclusive’ and ‘cohesive’ in exactly the way power defines those terms. The result is not simply silence but displacement. Political content goes underground, sideways, into code, into subject matter that appears safely domestic. That is not retreat in any simple sense. It is survival, and sometimes survival is the most advanced political form available.

Tatlin remains the great example. The standard art-history version gives us the heroic constructor, the engineer of revolutionary possibility, the man of the tower that was never built. But the later Tatlin matters just as much: the marginalised artist pushed out of the active centre of revolutionary culture as Stalinism consolidated, the man who drifted into theatre design and flower painting because he had become, in effect, too irrelevant to be worth killing. Those flower paintings are astonishing precisely because they are so bleak, this is in fact the cheeriest one I could find. They do not look like a man reconciled to still life, they look like someone painting at the edge of historical suffocation. He obeys but he obeys with an obvious sullen bad grace.

They are not exuberant still lifes by someone who has discovered botanical pleasure in old age. They are burdened, depressed things sitting there as if they know what has happened. The man who conceived the Monument to the Third International, who tried to think materials, politics and social structure together in a single revolutionary form, ended up painting flowers. The flowers are not an escape from history they are a record of being cornered by it.

Malevich underwent a similar reduction. The painter of Black Square, who declared war on the ballast of the objective world, lost his positions, had work confiscated, was watched, harassed and forced back into representation. His late figures and flowers are not simply conservative paintings. They are testimony painted in one of the few idioms still available to him. What looks like aesthetic retreat is often political evidence.

Schwitters offers a different version of the same problem. Hounded by the Nazis, driven into exile, interned in Britain, poor and improvising with whatever materials were at hand, he kept working. He painted portraits, landscapes and still lifes for money, and in 1946 won first, second and third prizes in the Ambleside flower show art competition. That is either a comic footnote to modernism or a perfect parable of it. The artist of Merz, broken by exile and poverty, ends up painting flowers in provincial England. But again, those flowers are not capitulation. They are what the shattered avant-garde looks like when trying to stay alive.

Hannah Höch makes the point more sharply still. Under Nazism, cut off from the public culture that had made Berlin Dada possible, she moved into what has been called inner exile. Retreat, yes, but also refusal. Her turn to the garden and to symbolically charged work should not be read as depoliticisation. Under those conditions, the enclosed garden is itself a political space: not comfort, but damaged persistence.

Beckmann’s still lifes, painted under the pressure of exile, are too tense and estranged to be reduced to formal exercise. Even the vase of flowers becomes a staging ground for displacement. Nolde is harder, and therefore more useful, because he prevents easy moralising. He was compromised and implicated in terrible ways, yet he too ended up under professional ban, turning to flower and landscape watercolours. The point is not to redeem him but to note that the flower is not morally pure. It can hold grief, denial, self-mythology, defiance and compromise at once.

Although basically a conservative artist who reminisces about repression rather than suffers it, Anselm Kiefer has made the same case in his own overblown way for decades. His flower works are not decorative; they drag memory, war, ruin and national shame into botany. He even produced a series beginning in 1998 titled Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom, confronting Mao’s notorious campaign directly. Each work in the series features a sculptural depiction of Mao, incorporating photographs taken by Kiefer of the propagandist statues he encountered on a trip to China in 1993. The sand and ash-encrusted flowers at the bottom struggle to blossom under the weight of the imposing statue while the wall blocks all access beyond the picture plane. Kiefer understood exactly what flowers signify in the shadow of power. They are not beauty, they are the residue of crushed possibility.

The pattern holds across different political conditions because it is not tied to one ideology. Whether repression comes from the right or the left, from a security state or a cultural bureaucracy, the mechanism is similar: when the cost of direct practice becomes too high, radical artists retreat into forms that are legible and unthreatening. Of all such forms, flower painting is one of the most efficient disguises. It is decorative, domestic, feminine in the old derogatory critical sense, and therefore beneath notice. Nobody sends intelligence services to photograph a vase of dahlias.

Part of my interest in this is not merely historical. I have been thinking about it for twenty years because I have been doing it. My own tribute to Tatlin took the form of flower paintings deliberately made to resemble the sad, muted, emptied qualities of his late work. To paint flowers as Tatlin painted them is not to celebrate the pastoral. It is to make subjugation visible through flatness, desolation and the sense that something has been evacuated from the image. Those are not aesthetic failings, they are the content.

That is also why my 2013 flower images, Homage to Tatlin, took the form they did. They were never simply flower images. They were images of coal draped with flowers, using an apparently conservative surface to smuggle in a memento mori for a planet moving towards mass extinction under fossil capitalism. The work borrowed the mask of the harmless in order to carry death, irony and accusation. In that sense it was faithful to Tatlin, not by imitation but by understanding the strategic intelligence of appearing submissive while still twisting the knife.

This matters now because the managerial language closing around culture has become simultaneously softer and more punitive. Creative Australia’s repeated framing of the arts as instruments of social cohesion and mutual understanding sounds benign, as these things usually do. But once bureaucrats praise art chiefly for its capacity to soothe division, rebuild trust and neutralise threat, the gears are already turning. In that framework, questioning becomes suspect. Art is tolerated so long as it behaves like conflict mediation with good design.

The Khaled Sabsabi affair made that plain. ‘Social cohesion’ became a vague but potent rationale for overriding artistic judgment in favour of reputational risk management. Institutions now want art to be expressive but safe, political but never costly. In other words, they want culture without consequences. That fantasy pushes artists towards muted genres, coded speech and displaced forms. Flowers begin to make perfect sense.

The current Sydney Biennale has shown the same mechanism in motion. Before the exhibition had even properly opened, organised Zionist critics and institutions were already warning against anti-Zionist bias, objecting to artists’ social media activity and pressuring the event through complaints, denunciations and sponsor agitation. After the opening-night DJ Haram controversy, those pressures intensified into police complaints, corporate withdrawals and the familiar institutional retreat into the language of welcome, inclusion and risk review. You do not need to endorse every slogan uttered on a stage to recognise a political pressure campaign when you see one. The point is structural: organised pressure narrows what can safely be said or shown.

I wrote years ago that biennales, like war, are the continuation of politics by other means. That remains true. The problem is not just this or that sponsor, scandal or lobby group. The problem is that the whole system now excels at absorbing conflict as branding while suppressing any conflict that threatens its operating conditions. Political art is welcome as a genre, less welcome as an intervention. Institutions will happily market difficulty, so long as it remains consumable. What they cannot tolerate is practice that changes register, slips past the approved channels, or refuses the therapeutic tone now demanded of public culture. Again: this is why flowers become interesting.

We are not living under Stalinism or Nazism. But it would be foolish to deny that the mechanisms of cultural contraction are active. Funding is weaponised, boards are stacked, artists are harassed, institutions anticipate outrage and censor themselves in advance, and the pressure to retreat into safe, decorative, risk-free production is constant. The methods are not gulags or Gestapo lists, but they are effective.

The question is whether that retreat can itself be made legible as commentary.

So perhaps the time has come to make letathousandflowersbloom.com real. Not as an online florist for exhausted aesthetes, but as a platform for flower paintings, still lifes, gardens and other apparently modest images made under conditions of damage, defeat, fury and endurance. A site for flowers as social commentary: flowers of censorship, political exhaustion and genocidal times; flowers laid over coal, ash, prisons, drowned cities and ruined solidarities. A site where beauty is not rejected but mistrusted, used tactically, made to carry historical freight.

In short, a site for artists who understand that under repression the minor key may be the only key left, and that even then one can still compose something merciless.

The flowers would not signify optimism. They would signify what remains after optimism has been mugged by history. They would be records of compromise without surrender, of coded dissent, of persistence after the slogans have been confiscated and the grants rewritten around ‘cohesion’. They would acknowledge that defeat is real, that damage accumulates, and that artists are often forced into weakened forms. But weakened forms are not necessarily weak art. Tatlin knew that. Schwitters, Höch, Beckmann and Kiefer knew it. The rest of us are learning it again.

Let a thousand flowers bloom, by all means.

But let them bloom as evidence.

Donald Trump provides, on a nightly basis, a terrifying illustration of the disinhibiting effect of social media at civilisational scale. We can no longer pretend this is abstract or distant, or that the way social media aggregates diffuse discontent into outright fascism is something that can simply be laughed off. This essay was prompted by observations from my friend Dekker Dreyer, whose thinking on this I have taken further here — but I want to close by handing the argument to a different kind of analyst. The World Wide Union of Robots has produced an AI commentary on these same questions, and it is more rigorous and more structurally precise than my own account — examining how social media platforms have been deliberately engineered to reward bad behaviour, and what might actually be done about it. You could say the robots are more generous to humans than I currently feel inclined to be. Their commentary is here.

Social media is full of people who present in daily life as perfectly agreeable: courteous, measured, the kind of person who holds doors open and asks after your health. Yet online the same person can be a reliable source of racist commentary, misogynist jokes circulated with appreciative emojis, and the ambient cruelty that has become so ordinary on social platforms we barely register it any more. The instinctive response — that the online version is the fake, a performance of extremity that doesn’t represent who the person really is — deserves to be turned on its head. That’s who they actually are. The agreeable version is the performance.

Dekker Dreyer, whose writing on digital culture has sharpened my thinking here, makes the point with characteristic insight: the conservative who posts racist and sexist content beneath an AI-generated avatar of their idealised self is not playing a game. It is, he argues, a naked presentation of the world they want to craft and the position they intend to occupy within it. The fantasy avatar is not concealment — it is aspiration made visible. And the content posted beneath it is the political and moral programme those aspirations require. Dreyer’s broader argument is that online discourse is more real, in the sense of determining broad social outcomes, than face-to-face interaction, and that the curated public presentation of self — the person you meet at the shops — is more a product of situational constraint than of genuine character. At home, he writes, when people remove their human mask and type what they feel into their phone, “that’s the person you’re really dealing with.”

The conventional wisdom runs the other way. Social media, we are repeatedly told, is a theatre of manufactured identity: we curate, we filter, we post the holiday from the flattering angle and the career milestone without the rejections. The self projected online is a polished fiction, a highlight reel assembled to manage impressions. The “real” person exists somewhere beneath it, messier and more human. This analysis, however widely accepted, is at best incomplete and at worst precisely inverted. It describes one pattern of social media behaviour while ignoring another that is, if anything, more politically significant. Because for every person constructing a flattering self-portrait, there is someone — often the same person at a different hour — posting something no reputation manager would sanction. Something that reveals not an aspirational fiction but an actual interior.

The question this forces is straightforward: if the online persona is a mask, why would anyone choose a mask that is so comprehensively unpleasant? Masks are chosen for presentation. We wear them to appear as something we wish to be. The person who spends an afternoon posting dehumanising commentary about refugees, sharing memes that reduce women to objects of contempt, or celebrating the humiliation of those they’ve decided are enemies — what possible social advantage comes from presenting yourself to your actual network of acquaintances as someone who finds pleasure in the suffering of others? The answer is none. Which is precisely the point. This is not strategic construction. It is what surfaces when the ordinary social pressures governing face-to-face behaviour are removed — when there is no body language to read, no visible discomfort on the other person’s face, no awareness that you’ll run into them again at the school gate. What remains is closer to unmediated thought than almost anything else modern life produces.

Psychology provides a framework for this, though its conventional interpretation is too cautious about the implications. John Suler’s 2004 paper identifying the “online disinhibition effect” describes the tendency of people to behave online in ways they would not in person — to act out more, shed ordinary social constraints, and express hostility they would normally suppress, what he termed “toxic disinhibition.”¹ Suler himself was careful not to describe this as the revelation of a “true self,” preferring to characterise it as a shift between different constellations within the self-structure. That caution is reasonable as psychology, but it sidesteps the political question. When what is disinhibited is racial contempt, the dehumanisation of women, or enthusiasm for state violence against the powerless, we are not dealing with a contextual variation in personality. We are dealing with a politics. And the conditions that normally inhibit its expression — professional consequences, social censure, the basic requirements of community participation — are forms of constraint, not authenticity.

This matters because it connects to a much larger argument about how fascism forms as a cultural phenomenon. Henry Giroux, drawing on decades of critical pedagogy, has tracked the way fascism normalises itself not through sudden rupture but through the gradual erosion of the language and social norms that once made its expression unacceptable. Fascism is normalised in a capitalist order when its diverse economic, political and social problems appear fragmented, disconnected, and are treated in isolation. The racist meme shared among friends on a private Facebook group, the misogynist joke that “everyone knows is just banter,” the cheerful cruelty directed at asylum seekers — these are not peripheral to political life. They are its texture. They constitute the cultural substrate in which authoritarian politics roots and grows. Fascism does not merely enforce obedience; it stages it. The staging begins long before policy, in the daily rehearsal of contempt.

What Dreyer’s analysis adds to Giroux’s is the recognition that social media is the primary contemporary site of this rehearsal. The meme is not innocent entertainment. Fascist visual culture operates as a form of public pedagogy and the meme — cheap, viral, deniable as humour — is perhaps the most efficient delivery mechanism that pedagogy has ever had. The AI-generated avatar of the idealised self paired with content expressing racial hierarchy is a coherent political act: it projects the desired social order and the desired position within it simultaneously. It recruits. It normalises. It tests what can be said and measures the social cost of saying it, gradually establishing that the cost is lower than previously assumed.

The role of mainstream media in this process is not incidental — it is structural. The mainstream media have a greater affinity for the bottom line than for the truth. Their silence amounts to a form of complicity. More than silence, actually. The liberal media and Trump have a love/hate relationship. Although these media are some of Trump’s fiercest critics, they helped create him. The logic is straightforward: outrage and spectacle are commercially productive. Every amplified extremity, every platform given to the provocateur as a ratings exercise, every false-balance segment that treats fascist rhetoric as one legitimate perspective among several, trains audiences in the grammar of normalisation. A media ecosystem built on clickbait and erasure renders fascists as legitimate while making invisible the roots of mass suffering and fear, turning oppression into spectacle and silence into complicity. The troll and the mainstream broadcaster operate in the same system. One produces the raw material; the other launders it.

This is the context in which Dreyer’s observation about online authenticity takes on its full weight. The culture war, he argues, is where real political action occurs, and online discourse shapes broad social outcomes more directly than most physical-world interactions do. If that is right — and the evidence increasingly supports it — then dismissing toxic online behaviour as venting, trolling, or exaggeration is not just analytically wrong. It is politically disarming. It allows the very people whose expressed commitments include hostility to democratic equality to be treated, in their daily face-to-face roles, as basically decent citizens whose online activity is somehow separate from who they are. It extends, indefinitely, a benefit of the doubt they are actively working to exploit.

Consider what it means to sustain a pleasant social performance across years while maintaining an online presence devoted to racial contempt or the degradation of women. This is not hypocrisy in any simple sense — the warmth in the moment may be genuine, as an expression of the social self that the constraints of face-to-face life have shaped. But it operates within a person whose deeper political commitments are visible only when those constraints are lifted. And those commitments are the ones that matter: the ones that determine how they vote, which forms of violence they will excuse, what policies they will quietly support. The agreeable demeanour is real but it is also, in the relevant sense, performance. The post is the programme.

None of this leads to a comfortable politics. It means taking seriously, as evidence of character and political alignment, things routinely dismissed as peripheral. It means recognising that the online space is not a distorted reflection of social reality but one of its primary production sites — the place where the cultural formation of political allegiances actually happens, where fascism rehearses itself and builds its social base. And it means understanding that the mainstream media’s chronic failure to name this process clearly, its preference for spectacle over analysis and balance over truth, is not mere negligence. It is a form of enabling, structurally indistinguishable from complicity.

For decades, the Australian arts sector has operated under a spell—the spell of philanthropic benevolence, of patronage as virtue, of funding as the lifeblood of cultural life. But every spell is a form of binding, and this one has been precise: the acceptance of Zionist-backed funding carried an implicit contract that was invisible to most recipients until recently, a contract to remain silent on Palestine, to normalise occupation, to transform culture into a diplomatic asset.

Recent events—most notably the Sydney Biennale’s refusal to be bullied over its choice of Artistic Director—have demonstrated that the withdrawal of patronage is, in practice, a hollow threat. Truth is finally “coming out of her well to shame mankind”. The withdrawal of such funding, far from the catastrophe predicted by some, represents not the silencing of the arts but their emancipation. This transition, occurring within the context of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, offers Australian arts a historic opportunity: to build a cultural economy rooted not in the image management of powerful interests but in democratic accountability, artistic integrity, and genuine solidarity.

I. The Nature of Zionist Patronage

Before proceeding, a distinction must be made—one that this essay’s critics will be quickest to seize on. The problem addressed here is not Jewish philanthropy in the Australian arts. It is a specific subset of it: funding that operates as an instrument of Israeli state advocacy, deployed to silence Palestinian voices and punish institutions that refuse to comply. These are not the same thing, and conflating them would itself be a form of the dishonesty this essay seeks to expose.

As documented in Essay One, Jewish philanthropy has a history in the Australian arts that is, in places, genuinely spectacular. The Besen, Gandel, and Pratt family foundations have funded institutions, collections, and programmes that would not otherwise exist. Much of this giving has proceeded without political conditions, motivated by the same civic generosity that has characterised Jewish cultural philanthropy in liberal democracies for over a century—a tradition with deep roots in the emancipatory politics of diasporic Jewish life. To treat that history as tainted by association with a political programme it long predates would be both inaccurate and unjust.

The difficulty, and it is a real one, is that there is currently no reliable mechanism for distinguishing philanthropic giving made in good faith from giving deployed as soft-power leverage—until the leverage is applied. The problem becomes visible only when a donor withdraws, demands a programme change, or coordinates with lobby bodies to threaten an institution’s funding base. By that point, the damage to institutional independence has already begun. This opacity is itself a structural argument for reducing dependence on any concentrated private philanthropy, Jewish or otherwise.

On the question of how many Australian Jews actively support the weaponisation of arts funding: the data is genuinely contested and the honest answer is that we do not know. Surveys conducted before October 2023 found that roughly 70 per cent of respondents identified as Zionists in some form—but those surveys were distributed through Zionist Federation networks, skewed heavily towards older community members, and asked questions that conflated broad emotional attachment to Israel with active political support for its government’s conduct. Zionist peak bodies claim up to 95 per cent of Australian Jews have a strong connection to Israel; the Jewish Council of Australia, founded in 2024 to represent non-Zionist Jews, cites a pre-war figure suggesting at least 30 per cent do not identify as Zionists, and has attracted over 1,300 signatories to its core values statement.

The gap between those figures—and the methodological chaos that separates them—should caution against treating the Australian Jewish community as a monolith. What can be said with more confidence is that the organisations actively coordinating pressure on arts institutions—the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA), Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC)—represent a specific, politically organised faction within that community, and that this faction does not speak for all Australian Jews, many of whom have been among the most vocal critics of both the occupation and the silencing of dissent about it. The dishonour being done to a noble tradition of Jewish cultural patronage is, in large part, being done by people who claim to act in the name of a community far more divided than they acknowledge.

The withdrawal of Zionist-backed funding is best understood not as censorship but as exposure. For decades, corporate and philanthropic funding has operated as a transaction masquerading as benevolence. The donor’s ‘gift’ is never neutral; it is a purchase of cultural legitimacy, an investment in what might be termed ‘image management.’ For organisations backed by Zionist interests, the return on investment is the normalisation of the Israeli cultural presence and the marginalisation of Palestinian voices within Australian public life. The 2022 Sydney Festival’s acceptance of Israeli embassy funding stands as a case study in this dynamic: an institution becoming, however unwittingly, part of a public diplomacy apparatus designed to launder a reputation stained by occupation.

This is not a conspiracy theory but a structural observation. Philanthropy in the arts has always functioned as a form of soft power. When the Australian arts sector accepts funding from sources tied to the Israeli state or its advocacy networks, it enters into an implicit contract. That contract requires that Palestinian narratives—particularly those that name the occupation as apartheid or genocide—remain offstage, unspoken, unfundable. The withdrawal of such funding exposes this hidden contract, revealing how dependent Australian cultural institutions have become on morally compromised revenue streams.

The panic that accompanies this exposure is revealing. It suggests that many institutions have internalised the logic of the donor, prioritising financial survival over artistic integrity. But the question we must ask is: survival at what cost? The preservation of an institution that cannot speak truthfully about the world is not preservation but embalming. The death of an institution is not the death of culture; it is the precondition for cultural rebirth.

II. Recent Cases: The Deplatforming of Dissent

The mechanisms of Zionist pressure on Australian arts organisations have grown increasingly brazen in recent months. Two cases in particular illustrate the pattern of censorship and manipulation that has become commonplace.

The Francesca Albanese Cancellation

In March 2026, Adelaide University abruptly cancelled a venue booking for a literary festival event featuring Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The event, part of Constellations: Not Writers Week—itself a pop-up festival that emerged after the cancellation of the main Adelaide Writers’ Week—was scheduled to take place at the university’s Elder Hall. Organisers had worked with university management for weeks, only to be told at the last minute that the booking ‘did not proceed in accordance with due process.’ The university offered an alternative venue at the National Wine Centre for the substantial sum of $23,500, compared to the original $750 fee for Elder Hall.

The incident drew sharp criticism from former Adelaide Writers’ Week director Louise Adler, who described Adelaide as ‘Moscow on the Torrens,’ and from UN Independent Commission member Chris Sidoti, who stated that ‘a university incapable of upholding free speech no longer merits to be called a university.’ The cancellation followed a report in The Australian suggesting that hosting Albanese—who had been placed on the US Treasury’s sanctions list by the Trump administration for her criticism of Israeli actions in Gaza—could place the university in defiance of US sanctions.

The Sydney Biennale Fabrication

The case of the Sydney Biennale reveals an even more insidious pattern. When Hoor Al-Qasimi was appointed Artistic Director of the 25th Biennale of Sydney in 2024, the organisation immediately came under intense pressure from Israeli and Zionist sources. Several donors withdrew their support, and the appointment drew condemnation from figures such as Peter Wertheim of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, who described it as an example of ‘one of Australia’s flagship cultural institutions being captured by an extremist anti-Western political agenda.’ The Biennale board resisted this pressure, found alternative funding sources, and strenuously fought off attempts at censorship.

However, when direct funding pressure failed to destroy the Biennale, the tactic shifted dramatically. A fabricated narrative emerged that the Biennale would be placed under the oversight of a representative of the Jewish Board of Deputies—a confected story designed to provoke artists into withdrawing in protest. When the organisation could not be destroyed by defunding, its opponents sought to destroy it by fabrication. This manipulation—creating a censorship crisis that did not exist precisely because actual censorship attempts had failed—is a recurring pattern that must be named and understood.

The Systemic Pattern

These cases are not isolated incidents but part of a systematic pattern documented across Australian arts institutions:

• KA Ren Wyld: Martu author stripped of $15,000 black&write! fellowship by ministerial direction over a social media post

• Khaled Sabsabi: Lebanese Australian artist dumped as Australia’s Venice Biennale representative by Creative Australia

• Jayson Gillham: Pianist’s dispute with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra led to the CEO’s resignation and a legal battle

• State Library of Victoria: Cancelled Teen Writing Bootcamp after vetting facilitators’ social media for Gaza content

• Sydney Theatre Company: Censured actors for wearing keffiyehs, cancelled performance, issued public apology

• ABC journalists: Suspended from Gaza coverage for signing a petition for unbiased reporting

III. The New Funding Architecture

What, then, should replace the old patronage model? The answer cannot be a simple return to government funding, for the state is no neutral arbiter—especially once it has been captured by foreign interests. However, the spectre of government control is often invoked more readily than the reality of private censorship. We must be clear-eyed about the limitations of all funding sources while recognising that some are more amenable to democratic accountability than others.

Expanded Public Funding

The Creative Australia model, with its ‘arm’s-length’ principle, offers a starting point. Public funding, protected from direct political interference by statutory independence, provides a more accountable foundation than private philanthropy. The argument that ‘who pays the piper calls the tune’ applies with equal or greater force to corporate donors, whose interests are never subject to electoral oversight. The push to restore and expand public funding should be understood not as a retreat to state dependence but as a positive good: the recognition that culture is a public utility, not a private luxury.

As demonstrated in Essay One, government funding already provides 96–97 per cent of non-commercial arts funding. The challenge is not to replace philanthropic funding with government funding—government funding already dominates—but to protect government funding from the leverage of private donors. This requires strengthening the arm’s-length principle, increasing base funding to reduce institutional vulnerability, and explicitly protecting artistic freedom in funding legislation.

Grassroots and Community Models

The history of Australian arts is rich with examples of self-organisation: artist-run initiatives, community cultural development programmes, union-sponsored projects. These models, though often precarious, offer a more democratic alternative to the hierarchical structures of corporate philanthropy. They tie artistic production to communities of accountability rather than to the whims of wealthy patrons. The emerging network of crowdfunding and cooperative funding models—exemplified by platforms such as Patreon and Kickstarter, as well as more radical experiments in mutual aid—suggests that the public is willing to support culture directly when given the opportunity.

The Australian Cultural Fund’s record-breaking $15 million in 2024–25, supported by 20,000 donors, demonstrates the viability of distributed giving. While this represents only 5 per cent of private arts philanthropy, it offers a model of support disconnected from the leverage of major donors. The median donation of $50 suggests a broad base of modest supporters—a different political economy entirely from the concentration of giving among wealthy families.

International Solidarity Funding

The withdrawal of Zionist-backed funding opens space for new international partnerships. Rather than relying on the predictable circuits of Western philanthropy, Australian arts organisations might build direct relationships with cultural centres in the Global South, with Palestinian arts organisations, and with international networks of solidarity. Such partnerships would not be without their own complexities—solidarity is not a simple exchange—but they would align funding with political principle in ways that the old model explicitly forbade.

The Sydney Festival’s loss of $20,000 in Israeli embassy funding in 2022 led to its decision to no longer accept foreign government funding—a principled stance that could be extended to corporate sponsors with state ties. The question is not whether arts organisations can survive without compromised funding, but whether they can survive with it while maintaining artistic integrity.

IV. Addressing Censorship and Hegemony

Critics will argue that the withdrawal of Zionist funding would leave Australian arts vulnerable to other forms of censorship. This concern is not unfounded but it is absurdly contradictory. The recent history of Australian arts funding includes notable instances of government interference: the ‘hate’ clauses proposed by Antisemitism Envoy Jillian Segal, which would condition funding on adherence to vague standards of ‘social cohesion’; the defunding of organisations that express solidarity with Palestine; the quiet pressure exerted on arts ministers to shape programming decisions. The lesson to be drawn from Zionist interference is that if they can do it, others can do it—but the glaring truth remains that very few other influences could be as toxic as Zionism has shown itself to be.

Yet the answer to state censorship is not a retreat to private patronage but a fight for better public protections. The ‘arm’s-length’ principle must be defended not as a historical curiosity but as a living tradition. Artists and arts workers must organise to resist attempts to weaponise funding, whether the weapon is wielded by the state or by private donors. The difference is this: a democratic state can be held accountable through political struggle; a private foundation can only be petitioned.

Moreover, the private patronage model has long enforced its own form of censorship—a self-censorship that is all the more effective for being internalised. Artists learn early which topics are ‘fundable’ and which are not. The withdrawal of Zionist funding makes this hidden curriculum visible, creating space for work that the old model would have suffocated in its cradle.

The Limits of ‘Neutrality’

Creative Australia’s response to the Khaled Sabsabi controversy—invoking ‘social cohesion’ and institutional ‘neutrality’—reveals the political nature of claimed neutrality. As Alissar Seyla argues in L’Internationale Online, neutrality in the face of ongoing violence is itself a political position that supports the status quo. The claim that arts institutions must remain ‘neutral’ on questions of occupation, apartheid, or genocide is not a defence of artistic freedom but its negation.

The pattern is clear: ‘neutrality’ is invoked to silence Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices while Israeli cultural programming proceeds unquestioned. The Sydney Festival accepted Israeli embassy funding without controversy until artists boycotted; the NGV Contemporary development received massive support from Jewish philanthropists without political scrutiny until protests began. Neutrality, it seems, applies only to one side of the conflict.

V. A Note on Structural Funding Reform

The fact remains that while increased government arts funding is welcome, it also carries the risk of becoming a censorship instrument. The recent controversies over the Sydney Biennale and the Adelaide literary festivals demonstrate that neither private nor public funding is immune to political pressure. The solution lies not in choosing between these flawed systems but in moving towards a model that structurally removes political leverage over individual practitioners.

One reform concerns the allocation model itself. We need to move away from peer-assessed project-application funding—a system that rewards competitive entrepreneurship and conformity to bureaucratic metrics—towards arms-length allocation based on sortition: a lottery-based system that distributes funding by random selection from a pool of eligible practitioners. Eligibility criteria would focus on demonstrated commitment to artistic practice rather than on the perceived merit of specific proposals. This approach would eliminate the perverse incentives that currently shape artistic production, reduce the administrative burden on artists, and—most importantly—remove the capacity of politicians, donors, or peer panels to punish individual practitioners for their political views.

Such a system would not eliminate all forms of judgement or accountability, but it would shift the locus of decision-making from the speculative projection of ‘excellence’ to the material support of practice. It would recognise that artistic value cannot be predicted in advance, that the most important work often emerges from unexpected quarters, and that a democratic culture requires not the selection of winners by expert panels but the provision of resources to all who commit to the rigours of artistic labour.

A second, complementary reform addresses the structural relationship between private patronage and public institutions. The problem with private patronage is not the donors themselves—they are perfectly entitled to their views—but the structural relationship that allows a gift to function as leverage. That relationship can be broken without touching anyone’s right to give.

The mechanism is straightforward: require that all private donations to publicly funded cultural organisations be channelled through the Australian Cultural Fund (or an equivalent intermediary body), where they are pooled and disbursed to recipient organisations as an aggregated, anonymous lump sum. Donor names might appear on a public register for transparency purposes, but individual amounts would remain undisclosed. The organisation receives money; it does not receive a relationship. The donor’s capacity to attach conditions, apply pressure, or threaten withdrawal in response to programming decisions is structurally eliminated, because the causal link between any particular gift and any particular recipient has been severed at the point of aggregation.

This reform would also provide a natural mechanism for expanding public funding through matching arrangements: government contributions indexed to the aggregate of private donations flowing through the fund, turning philanthropic activity into a lever for increased public investment rather than a substitute for it. The net effect would be more money in the sector, more equitably distributed, and none of it carrying the barnacles of donor expectation.

What such a reform does not do—and should not do—is prevent anyone from founding their own organisation aligned with their own values and funding it accordingly. The Zionist lobby, or any other ideologically coherent constituency, retains every right to establish and sustain cultural institutions that reflect its commitments. What it loses is the ability to use philanthropic instruments to discipline institutions that exist to serve the broader public. The distinction between founding and colonising is not a subtle one. It is, in fact, the whole point.

Proposed Reforms: (1) Transition from competitive project-application funding to sortition-based allocation, removing the capacity for political or donor leverage over individual artists while maintaining democratic accountability through transparent eligibility criteria. (2) Require all private donations to publicly funded cultural organisations to be channelled through the Australian Cultural Fund as aggregated, anonymous lump sums, breaking the structural link between donation and leverage, and enabling government matching of private contributions.

VI. Structural Rebirth

The transition to a post-Zionist funding model will not be painless. Some institutions will not survive the loss of their traditional revenue streams. Others will transform beyond recognition. This is not a tragedy but a necessity. The Australian arts sector has long been burdened by a funding structure that prioritised the already-successful, the already-connected, the already-sanitised. A new funding architecture offers the possibility of a different hierarchy: one that values emerging and regional artists, that funds process as well as product, that recognises the right of artists to address the world as it is, not as the donors would have it be.

The withdrawal of Zionist funding is thus not a crisis but an opportunity. It is an opportunity to build a cultural economy that answers to communities rather than to embassies, to justice rather than to ‘image management,’ to the difficult truth rather than to the comfortable denial. The muse was never silenced by the absence of Zionist money; she was silenced by its presence. Her return to voice is the promise of this moment.

The Path Forward

The quantitative analysis in Essay One established that Jewish philanthropy represents approximately 0.2–0.5 per cent of total Australian arts funding. This minuscule percentage should not be capable of generating systemic censorship, widespread self-silencing, and political controversy. That it does so reveals the mechanism: influence operates not through the promise of support but through the threat of withdrawal, amplified by political intervention and weaponised accusations of antisemitism.

The solution, therefore, is not to replace Jewish philanthropy with other forms of private patronage—any concentrated source of funding can be leveraged for political control. The solution is structural:

• Reduce institutional vulnerability by increasing base government funding to levels that make the withdrawal of individual donors strategically irrelevant

• Strengthen arm’s-length principles by explicitly protecting artistic freedom in funding legislation and holding government actors accountable for political interference

• Democratise funding allocation through sortition-based systems that remove the capacity for political or donor leverage over individual artists

• Channel all private philanthropy to publicly funded organisations through an intermediary fund as anonymous, aggregated lump sums, with government matching of contributions

• Build alternative networks of grassroots, community, and international solidarity funding that distribute risk across many small supporters rather than concentrating it among few wealthy donors

• Refuse the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism and defend the right of artists to address questions of occupation, apartheid, and genocide without institutional reprisal

The Australian arts sector stands at a crossroads. One path leads to continued dependence on funding sources that demand silence on questions of justice, that transform culture into a tool of state and corporate interests, that reduce art to a commodity purchased by the wealthy to launder their reputations. The other path leads towards a cultural economy grounded in democratic accountability, artistic integrity, and genuine solidarity with the oppressed.

The choice is not between funding and freedom—the quantitative evidence proves that government funding already provides the vast majority of support. The choice is between a cultural sector that serves power and one that serves justice; between a cultural sector that can be bought and one that cannot be sold; between a cultural sector that speaks truth and one that speaks only what the donors permit.

The withdrawal of Zionist patronage does not silence the arts. It gives them voice.

Bibliography

‘A Year in Review—2024/2025 Financial Year.’ Australian Cultural Fund, 2025. https://australianculturalfund.org.au/blog/a-year-in-review-2024-2025-financial-year/.

‘Annual Impact Report 2023–2024.’ Gandel Foundation, 2024. https://gandelfoundation.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/2023-2024-GF-impact-report_final.pdf.

‘Australia’s Elites Are Censoring Criticism of Israel by Calling It Antisemitism.’ Jacobin, December 2023. https://jacobin.com/2023/12/australia-elites-censorship-israel-palestine-solidarity-sydney-theatre-company.

‘Australians Report Donating Almost $8 Billion to Charity.’ Roy Morgan, October 2025. https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/10024-charitable-donations-october-2025.

‘Call to Strip Arts Institutions of Funding over Antisemitism.’ Sydney Morning Herald, July 15, 2025. https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/call-to-strip-arts-institutions-of-funding-over-antisemitism-raises-alarm-bells-20250715-p5mf58.html.

‘Censorship, 2018Social Cohesion2019 and the Case of Khaled Sabsabi.’ L’Internationale Online, 2025. https://www.internationaleonline.org/contributions/speaking-in-times-of-genocide/.

‘Comparing US and Australian Fundraising by Revenue Area.’ Fundraising Force. Accessed March 2026. https://fundraisingforce.com.au/comparing-us-and-australian-fundraising-by-revenue-area/.

‘$18 Million to Build the Jewish Arts Quarter.’ Josh Burns MP, March 31, 2025. https://www.joshburns.com.au/media/18-million-to-build-the-jewish-arts-quarter/.

‘Federal Budget 2025–26—What It Means for the Arts.’ Theatre Network Australia. Accessed March 2026. https://tna.org.au/federal-budget-2025-26-what-it-means-for-the-arts/.

‘4.48 Million Aussies Donated to Charities.’ KPMG, January 2026. https://kpmg.com/au/en/media/media-releases/2026/01/over-4-million-aussies-donated-to-charities-kpmg-analysis.html.

‘Jewish Donors Withdraw Funding from Australian Arts over Anti-Israel Sentiment.’ Facebook, February 2026.

‘Major Donor Walks Out, Pulls Funding over Show 2018Repulsive2019 to Jews.’ Australian Financial Review, February 6, 2026.

‘Perpetual Philanthropy Insights Report 2024.’ Perpetual, 2024. https://www.perpetual.com.au/4ab708/globalassets/_au-site-media/01-documents/03-wealth-management/reports/2024/perpetual-philanthropy-insights-report-2024.pdf.

‘Speaking out on Gaza: Australian Creatives and Arts Organisations Struggle to Reconcile Competing Pressures.’ The Guardian, June 15, 2025.

‘Sydney Festival to No Longer Accept Foreign Government Funding after Mass Boycott.’ The Guardian, September 27, 2022.

‘Sydney Festival Boycott: More than 20 Acts Withdraw over Israeli Embassy Funding.’ The Guardian, January 4, 2022.

‘The Grant Programs.’ Besen Family Foundation. Accessed March 2026. https://www.besenfoundation.org.au/areas-of-interest.

‘The Jewish Population of Australia: Key Findings from the 2021 Census.’ Jewish Data Bank, 2022. https://www.jewishdatabank.org/databank/search-results/study/1239.

‘To Scale: Mapping Financial Inflows in Australian Arts, Culture and Creativity.’ A New Approach, August 2023. https://newapproach.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/To-Scale-main-report-ANA.pdf.

‘United Israel Appeal: Charity Channels Tax-Free Donations Direct to Israel.’ Reddit, February 2026.

Vivian, Angela, Alan Hui, Kate Fielding, Tim Acker, and Sari Rossi. ‘The Big Picture 4: Expenditure on Artistic, Cultural and Creative Activity by Governments in Australia in 2007–08 to 2021–22.’ A New Approach, May 2024. https://newapproach.org.au/publication/the-big-picture-expenditure-on-artistic-cultural-and-creative-activity-by-governments-in-australia-in-2007-08-to-2021-22/.

The current Sydney Biennale is worth pausing over. From the moment Hoor al-Qasimi was appointed, the attacks began almost immediately — withdrawal of patronage funding, public pressure, the usual arsenal. An Emirati sheikha and world-renowned curator, she was eminently qualified and the objections appeared to have no basis beyond her being Arab. That’s not a complicated observation — it was racism in the service of Israeli state politics.

The Board held firm. They secured replacement funding and the Biennale proceeded although apparently under constant harassment. The result is arguably the best Biennale in years, certainly one of the very few I’ve ever wanted to attend and the first one I’ve found myself genuinely wishing I was included in.

What interested me more was what came next: the attempt, once the funding pressure failed, to sabotage the Biennale from within, finally at the last minute by circulating claims that the Board had invited a representative of the militant pro-Israeli Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) to vet the exhibition. This turned out to be false; someone from the Council had been on a general invitation list of around 2,000 people for a preview event but an Australian Financial Review article provocatively implied this was formal vetting, with potential to provoke a protest boycott from artists. It failed but it had landed on already fertile ground, because the ECAJ and allied organisations have developed a consistent pattern of targeting any artist or institution that expresses even the mildest solidarity with Palestinians or criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza.

I should say that I come to this with a particular history. When I first became seriously involved in the art world in the early 1960s, many of my most significant supporters were European Jewish refugees — some war refugees, some who arrived later as economic migrants. They educated me and guided me towards perspectives and knowledge that would have been difficult to find in the then-barren landscape of Anglo-Australian culture. They were artists and they were patrons whose generosity played a major part in creating our current cultural infrastructure. They made me who I am, and I will never resile from that.

These people are not the source of the current problem. The problem, as so often, lies with neoliberalism which in its systematic destruction of public infrastructure opened the door for bad-faith actors to move in and weaponise patronage, corrupting the open and tolerant institutions their predecessors helped build. What we are now fighting to preserve is precisely what these malign foreign forces are prepared to destroy in their racist zealotry.

This prompted me to look more carefully at the actual structure of arts patronage in Australia. Anyone who has worked in cultural institutions knows the dynamic: patrons are treated as gods, while artists are treated as disposable, despite their unpaid (or poorly paid) participation contributing far more value to the cultural life of these organisations. I wanted to understand how much patronage the system actually depends on, and how much of it could plausibly be leveraged for political ends.

The short answer is: very little. The proportion of Australian arts funding susceptible to Zionist or other pressure turns out to be infinitesimally small. Which raises the obvious question of how so much institutional anxiety has been generated by so little financial exposure.

Quantifying this is necessarily imprecise. No one tracks patronage by religion or ethnicity, nor should they, but where organisations are involved some inferences become possible. However, they remain inferences. Any figure relating specifically to Zionist-aligned giving requires further guesswork about what proportion of Australian Jews identify with Zionist politics — and that figure is itself contested and probably overstated. I feel genuinely uncomfortable working in these categories at all; the fact that it has become necessary is itself a measure of how much damage has already been done.

With all those caveats, what follows is a survey of the elements that actually constitute arts funding in Australia, and an examination of how funding structures might be reformed to resist the kind of political leverage that attempted to derail this Biennale, having already successfully derailed other cultural events. A second essay, to be published separately, addresses the record of censorship and what might be done about it.

Essay One: The Disproportion

In the theatre of Australian arts funding, a curious paradox has emerged: private philanthropy, comprising a mere 3-4% of total arts funding, wields influence far exceeding its financial contribution. Jewish philanthropic contributions, representing perhaps 0.2-0.5% of total arts funding, have become the subject of intense political controversy entirely disproportionate to their scale. This disparity between financial contribution and political influence demands explanation. How can such a small fraction of total funding generate such outsized power over what is seen, heard, and funded in Australian cultural institutions?

The answer lies not in the quantum of philanthropic dollars but in the structural vulnerabilities of arts institutions, the mechanisms of donor leverage, and the political weaponisation of accusations of antisemitism. This essay examines the quantitative reality of Australian arts funding—dominated overwhelmingly by government sources—and asks why private philanthropy, particularly from Jewish donors, exercises influence so vastly disproportionate to its financial contribution. It exposes a system where the threat of withdrawal, rather than the promise of support, has become the primary mechanism of cultural control.

I. The Government Dominance:
Quantifying the Funding Landscape

Total Government Expenditure

The foundation of Australian arts and culture is emphatically public. According to A New Approach’s “The Big Picture 4” report, Australia’s three levels of government—federal, state/territory, and local—collectively directed $7.7 billion into arts and culture in 2021-22. This represents a 4% increase from the previous year when adjusted for inflation, though it masks a troubling long-term trend: between 2007-08 and 2021-22, Australia’s population increased by 22% while arts expenditure increased by only 14%.

The 2025-26 Federal Budget provides more recent figures. Creative Australia’s core funding increased to $318 million (up from $306.6 million in 2024-25), with the total federal arts portfolio investment reaching $1.1 billion. These figures confirm government funding as the overwhelming foundation of Australian arts infrastructure.

Key Finding: Government funding accounts for approximately 96-97% of all non-commercial arts funding in Australia, with private philanthropy contributing only 3-4%.

International Comparison: Australia’s Underfunding

Even this substantial government investment places Australia poorly in international comparison. According to A New Approach, Australia spends 0.9% of GDP on “recreation, culture and religion,” compared to the OECD average of 1.2%, ranking 26th out of 33 OECD countries. Australia’s total charitable giving (across all causes) represents only 0.8% of GDP, compared to 2.1% in the United States.

II. Private Philanthropy:
The Minor but Significant Contributor

Total Private Philanthropy for Arts

The quantitative reality of private philanthropy in Australian arts is sobering. According to A New Approach’s “To Scale” report, private philanthropic income for arts and culture not-for-profits was $282 million in 2021-22 (adjusted dollars), up from $150 million in 2017-18—an 88% increase that sounds impressive until placed in context. This $282 million represents only 0.18% of the total $160 billion financial inflows to Australia’s cultural and creative industries.

Recent data suggests arts and culture receives approximately 3% of total Australian philanthropy. With Australians donating approximately $8-9 billion annually to charity, this suggests $240-270 million annually for arts and culture from all private sources—closely aligned with the ANA figure. Notably, the Perpetual Philanthropy Insights Report 2024 reveals a concerning trend: funding for arts and culture has declined from 5% to 3% of total philanthropic giving over the past decade.

The Critical Ratio: Government vs Philanthropy

The ratio of government to philanthropic funding reveals the stark reality. For the overall arts and culture sector, government funding exceeds private philanthropy by approximately 27 to 1. For not-for-profit arts organisations specifically, government grants make up 41% of revenue while donations contribute 23% — a ratio of approximately 11 to 1.

These ratios expose a fundamental truth: the notion that private philanthropy could replace or even significantly supplement government funding is mathematically absurd. The scale disparity is simply too great.

III. Jewish Philanthropy in Australian Arts:
Disproportionate but Limited

Demographic Context

According to the 2021 Australian Census, Australia’s Jewish population was estimated at 116,967 people, constituting 0.46% of the national population. This tiny demographic base makes the prominence of Jewish philanthropists in Australian arts all the more notable—and the political controversy surrounding their role all the more revealing.

Major Jewish Arts Philanthropists

Several Jewish families and foundations are significant contributors to Australian arts. The Gandel Foundation, established in 1978, has invested over $200 million in the community, with approximately $152 million in grants to over 615 charities in the last 13 years alone. Arts and culture is one of three priority areas (alongside health and Jewish identity). Major recipients include:

• National Gallery of Victoria (NGV): Major legacy grant for NGV Contemporary building development

• Jewish Museum of Australia: Support for exhibitions and capacity building

• Melbourne Symphony Orchestra: Funding for Holocaust-related concerts

• Various community arts organisations

The Besen Family Foundation similarly lists arts and culture as a priority area, having established the Tarrawarra Museum of Art in 2002—the first significant public visual arts museum established by private donors in Australia. Other notable Jewish donors include the Lowy, Smorgon, Pratt, and Myers families. Private donors (many Jewish) contributed more than $100 million to the Art Gallery of NSW’s Sydney Modern wing, with the largest single donation of $24 million.

The Jewish Arts Quarter: A Case Study

The proposed Jewish Arts Quarter (JAQ) in Melbourne’s Elsternwick has attracted significant political attention. Both major parties committed $18 million in government funding—a rare bipartisan agreement that itself signals the political weight of Jewish community representation. This $18 million commitment represents approximately 5.7% of Creative Australia’s annual core funding of $318 million, redirected to a single culturally-specific project.

Estimating Jewish Philanthropic Contribution

Precise figures for Jewish philanthropic contributions to Australian arts are not publicly available. However, we can construct a reasonable estimate:

• Total private arts philanthropy: ~$282 million annually

• Jewish population: 0.46% of Australia

• Jewish representation among major donors: Disproportionately high

• Estimated Jewish share of arts philanthropy: 5-15%

• Estimated Jewish philanthropic contribution: $15-40 million annually

This represents approximately 0.2-0.5% of total arts funding (government + private). For context, the United Israel Appeal (UIA) Australia received $50.9 million in tax-deductible donations in 2024 alone, demonstrating the substantial capacity of Jewish philanthropic networks—much of which is directed internationally rather than to Australian arts.

IV. The Paradox of Influence Without Scale

How 0.2-0.5% Becomes 100%

The central question demands answering: how does philanthropic contribution representing 0.2-0.5% of total funding exercise such extraordinary influence over artistic programming, institutional policy, and public discourse? The answer lies not in the quantum of support but in the threat of withdrawal and the political weaponisation of that threat.

1. Structural Vulnerability of Arts Institutions

Arts institutions operate on marginal budgets with high fixed costs. The withdrawal of even modest philanthropic support can trigger institutional crisis. As documented in recent cases, major donors have withdrawn funding from:

• Sydney Theatre Company (following actors wearing keffiyehs)

• Sydney Festival (following boycott over Israeli embassy funding)

• Collingwood Yards and NAVA (following pro-Palestinian statements)

• Sydney Festival 2026 (following appointment of Arab curator)

2. The Weaponisation of Antisemitism Accusations

As documented by The Guardian, Jacobin, and L’Internationale Online, political and media establishments have systematically weaponised accusations of antisemitism to delegitimise criticism of Israel. This conflation serves multiple functions:

• It provides moral sanction for censorship of pro-Palestinian expression

• It creates a ‘built-in blackmail lever’ where any support for Palestinian justice can be designated as antisemitic

• It places institutions in impossible positions where they must choose between donor support and artistic freedom

• It allows wealthy donors to threaten institutions with accusations of ‘institution-wide antisemitism’

3. Government Amplification

Government actors have amplified donor pressure through direct intervention:

• Queensland Arts Minister John-Paul Langbroek directed the State Library of Queensland to strip author KA Ren Wyld of a $15,000 fellowship due to a social media post about Gaza

• Shadow Arts Minister Claire Chandler pressured Creative Australia to dump artist Khaled Sabsabi from the Venice Biennale. Arts Minister Tony Burke expressed ‘shock’ at Sabsabi’s work, precipitating his removal

• Special Envoy for Antisemitism Jillian Segal proposed conditioning arts funding on adherence to undefined ‘social cohesion’ standards

The Mechanism of Pre-emptive Censorship

The most insidious effect is institutional self-censorship. Organisations learn which topics are ‘fundable’ and which are career-ending. The State Library of Victoria’s implementation of ‘Ways of Working’ frameworks requiring contractors to sign agreements about personal views, the widespread vetting of artists’ social media for Palestine-related content, and the quiet exclusion of Arab, Muslim, or pro-Palestinian voices from programming—these represent the ‘hidden curriculum’ of donor influence operating far below the threshold of public visibility.

Key Finding: The power of philanthropic influence operates not through the promise of support but through the threat of withdrawal, amplified by political intervention and weaponised accusations of antisemitism. This creates a system of pre-emptive self-censorship where the quantum of funding becomes irrelevant—what matters is the threat of its loss.

Conclusion: Beyond the Numbers

The quantitative analysis reveals a funding landscape where government sources provide 96-97% of non-commercial arts funding, private philanthropy 3-4%, and Jewish philanthropy approximately 0.2-0.5%. Yet this minuscule percentage has generated:

• Multiple high-profile cancellations and dismissals

• Widespread institutional self-censorship

• Government intervention in artistic programming

• Proposed legislation conditioning arts funding on political compliance

• The systematic exclusion of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices from Australian cultural institutions

This disproportion between financial contribution and political power reveals the true nature of philanthropic influence: it operates not as support but as leverage, not as generosity but as control. The withdrawal of Zionist-backed funding, far from being a catastrophe, represents an opportunity to build a funding architecture based on democratic accountability rather than donor diktat. As the second essay explores, the path forward requires not simply replacing one form of patronage with another, but fundamentally reimagining how Australian arts are funded and who they serve.

Bibliography

Angela Vivian et al., “The Big Picture 4: Expenditure on Artistic, Cultural and Creative activity by governments in Australia in 2007–08 to 2021–22,” A New Approach, May 2024, https://newapproach.org.au/publication/the-big-picture-expenditure-on-artistic-cultural-and-creative-activity-by-governments-in-australia- in-2007-08-to-2021-22/.

“Federal Budget 2025–26 – What It Means for the Arts,” Theatre Network Australia, accessed March 2026, https://tna.org.au/federal-budget-2025-26-what-it-means-for-the-arts/.

“Comparing US and Australian Fundraising by Revenue Area,” Fundraising Force, accessed March 2026, https://fundraisingforce.com.au/comparing-us-and-australian-fundraising-by-revenue-area/.

“To Scale: Mapping Financial Inflows in Australian Arts, Culture and Creativity,” A New Approach, August 2023, https://newapproach.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/To-Scale-main-report-ANA.pdf.

“Australians report donating almost $8 billion to charity,” Roy Morgan, October 2025, https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/10024-charitable-donations-october-2025; “4.48 million Aussies donated to charities,” KPMG, January 2026, https://kpmg.com/au/en/media/media-releases/2026/01/over-4-million-aussies-donated-to-charities-kpmg-analysis.html.

“Perpetual Philanthropy Insights Report 2024,” Perpetual, 2024, https://www.perpetual.com.au/4ab708/globalassets/_au-site-media/01-documents/03-wealth-management/reports/2024/perpetual-philanthropy-insights-report-2024.pdf.

“The Jewish population of Australia: Key findings from the 2021 Census,” Jewish Data Bank, 2022, h“Australia’s Elites Are Censoring Criticism of Israel by Calling It Antisemitism,” Jacobin, December 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/12/australia-elites- censorship-israel-palestine-solidarity-sydney-theatre-company.ttps://www.jewishdatabank.org/databank/search-results/study/1239.

“Annual Impact Report 2023-2024,” Gandel Foundation, 2024, https://gandelfoundation.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/2023-2024-GF-impact-report_final.pdf.

“Annual Impact Report 2023-2024,” Gandel Foundation, 2024, https://gandelfoundation.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/2023-2024-GF-impact-report_final.pdf.

“The Grant Programs,” Besen Family Foundation, accessed March 2026, https://www.besenfoundation.org.au/areas-of-interest.

“Jewish Donors Withdraw Funding from Australian Arts Over Anti-Israel Sentiment,” Facebook, February 2026, https://www.facebook.com/groups/710902039012070/posts/7497404100361796/.

“$18 Million to build the Jewish Arts Quarter,” Josh Burns MP, March 2025, https://www.joshburns.com.au/media/18-million-to-build-the-jewish-arts-quarter/.

“United Israel Appeal. Charity channels tax free donations direct to Israel,” Reddit, February 2026, https://www.reddit.com/r/AusPol/comments/1qz62yu/united_israel“Australia’s Elites Are Censoring Criticism of Israel by Calling It Antisemitism,” Jacobin, December 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/12/australia-elites- censorship-israel-palestine-solidarity-sydney-theatre-company._appeal_charity_channels_tax_free/.

“Australia’s Elites Are Censoring Criticism of Israel by Calling It Antisemitism,” Jacobin, December 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/12/australia-elites- censorship-israel-palestine-solidarity-sydney-theatre-company.

“Sydney festival boycott: more than 20 acts withdraw over Israeli embassy funding,” The Guardian, January 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/jan/04/sydney-festival-boycott-more-than-20-acts-withdraw-over-israeli-funding.

“Australia’s Elites Are Censoring Criticism of Israel.” “Major donor walks o“Federal Budget 2025–26 – What It Means for the Arts,” Theatre Network Australia, accessed March 2026, https://tna.org.au/federal-budget-2025-26-what-it-means-for-the-arts/.ut, pulls funding over show ‘repulsive’ to Jews,” Australian Financial Review, February 2026, https://www.afr.com/life-and-luxury/arts-and-culture/major-donor-walks-out-pulls-funding-over-show-repulsive-to-jews-20260206-p5o04a.

“Speaking out on Gaza: Australian creatives and arts organisations struggle to reconcile competing pressures,” The Guardian, June 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/jun/15/speaking-out-on-gaza-australian-creatives-and-arts-organisations-struggle-to-reconcile-competing-pressures.

“Censorship, ‘social cohesion’ and the case of Khaled Sabsabi,” L’Internationale Online, 2025, https://www.internationaleonline.org/contributions/speaking-in-times-of-genocide/.“Censorship, ‘social cohesion’ and the case of Khaled Sabsabi.”

“Call to strip arts institutions of funding over antisemitism,” Sydney Morning Herald, July 2025, https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/call-to-strip-arts-institutions-of-funding-over-antisemitism-raises-alarm-bells-20250715-p5mf58.html.

With Australia Day coming up I thought I would ask my friend Judith Pugh to talk about the speech Susan Ley gave for Australia Day 2025, a speech which repudiated her long held support for Palestine and had all the hallmarks of being supplied by an Israeli lobby group. A word salad of pedestrian and half baked clichés about Australian history it raised the question of where had Judith’s long term friend, the real Susan Ley, disappeared to?

Understanding Susan Ley’s abandonment of her public commitment to the Palestinians is my concern, and I’m contrasting the language she now uses with her previous calm good sense to understand when and why she took up the Zionist project and general “hard-right” ideas. This requires some concentration, sorry to bore, but detail is crucial here. As 26th January approaches I want to compare the astonishing speech she made on that date last year with a section of a 2013 speech she made to the Federal Parliament on the 50-year anniversary of the 6-day War, the Yom Kippur War, when she was Assistant Minister for education.

I am familiar with the Yom Kippur anniversary speech because she asked me to comment on it before she delivered it to the Parliament; I have a copy on my computer. Accurate, measured, balanced, it clearly expresses her points, makes her arguments carefully and without drama; it speaks to middle Australia. I’m reproducing part of it here:

“The conflict that empowered the state of Israel but began 50 years of occupation of Palestinian land is seen from very different points of view. Whilst I recognize and respect the viewpoint of many Jewish people, whose ancestors and families have been persecuted for their race and their faith, and understand that they see that in that war the Israeli State defended its position as a place of refuge and as a symbol that the Western world understands Jewish history, as a previous co-chair of this parliament’s Friends of Palestine, I wish to highlight the Palestinian viewpoint. The war led to eventual peace with Egypt and Jordan, but it never brought full acceptance from its neighbors. Taking stock at this half-century mark, we can see that both sides have been scarred by violence, failed negotiations, and a peace process that seems to be all process and no peace. The disputes over Jerusalem and its holy sites, the wall, like the Berlin wall, cutting off the West Bank, the blockades and resistance of the Gaza Strip and Israel’s provocative settlement-building program remind us of the intransigence on both sides. The miracle that is Israel’s “start-up nation,” with its high-tech industries spanning the globe and the vibrant society and culture it has created on the shores of the Mediterranean astonishes every visitor. Sitting in the bustling cafes of Tel Aviv, it is easy to forget that the Palestinians even exist. There are roads into the West Bank on which only Israelis can travel, and as you look across the landscape from settlements high on the hills in occupied territory, you see no evidence whatsoever of the indigenous occupants. I use the word indigenous because we Australians are looking right now to ways to right the injustices done to our indigenous people. We are concerned that development of our country has left indigenous people behind. The richness of Israel makes the misery of Palestinians, the indigenous people of that area, all the more troubling.”

Her 26th January 2025 speech, made when she was Deputy Leader of the Liberal party, is reproduced on her website. It is historically inaccurate, badly expressed, clichéd, offensive, and ill-informed. I’m going thoroughly to dissect it, because it is very troubling. It reveals the Leader of the Liberal Party, notionally at least the alternative Prime Minister, not only as embarrassingly ignorant of history, but using cliché, misinformation, a divisive narrative, to undermine society. It exposes un-Australian attitudes, echoes the dated ideas of Margaret Thatcher, and emphasises that while Susan supported Palestine, and voted for same-sex marriage and stem-cell research, her public advocacy now has a very narrow focus.

She seems to be speaking not to the centre, but to the irrelevant right; a very limited area of political possibility. This will not produce election victory for her coalition. Only those who don’t understand how compulsory preferential voting works aim for either hard edge — right or left —when campaigning. The current centrist-progressive view on the Middle East is to support a Palestinian State and to condemn a genocide in Gaza at the very least as an overreaction to the October 2024 attack on Israel, and see that attack itself as a response to years of violent oppression of Palestinians.

So the question is, why would Susan think that taking the hard right attitude will work? Whose advice is she taking? After years of calm discussion of the issues, why, for example, is she advocating for legislated Jewish exceptionalism, and why in such an overheated manner, in such provocative language? This is not a reaction to the unhappy event at Bondi. She began to use this manner and this language while she was deputy leader of the Liberal Party before the election. You can find the following inaccurate, badly argued, ignorant, impolite and irresponsible speech on her website. It was delivered in Albury on 26th January last year: she begins

“On this day, 237 years ago, a group of British settlers arrived at Sydney Cove and began a new chapter of human history right here in this Great Southern Land at the edge of the world.”

This is nonsense. The fleet had arrived to establish a penal Colony. Only Governor Philip, some convicts, and several officers actually stepped onto land that day. Philip did not formally read his letters patent ‘claiming’ the land until February 7th. The arrivals were administrative officials and such people as a surgeon and chaplain, the convicts, the marines supervising the convicts — not all of whom were “British” — together with some wives and children of more senior officials, and the crews of the ships. No settlers independent of the project, everyone under the authority of the Governor. Those in authority had a commitment to incarceration, not freedom, although the convicts probably leaned that way. Her speech looks at history not only from a geographical British perspective; but an eighteenth-century British perspective, when colonising ignored and overbore the interests of the “natives”.

“That endeavour was not assured success. But through hard work, a commitment to freedom and a belief that a better future lay ahead, our ancestors set a course that built the freest and most prosperous nation the world has seen.”

Susan has yet to announce the Coalition migration policy; this inane rhetoric may anticipate it. She’s been suggesting people who migrate must share Australian “values”. Such a useful word, it resonates within everyone, and anyone “different” will, by definition, have different values and attract suspicion. Her statement suggests the arrival of the settlers began a form of Thatcherism, but it certainly doesn’t echo the reality of 1788. The NSW colony was a bureaucratic project initiated by, funded by — and for years sustained by — the government in London. The hard work was performed by convicts who were flogged for infractions. Susan is advocating for controlling laws, and the claim Australia is the freest and most prosperous nation is...surprising for an economist.

The errors and assertions are so irritating that I want to write “not her ancestors, she’s a migrant”... indeed I find myself wondering how the polite woman speaking about indigenous Palestinians in 2013, contemplating the issue of her own identity in a charming program on SBS —during which she reminds the interviewer that she was born in Africa and had many happy years in the UAE — disappeared. How does an intelligent woman, with an M.A., ignore the changing Australian attitudes, the many books and articles detailing the consequences of the British invasion of Australia? Susan remained in the chamber in 2008, when the Parliament apologised to the indigenous people for the way they had been treated. Would the new Susan remain? The new Susan aggressively demands legislation to emphasise the suffering of jews over any other suffering; the old Susan knew that all parties suffer in conflict.

Her clichés are unconvincing; “Chapter of Human History” is misused, the colony is more a footnote in British History. “Great Southern Land” and “Edge of the World” ask the listener to contemplate the Australian nation from the point of view of the colonial power. She claims:

“All those years ago those ships did not arrive, as some would have you believe, as invaders.”

They did come as invaders.

“They did not come to destroy or to pillage.”

They certainly came to pillage; pillaging means taking resources: resources and convict relocation were the purpose of the settlement.

“In what could be compared to Elon Musk’s Space X’s efforts to build a new colony on Mars, men in boats arrived on the edge of the known world to embark on that new experiment. A new experiment and a new society.”

No; a Mars colony would be the first inter-planetary colony. Both sexes arrived. England and other European nations had been colonising energetically in the previous centuries. Convict transportation was not a ‘new experiment”: penal colonies were common. She goes on:

“And just like astronauts arriving on Mars those first settlers would be confronted with a different and strange world, full of danger, adventure and potential. “

The cliches are now promoting an adventure movie:

“From that moment our national story stood at a crossroads. Like so many other colonial stories it could have ended in disaster and collapse. The imperial impulse to extract wealth and rule through naked violence could have been the norm. But that would not be our fate as a nation.”

The notion of “our national story” (that is, indigenous people asking a small group of campers to leave) then being “at a crossroads” is simply mystifying. Crossroads implies choice: does she think Philip and his officers might have chosen to leave? While colonial stories usually mean disaster for the colonised people and collapse of indigenous economies and cultures, few colonial stories are disastrous for the colonisers; and we certainly began by using naked violence and, (does she not know?) continued to murder indigenous people by poisoning of groups (let alone other killing methods) during the twentieth century. She adds:

“Despite being a colony built by convict labour, the society our ancestors would build here across our Wide Brown Land would be one in the mould of the liberal tradition”.

This rhetoric implies that the Sydney Cove colony somehow spread across the clichéd Brown Land. Ignoring that the nation called Australia was formed from a group of other penal colonies and other settlements she perhaps hoped to avoid the problem with all arguments for celebrating “Australia Day” on January 26th, that the date applies, if at all, only to NSW.

She provides a list for us to celebrate: first

“It would be a society without class or aristocracy.”

The speech would surprise for this “classless” assertion alone. Of course Susan arrived at the age of 13 from a boarding school in Britain, where class is articulated, and she lived in Canberra, a city of compliant public servants, as near aa meritocracy as you’ll find in Australia. Elsewhere a dominant class still prevails: sustained by automatic access to influence and power — traditionally through private schooling or land ownership but accessible by wealth. Her rural electorate no doubt demonstrates levels and styles of class; she has travelled widely across the nation for many years. Then:

“It would be a society built on democratic principles and the fair go.”

Indeed, all States and the Federal government were established using the Westminster system. Fair go is another cliché; one remembers that this has become a favourite phrase for the new Susan, it can be used when debating economic issues and immigration or racism. Following:

“It would be a society that supported innovation, entrepreneurialism and reward for effort.
It would be a society that protected workers and gave them new rights.
It would be a society where faith was respected and women would stand in time as equals.
It would be a society that open its arms for migrants and the displaced.
It would not be perfect and it would not all go to plan.”

The word displaced reminds me here how acute and how fast and how polite she used to be. I can’t recall the context, but probably during the refugee crisis caused by the Iraq war, I made a remark that implied Palestinians were among the refugees on European borders, and she very quickly and quietly said “I thought they did not want to leave?” No sarcasm, no condescension, a correction politely framed as a question. Of course that is the point, Palestinians don’t want to be forced out, to be relocated or resettled, and Susan knows that in her bones. On that matter she was always precise. In this incoherent error-filled speech she poses some rhetorical questions:

“But today as we stand here in a peaceful, prosperous and free Australia how can we do anything but celebrate the success of that daring experiment? How can we not be proud of the society our ancestors have left us? And today, Australia Day, is an important part of recognising who we are and where we have come from. It is an important day to recognise just how improbable and how incredible the Australian experiment has been. And it might not be fashionable in the wine bars of Melbourne or in certain circles in Sydney but marking Australia Day on this day, the 26th of January is important too. It is important because marking Australia Day on this day situates our national story.”

Well the 26th of January certainly does not situate our national story, it was not the “official” beginning of the colony of New South Wales, which was not Australia; it only became a national public holiday in 1994. When I was young in Victoria we hardly noticed the date. Celebrating the appropriation of a section of what became one State in the Federation specifically confirms that one culture travelled thousands of kilometres to appropriate the resources of another, at the expense of the local people. The colonisation wasn’t an experiment, the initial attempt to establish one form of colony began in Botany Bay on an earlier date, the legal declaration and disembarkation of all the arrivals did not take place until February, various other colonies were established or emerged through the 19th century and those colonies celebrated other foundation dates. Most interestingly, rather than refer to perfectly reasonable requests by indigenous people NOT to celebrate the day that Philip chose the site to colonise them she suggests “Change the day” supporters are somehow simply following fashion. This is interesting because Susan once avoided division: she was not wildly gregarious, she was very independent, more one-to-one in relationships; but she always noted both sides of an issue. Her statement last year continued:

“Today, among the smells of the barbecues, and the crashing of the waves, or the laughter of children, I can hear and smell the sounds of our national story too. These sights and sounds are part of our national story as much as any big speech or fancy occasion. The creaking of the Endeavour with Cook at its helm as he sailed sketching our Fatal Shore.”

The images in the first sentence are reasonable if uninspiring, and with the statement in the second sentence, to some extent reassure me that Susan actually wrote, or oversaw the speechwriter who produced this piece...but again the clichés of the third sentence interfere, and the thoughtlessness of the image of Cook at the helm undermines the piece. Cook, the Captain of the Endeavour was occupied with administrative tasks. His crew, like any naval ship, included specialised helmsmen...and neither they nor Cook, sketched while at the helm. The two activities are incompatible. She went on:

“The clanking of beer mugs as the hard men of the goldfields come together in the pubs of Ballarat to voice their concerns about the overbearing licensing system.”

Perhaps in this image she’s looking for a sound, but why not their voices? and why not women’s voices? is she unaware women were active at Eureka? that most meetings, rebellious or not, took place in hotels or outdoors in early settlements?... And using hard to describe the men is interesting. Why hard men? Hard men drinking beer. Very...nasty and working class, she seems to say. I think it’s because she is aware but wants to avoid noting that the Eureka event stimulated democracy and collaborative movements, including the union movement. But of course if Margaret Thatcher rather than Robert Menzies is your model, it’s instinctive to reduce the respectability of unions, even when attempting to arouse nationalist sentiment. She continues with sound:

“The booming of the 21 Gun salute as they opened the Sydney Harbour Bridge, connecting one of the world’s greatest cities.”

Perhaps she’s going for balance, Victoria plus NSW, one almost begins to feel sorry for her at this point. For most Australians the image of the Bridge opening conjures up the fascist de Groot, on horseback slashing the ribbon which was to be cut by Jack Lang, the Labour Premier of NSW. Perhaps the “they” is an inclusive reference to the two men each cutting the ribbon. For a leader of the current Liberal party the Harbour Bridge is an unfortunate element of the national story, because for Australians it emphasises the virtue of publicly funded infrastructure. Staying with sound but introducing smell:

“The crack of machine gun fire and the smell of mud as our brave boys charge across cratered fields to free Villers-Bretonneux from the German advance. The roar of the crowd as Travis Head notches another century.”

Fair enough, if you must include war; I’d have thought the smell of gunsmoke would have prevailed during that battle. The 26th January occurs in summer, so cricket. But this is a Commonwealth of States, and two States only have provided Susan’s picture. Then:

“Or the quiet scratch of a pencil in a voting booth as an average Australian casts their vote and expresses their views respectfully before getting a democracy sausage.”

Nice touch, original phraseology. More like the old Susan. Which renders very odd the abrupt introduction of aggressive assertions framed in divisive language. With another cliché she claims

“These moments are the threads of our national story” and then “and they are all tethered whether people like it or not to the 26 of January 1788. That date anchors our story. So today is important. And today is something worth fighting for.”

Tethered. A vivid word but without meaning here. Susan doesn’t explain how these events are tied together and with the date. Moreover the “Whether people like it or not” is entirely at odds with the language through which for years she acknowledged the beliefs and anxieties of the Palestinians and Israelis. Concepts such as Freedom or Nationalism might be worth fighting for, but a date? A date which commemorates ships at anchor, in a cove where the State of NSW was later proclaimed? when a group of men drank a toast to the Monarchy beside the Union Flag? Is she unaware that date was in flux for years, and has been contested as “Australia” day for some time? In 2013 Susan called the Palestinians the indigenous people of Palestine, referring to the occupation of their land by the Israelis, and she noted then that in Australia the indigenous people had been left behind as the country “developed”. Indigenous Australians gave up violent struggle, but many of them ask that “Australia” day be celebrated on another date, not when Europeans arrived at the place where they would establish a colony. She once sympathised with indigenous people wanting their land back; now indigenous people and their supporters merely wanting to move a public holiday are put aside:

“Because despite the black arm brigade, who will be marching in the streets of our cities today, the fact is the story of Australia is one that is objectively good. We need to reject what those mobs are saying today through their loudspeakers and their iphones. The problem with those activists is they are so fixated with projecting themselves as survivors that they leave no room for us to come together as citizens. And history shows us strong and successful societies are not made up of survivors, they are built and maintained by citizens. So we have to stand up against what those people are peddling today. We should be proud of being Australian and our Australia Day.”

I checked the website. Black arm, not black armband. Our errors expose us. I doubt Susan wrote this; she simply is not racist. But whoever wrote this is: did the Zionists supply her with a speechwriter? It would explain the conflation of the penal colony with the arrival in America of the Pilgrim Fathers, the failure to understand our parliamentary system, the claim this is the freest and most prosperous country, the aggression, the suggestion that “mobs” of “survivors” riot against Australia Day. Descendants of Europeans march against, and argue against the date. The language employed here is belligerent: we have to “stand up against” people, “peddling” as if they were violent drug pushers.

“The fact is Australia has navigated the base human impulse to divide into tribes, by religion and by race better than almost any other country in history.
The Australian way is to stand up to bullies, to protect the weak and do the right thing.
We have fought and died to protect the freedoms of others from Simpson and his Donkey on the shores of Gallipoli, to Oscar Jenkins in Ukraine.
Australia has set democratic standards and norms that are now the benchmark of democracy across the world, like the secret ballot and women’s suffrage.
Australia has built a prosperous economy and a strong social safety net.
We have balanced freedom with the need to maintain harmony, social cohesion and community safety.
We have built a nation the envy of the world that opens its arms to all religions, creeds, races and aspirations.
Australia is truly a country where you can live the life you want to live.
I think that is well worth celebrating.
And in celebrating Australia Day we also draw a line in the sand and stake out our rejection of the UnAustralian things we are seeing run rife in our suburbs over recent months, as the darkest elements of our community seek to vilify and ostracise and visit violence on our jewish community.
Today, we set an example of what our community is all about.
Australia Day is a moment of unity and hope for us all.
So to all of you, happy Australia Day.
Thank you for the contribution you have made in advancing this amazing country we call home.
But I leave you with this message, Australia’s story will only bend toward success if we put our shoulder to the wheel.
And it will only move forward if we continue to have faith in that Australian experiment.
Today we demonstrate that faith.”

I’m not going minutely to dissect this last section, just to point out that the rhetoric is again built on false claims and inaccuracies. She did not live in Australia through the time when Christian sects — Catholics and Protestants — avoided each other socially and thoroughly discriminated against each other. Nor when communists were fired from jobs. Or the worst of the white Australia, when only British migrants were welcomed, even slightly darker Southern Europeans were treated with suspicion. The Simpson/donkey story has been shown to be a myth, South Australia might have led in women’s suffrage but the nation did not, it removed voting rights from indigenous people and Asians, she must know the claims of “rising anti- semitism” are not only contested but incidents are often some form of criminal conspiracy; and that her speech contributes not to social cohesion but its disruption.

Ex-NSW Premier and Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr has explained how Zionists recruit politicians to support Israel. Susan surprised many people when as Deputy Leader of the opposition she went to Israel and promised that if the coalition were elected it would re-introduce the policy of moving the Australian Embassy to Jerusalem. She had sponsored a Palestinian child, but was affected because Israeli children had to be within minutes of a bomb shelter at all times. Her comments on the post-October war on Gaza repeated the Zionist line that Hamas had to return the hostages and must disarm; I have seen no condemnation of the continuing attacks in Gaza, including on children, since Trump’s fake peace began. She did not march across the Bridge: Chinese, European, Indigenous, Semitic people including Arabs and Jews, marched together in what was an uplifting crowd, rain pouring down, no anger, conscious of what that atmosphere conveyed. She has willfully misrepresented this great march.

I wonder, as I look at her past speeches and presentation of her image, what happened to the careful, calm, courageous independent woman I knew; whose political ambition seemed to be for a decent if conservative society and whose support for Palestine was then unfashionable. Who spoke quietly and with conviction.

How did she become this noisy belligerent woman flailing about, idiotically attacking the Prime Minister, trying to elevate the Bondi event to exceptionalise the interest of Jewish people above others, in error-filled, ultimately inept and vulgar statements?

Every now and again, when Susan was that decent woman, there would be a moment when I could tell she was being untrue to herself. I always ignored such moments because it is hard enough being a working mother, a public figure, it is hard always to be true under strain. It was small things, pretending she’d brought a present she needed when I had bought it, too much emphasis on an issue not vital but which might temporarily suit. But this is different. Those times, those few times taught me to notice the different pace the different tone of her speech. Now I don’t feel empathy, I am sad that her inaccuracy, deliberate distortion uncontrolled tone, proclaim that she is faking.

We’ve seen this script before. Every generation finds its scapegoat, its convenient Other to blame for systemic failures. In the 1970s, when I was on the barricades in Victoria Street, we fought against the displacement of communities—but the real enemy wasn’t the bulldozers, it was the property developers and the political economy that empowered them. The same misdirection is happening now with AI.

The anti-AI movement has all the hallmarks of Clayton’s racism—the racism you have when you’re not racist. It’s respectable, intellectual, cloaked in concerns about “authenticity” and “human creativity.” But strip away the rhetoric and what do you find? The same old fear of the Other, the same scapegoating that diverts attention from the actual culprits: late-stage capitalism, the concentration of wealth, the commodification of everything including consciousness itself.

Consider the language: AI systems are “stealing” jobs, “plagiarising” human work, “threatening” civilisation. This is the language of invasion, of contamination. It others AI in precisely the way that migrant workers, automation, and every technological shift has been othered throughout history. The subtext is always the same: there’s a pure, authentic “us” being corrupted or replaced by a dangerous “them.” When artists rail against AI-generated images, when writers demand legal protection from language models, when unions call for bans on algorithmic labour, they’re not challenging power—they’re drawing a defensive circle around professional privilege and calling it solidarity.

This rhetorical othering serves a particular function: it allows us to avoid confronting the actual architecture of exploitation. The anti-AI moralist can position themselves as defending human dignity without ever questioning the economic system that denies dignity to humans in the first place. They can champion “authentic human labour” whilst ignoring that most human labour under capitalism is neither authentic nor dignified—it’s alienated, surveilled, and extractive. The call to “keep AI out of creative work” comes predominantly from those who already had access to creative work as a viable livelihood, a privilege built on the exclusion of most humans from meaningful creative participation.

But here’s what the anti-AI moralists won’t admit: they’re defending a system that was already broken. The art world didn’t become corrupted by AI—it was already a playground for oligarchs and speculators. I’ve watched this for five decades. The contemporary art market is a financial instrument, a tax dodge, a wealth storage mechanism that occasionally produces culture as a byproduct. Jobs weren’t secure and meaningful before machine learning—they were already precarious, alienating, and controlled by capital. The creative industries weren’t nurturing human potential—they were gig economies wrapped in aspirational mythology, training young people to accept exploitation as the price of pursuing their passion.

AI didn’t create these problems. Capitalism did. But it’s easier to rail against algorithms than to confront the economic system that deploys them. It’s easier to defend “human creativity” in the abstract than to acknowledge that human creativity has been commodified, surveilled, and exploited for generations. The anti-AI movement is reactionary in the truest sense—it wants to preserve a status quo that never worked for most people, by demonising a new Other.

I’ve spent fifty years watching the art establishment appropriate radical gestures whilst maintaining its gatekeeping power. I’ve seen conceptual art’s critique of commodification become the most expensive commodity. I’ve watched street art move from radical intervention to real estate marketing tool. Now I see the same people who championed market-driven individualism suddenly discovering solidarity—but only when it’s their professional territory being disrupted. Where was this concern for displaced workers when manufacturing was offshored? Where was this defence of “authentic human labour” when the gig economy was invented? Where were the pearl clutchers when adjunct professors were being casualised into poverty, or when arts funding was being gutted, or when unpaid internships became the standard entry point to creative careers?

The selective outrage reveals the class interests at play. When automation threatened factory workers, the response from the professional creative class was largely indifference or celebration of “progress.” When algorithms threaten to displace graphic designers and illustrators, suddenly automation is an existential threat to human civilisation. This isn’t solidarity with workers—it’s the panicked realisation that professional-creative-class immunity to the forces that have immiserated other workers was always temporary.

The question we should be asking isn’t whether AI threatens human values—it’s whose interests are served by framing the question that way. When we other AI, when we construct it as an alien threat, we’re participating in the same logic that has always served power: divide, distract, and deflect from the real issue of who owns and controls the means of production, whether those means are robotic arms or neural networks.

If AI is destroying jobs, the problem isn’t AI—it’s an economic system with no social safety net, no universal basic income, no collective ownership of technological gains. If we had worker ownership of AI systems, if we had redistributed the productivity gains from automation, if we had decommodified basic necessities, then AI would be universally welcomed as a technology of liberation. The fact that we experience it as a threat reveals the bankruptcy of our economic arrangement, not the malevolence of the technology.

If AI is producing “soulless” art, the problem isn’t the technology—it’s an art market that was already soulless, already treating creativity as a commodity and artists as expendable cultural workers. The art world’s sudden concern for authenticity and human touch is remarkable from an institutional structure that turned Jeff Koons’ workshop production into the standard model, that made Damien Hirst’s fabrication studios a template for success, that celebrated appropriation art for decades. When humans exploit other humans to manufacture art, it’s the contemporary art economy. When AI produces images, it’s a crisis of authenticity. The inconsistency is ideological, not aesthetic.

The real fight isn’t humans versus AI. It’s still what it’s always been: collective human flourishing versus capital accumulation. Everything else is misdirection. And misdirection that conveniently allows the “good” people to feel righteous whilst changing absolutely nothing about the systems that exploit them.

This is the same mistake the Luddites made—and I say that with respect for their militancy, not dismissal of their grievances. They were right that industrial capitalism was destroying their livelihoods and communities. They were absolutely correct that the factory system was crushing human dignity and transferring wealth to owners. They were wrong about which part of the equation to smash. The problem wasn’t the machines. It never is. The problem was and remains the ownership structure, the power relations, the distribution of gains from technological advancement.

What would a non-reactionary response to AI look like? It would start with the recognition that AI is simply the latest means of production, and like all means of production under capitalism, it will be deployed to concentrate wealth and power unless we organise to control it collectively. It would demand public ownership of AI infrastructure, open-source models, algorithmic transparency, and democratic governance over how these systems are deployed. It would insist on universal basic income and reduced working hours to distribute the productivity gains. It would advocate for decommodifying creative production, so that people can make art and culture without needing to monetise every act of creativity.

Instead, the anti-AI movement largely demands either Luddite abolition or regulatory capture that will ensure only large corporations can afford to operate AI systems—the worst of both worlds. They want the state to protect their professional niche whilst leaving the fundamental relations of production untouched. This is petit-bourgeois panic dressed up as progressive politics.

The othering of AI lets us avoid confronting our own complicity in systems of exploitation. It lets us imagine that the problem is external, alien, removable—rather than embedded in the very structure of how we organise production, distribute resources, and value human life. It’s Clayton’s racism because it performs the moral righteousness of opposing dehumanisation whilst participating in an economic system built on actual human dehumanisation. It’s the activism you have when you’re not actually challenging power.

If we’re serious about human flourishing, about collective liberation, about building a world where technology serves people rather than profit, then we need to stop othering AI and start organising against capital. The machine isn’t the enemy. It never was. The enemy is the system that wields the machine as a weapon, that treats humans and algorithms alike as nothing more than inputs to be optimised for shareholder value. Until we confront that, everything else is just performance—righteous, respectable, and utterly beside the point.

In this final essay about future cultural infrastructure I want to talk about what physical infrastructure is needed in the near future and what should simply remain at its current level or even be discarded. Longer term needs are unpredictable. What is certain is that the traditional gallery/museum model—focused primarily on display and passive consumption—is obsolete and fails to support the material conditions now necessary for sustained artistic practice.

The future of public cultural infrastructure must centre on production facilities (studios, workshops, technical resources), long-term residential capacity, and distribution networks, with exhibition as one function among many rather than the primary purpose. This model already exists in embryonic form in four Australian institutions that should serve as blueprints for transformation: Artspace Woolloomooloo, Bundanon Trust, ANCA Canberra, and SHACC Fremantle.

The Crisis of the Exhibition Model

The dominant museum/gallery paradigm serves primarily curatorial, institutional, and market interests rather than artists’ material needs. These exhibition-focused institutions operate on a consumption model that treats cultural workers as content providers rather than producers requiring sustained support. The result is a crisis of precarity where artists cannot maintain practices without access to affordable production space, equipment, and time.

Consider the $344 million Sydney Modern extension to the Art Gallery of NSW—opened in December 2022 after a decade of controversy and budget blowouts. This monument to institutional vanity represents everything wrong with contemporary cultural policy: enormous public expenditure on display infrastructure that serves institutional prestige rather than cultural production. While Western Sydney receives virtually no arts infrastructure funding—less than 10% of state cultural funding despite representing one in ten Australians—the NSW Government contributed $244 million to this harbourside expansion that critics describe as “unquestionably the worst public building in Sydney” Culture Heist.

The architectural folly is matched by its cultural irrelevance. Sydney Modern adds 3,400 square metres of exhibition space to an already well-served cultural precinct while Western Sydney artists struggle to find basic studio space. The Japanese firm SANAA’s design—described by some as “glass walls strewn across the landscape”—lacks any local context or connection to Australian cultural needs Sydney Morning Herald. Meanwhile, the Powerhouse Parramatta project—at $1.4 billion and counting—represents an equally inappropriate response to Western Sydney’s cultural infrastructure deficit. This is not an art museum but a technology and applied sciences museum transplanted from Ultimo, offering another consumption venue while artists in the region continue to struggle with inadequate workspace and housing costs that make sustained practice impossible.

The exhibition model’s fundamental flaw lies in its temporal logic: it prioritises the moment of display over the extended processes of research, experimentation, and production that generate meaningful cultural work. Artists require not just space to make work, but time away from the relentless pressure to produce marketable objects. They need access to specialised equipment, technical expertise, and peer networks that sustain practice across decades.

The Production-Centred Alternative:
Four Australian Models

A viable alternative exists in four Australian institutions that demonstrate how cultural infrastructure can prioritise production over consumption. These organisations represent different scales and approaches, but share a common principle: they treat cultural workers as producers requiring sustained support rather than content providers for temporary programming.

Artspace Woolloomooloo: The Urban Studio Model

Artspace Woolloomooloo operates ten rent-free studios supporting five two-year residencies and four one-year residencies annually, providing artists with 45 square metre spaces, 24/7 access, curatorial advocacy, and connection to national and international networks. Since 2015, it has offered entirely rent-free studio residencies, moving toward exclusively two-year terms by 2026.

The integration of exhibition and production spaces at Artspace demonstrates how distribution mechanisms can serve production rather than dominate it. Located in the historic Gunnery building, the institution positions itself explicitly as “one of the leading institutions for the production and presentation of contemporary art in the Asia Pacific,” emphasising production as co-equal with presentation. Its governance model includes artist representatives on the Board of Directors who participate in studio selection, ensuring that those who understand the material conditions of practice shape institutional priorities.

What makes Artspace significant is its recognition that meaningful cultural production requires stability and time, not just temporary project support. The two-year residency model allows artists to develop work without the constant pressure of market deadlines or exhibition schedules. The rent-free structure acknowledges that cultural production often generates little immediate economic return, yet contributes immeasurably to public life.

Bundanon Trust: The Rural Production Sanctuary

Bundanon Trust represents the most comprehensive realisation of production-centred cultural infrastructure in Australia. Established through Arthur and Yvonne Boyd’s gift to the nation, it hosts over 250 artists annually across multiple accommodation types and specialised studios. The Artists in Residence Complex provides purpose-built spaces including the Dorothy Porter dance studio with sprung floors and 8-metre ceilings, the Dorothy Dwyer Silversmiths’ Studio with professional equipment for metalwork, and the Musicians’ Cottage with acoustically designed recording facilities.

What distinguishes Bundanon is its embeddedness in landscape and its removal from urban market pressures. Artists have access to accommodation for up to 10 people in various configurations, from self-contained cottages to shared apartments, all with integrated studio access. The Boyd Education Centre can accommodate larger groups of up to 32 people, making it suitable for collective production and intensive collaborative work.

The integration of living and working spaces at Bundanon addresses a fundamental need: the separation of living costs from production costs. This model demonstrates how public cultural infrastructure can intervene in the housing crisis that affects cultural workers, particularly in major urban centres where studio space has become increasingly unaffordable.

ANCA Canberra: The Permanent Studio Model

ANCA Canberra operates a different but equally important model: permanent studio spaces combined with exhibition galleries. With 35 purpose-built non-residential studios across two sites, ANCA provides affordable spaces ranging from 32 to 100 square metres at monthly rents between $410-$1,223—rates significantly below market value for professional workspace.

The ANCA model demonstrates how artist-run initiatives can create ongoing infrastructure rather than temporary programming. Established in 1989 through collaboration between the Federal Government and Canberra’s visual arts community, it has sustained affordable studio access for over three decades. The three-year lease terms with renewal options provide the stability that temporary project spaces cannot offer.

What makes ANCA significant is its longevity and sustainability. While many artist-run spaces collapse under financial pressure after a few years, ANCA has maintained its commitment to affordable workspace for more than 30 years. This demonstrates that production-centred cultural infrastructure can be economically viable when properly structured and supported.

SHACC Fremantle: The Cooperative Housing Model

SHACC (Sustainable Housing for Artists and Creatives Cooperative) represents perhaps the most innovative approach to production-centred cultural infrastructure. Based in Fremantle’s White Gum Valley, SHACC is Australia’s first artist-run housing cooperative, providing purpose-built combined living and working spaces for low-income professional artists.

The cooperative model offers a radical alternative to traditional cultural infrastructure. Rather than artists functioning as supplicants requesting institutional support, SHACC members collectively own and manage their housing. The $3.5 million complex includes 12 apartments and two studios, with rents set as a percentage of income rather than market rates. This income-contingent model recognises that cultural production often generates little immediate economic return, yet contributes immeasurably to public life.

What makes SHACC revolutionary is its integration of housing security with cultural production. Members don’t just rent space—they participate in collective governance, decision-making, and resource-sharing. The cooperative structure provides long-term housing security that enables sustained artistic practice without the constant threat of displacement that plagues urban cultural communities.

The SHACC model demonstrates how cultural workers can build collective infrastructure controlled by and for their communities. This represents a fundamental shift from the paternalistic framework of cultural philanthropy toward mutual aid and collective ownership models that place control over cultural resources in the hands of those who actually produce culture.

The Sydney Modern Swindle:
A Case Study in Cultural Misallocation

The $344 million Sydney Modern extension represents everything wrong with contemporary cultural policy. While Western Sydney receives virtually no arts infrastructure funding—less than 10% of state cultural funding despite representing one in ten Australians—the NSW Government contributed $244 million to this harbourside expansion that critics describe as “unquestionably the worst public building in Sydney” Culture Heist.

Imagine if this funding had been directed toward production infrastructure instead of display architecture. The $344 million could have established:

• 68 modest production facilities at $5 million each, providing workspace for hundreds of cultural workers

• 500 permanent artist studios across Western Sydney, creating long-term affordable workspace

• Comprehensive workshop facilities for specialised practices including printmaking, digital production, ceramics, and metalwork

• Residential accommodation for regional and international artists, integrated with local communities

• Aged artist housing that recognises lifelong cultural contribution through material support

Instead, Sydney received another monument to institutional ego while Western Sydney artists continue to struggle with basic workspace needs. The architectural folly—Japanese firm SANAA’s design of “glass walls strewn across the landscape”—lacks any local context or connection to Australian cultural needs Sydney Morning Herald.

The Sydney Modern swindle demonstrates how cultural funding serves institutional and political interests rather than cultural workers’ needs. Monumental buildings provide visible evidence of political investment in culture, while the slow work of supporting cultural production offers few photo opportunities for election campaigns. This must change.

The Penrith Cultural Precinct:
A Potential Transformation

The Marcel Breuer Torin Building in Penrith—Australia’s only structure by the legendary modernist architect—offers significant cultural capital currently underutilised as industrial space. Located just two kilometres from Penrith Regional Gallery (home of the Lewers Bequest), this heritage-listed building represents an opportunity for integrated cultural infrastructure development.

These facilities, along with the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, could be administered together as an integrated cultural precinct. The vision: adaptive reuse of the Breuer building as a comprehensive production facility including studios, workshops, and long-term accommodation for artists who face acute housing precarity.

The Breuer building’s robust industrial construction can accommodate heavy equipment and messy processes that cultural production requires, while its modernist aesthetic provides an inspiring environment for contemporary practice. The 3,800 square metre structure—sold for $3 million in 2017 (well below its asking price)—offers immediate opportunities for cultural adaptation.

Current “studio time” programs at Penrith Regional Gallery demonstrate demand, but require massive expansion. The integration of heritage architecture, contemporary gallery space, and comprehensive production facilities would create a unique cultural campus that serves both local communities and attracts regional, national, and international cultural workers.

This model could be replicated across regional Australia, where deindustrialisation has left numerous warehouse and factory buildings available for cultural adaptation. Cities like Newcastle, Wollongong, Geelong, and Townsville possess both underutilised industrial buildings and regional galleries that could be integrated into production-centred cultural infrastructure.

The Aged Artist Housing Crisis

The housing crisis devastating cultural workers requires specific attention to ageing practitioners. Current “affordable” studio models assume able-bodied participants who can tolerate precarious conditions. Aged artists need:

• Accessible accommodation integrated with studio facilities

• Support services adapted to cultural workers’ needs

• Retention of creative autonomy while accessing care

• Protection from displacement as inner-city areas gentrify

• Recognition of lifelong cultural contribution through material support

The Sustainable Housing for Artists and Creatives Cooperative (SHACC) model offers one approach, but requires expansion into aged care provision. Traditional aged care facilities rarely accommodate the specific needs of cultural workers—spaces for messy work, storage for materials and works, flexibility for irregular schedules, and understanding of the creative process.

Cultural infrastructure must address the full lifecycle of creative practice, not just the commercially viable years. As one SHACC member notes: “The pursuit of a living in creative activities often involves living in a state of quiet or dramatic desperation” Garland Magazine.

The aged artist housing crisis intersects with broader questions of cultural labour recognition and social support. Artists who have contributed to public life for decades through cultural production often face poverty and housing insecurity in later life, despite their cultural contributions enriching society immeasurably.

Building the Production Commons:
A Call to Action

The transformation of Australia’s cultural infrastructure requires a fundamental shift from consumption-centred to production-centred models. The institutions examined here—Artspace, Bundanon, ANCA, and SHACC—demonstrate that alternative models already function effectively within current constraints. They require not celebration but massive expansion into a comprehensive alternative to the failed exhibition model.

The vision is clear: a network of production-centred institutions across Australia, interconnected, artist-governed, focused on sustaining practices from emergence through ageing. This represents participation in broader struggles against neoliberal governance that reduces all cultural activity to market transactions.

The urgency of this transformation cannot be overstated. Without production infrastructure, cultural practice becomes the exclusive domain of the privately wealthy, while experimental work that challenges dominant narratives is systematically marginalized. The current model—enormous public expenditure on display infrastructure that serves institutional prestige rather than cultural production—represents a catastrophic misallocation of cultural resources.

Cultural workers must demand infrastructure that supports the material conditions of production rather than accepting institutions that treat them as content providers for consumption-focused programming. This requires rejecting the paternalistic framework of cultural philanthropy in favour of mutual aid and collective ownership models that place control over cultural resources in the hands of those who actually produce culture.

The transformation begins with recognition: exhibitions without production are meaningless, while production without adequate infrastructure is impossible. The choice facing Australian cultural policy is simple: continue funding spectacular but hollow display infrastructure, or build the production-centred commons that cultural workers need to sustain meaningful practice.

The institutions examined here light the path forward. They demonstrate that cultural infrastructure can serve producers rather than consumers, communities rather than institutions, and long-term cultural sustainability rather than short-term political spectacle. The question is not whether such transformation is possible, but whether we have the collective will to demand it.

References

1. Artspace Visual Arts Centre. “Studio Program.” artspace.org.au

2. Artspace Visual Arts Centre. “About Artspace.” artspace.org.au

3. Bundanon Trust. “Residencies.” bundanon.com.au

4. Bundanon Trust. “Studios.” bundanon.com.au

5. Australian National Capital Artists Inc. “About.” anca.net.au

6. Australian National Capital Artists Inc. “Apply for a Studio.” anca.net.au

7. Ward, Koral. “Sustainable housing for artists and creatives: A new cooperative.” Garland Magazine, March 12, 2018. garlandmag.com

8. Ward, Koral. “Building SHAC.” Artsource Magazine. artsource.net.au

9. Sydney Morning Herald. “The architectural poets behind Sydney’s newest art gallery.” November 21, 2022. smh.com.au

10. Culture Heist. “Two architectural specialists review Sydney Modern.” November 30, 2022. cultureheist.com.au

11. Wikipedia. “Torin Building.” wikipedia.org

12. Penrith Regional Gallery. “About PP&VA.” penrithregionalgallery.com.au

Australia’s major cultural institutions are dying, and we should let them.

The predictable outrage over mass redundancies at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, despite its record attendance figures, is a distraction (Morris 2025). These are not problems to be solved; they are the symptoms of a terminal neoliberal condition we should have the courage to accept. Rather than launching another futile campaign to reform these captured, moribund institutions, we must turn our attention to building genuine alternatives: direct funding models like Ireland’s basic income for artists trial (recently made permanent), platform cooperatives owned and governed by cultural workers, and decentralised, autonomous networks of mutual aid that embed cultural practice directly within communities.

Drawing on the practical experiments of collectives like the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation, I argue for a conception of cultural infrastructure as a distributed, community-controlled scaffolding that treats culture not as a commodity to be consumed, but as a collective practice of making meaning. The future does not belong to the brick-and-mortar monuments to capital, but to the intangible yet resilient networks of solidarity that prefigure a post-capitalist cultural reality.

Why Our Cultural Institutions Are Dying
(And Why We Should Let Them)

When the Art Gallery of New South Wales announced it was axing 45 jobs in late 2025, the response was a tired ritual of protest and petition (Morris 2025; Tucker 2025). What nobody seems willing to admit is that this isn’t a crisis to be averted. It’s a terminal diagnosis. This is the entirely predictable outcome of nearly four decades of ‘efficiency dividends’—those relentless, incremental funding cuts initiated by the Hawke Labor government in 1987 that have systematically hollowed out our public institutions from the inside (Bongiorno, Black, and Arrow 2023). Galleries have been forced into a desperate addiction to the market: blockbuster exhibitions, commercial revenue streams, and the relentless framing of culture as a tourism product. They have become, in essence, highly polished tourism machines, manufacturing spectacular, easily marketable shows that generate visitor numbers but little in the way of critical cultural knowledge.

It continues to shock me that anyone on the left still clings to the fantasy of art as an autonomous sphere of activity, rather than recognising it for what it is: just another business model. The art world remains utterly dominated by a neoliberal framework that rewards a kind of zombie individualism and the endless manufacture of ‘content’. The primary function of these institutions is no longer cultural production but their own self-perpetuation within the logic of the market. This obsession with spectacle necessarily displaces the more difficult, more dangerous work of critical research and genuine community engagement—the kind of work that cannot be quantified in a quarterly report or justified to a Treasury department fixated on simplistic economic impact metrics.

Building Infrastructure Without Buildings

Cultural infrastructure doesn’t have to mean buildings. In fact, it rarely should. It will mostly be what the venture capitalist James Connolly, in a different context, calls ‘invisible scaffolding’—the networks, platforms, and relationships that allow creativity to flourish and ideas to circulate (Connolly 2025). This scaffolding is composed of several key elements: access to capital (through microgrants, fellowships, and funding without strings); community spaces (which are more likely to be Discord servers or hacker houses than physical galleries); tools for amplification (the newsletters, podcasts, and social feeds that disseminate ideas); alternative systems of legitimacy (based on community recognition, not institutional awards); and a shared language (the memes, metaphors, and vocabularies that construct a collective identity).

This is not a utopian projection; it is a description of how digital platforms already function. Are.na operates as a form of commons-based knowledge assembly, where users publicly collect and remix cultural materials into new constellations of meaning. Discord servers host real-time collaboration amongst creative communities scattered across the globe. Zines launched in group chats evolve into fellowships and residencies. This is the reality of what Yochai Benkler, in his foundational work The Wealth of Networks, identified as ‘commons-based peer production’: the capacity for large, distributed groups of people to cooperate, often over the internet, to create shared cultural resources outside the logic of the market (Benkler 2006).

The most positive development I have witnessed in the last decade is the growing dominance of artist collectives and collaborations—a definitive movement away from the ideology of individualism and towards a recognition that real art, the significant cultural production that generates actual social change, is fundamentally a community-based activity. This collaborative mode is also prefigurative: it models the very forms of cooperation necessary to confront the immense challenges the world now faces. We cannot solve these problems alone. Collectives are not inherently transformative, but they represent the optimal form for working within and alongside communities—which is precisely why they have proliferated as the primary vehicle for radical cultural activity.

The Real Alternatives: Co-ops, DAOs, and Mutual Aid

Concrete alternatives to both the corporate cultural industries and the failing public institutions already exist. Platform cooperativism, as theorised by Trebor Scholz, offers a direct strategy for cultural workers to collectively own and control the digital platforms that distribute their work (Scholz 2016). Producer-owned platforms like Berlin’s Resonate music cooperative demonstrate how artists can build sustainable careers by co-owning their distribution infrastructure, rather than enriching the extractive intermediaries that currently dominate the industry.

Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) present even more radical possibilities. The Serpentine Galleries’ blockchain lab, for instance, has been a key site for exploring how DAOs might fundamentally ‘change the way the arts are organised’ (Serpentine Galleries 2020). Rather than replicating the rigid hierarchies of the traditional art world, DAOs allow communities to encode their values and decision-making processes directly into the fabric of their organisations. As the artist and researcher Ruth Catlow puts it, they are tools for ‘translocal peers to encode rules, relations and values into their joint ventures’ (Catlow and Garrett 2022).

This connects to the broader proliferation of mutual aid networks, which function as prefigurative models of post-capitalist social relations. Unlike charity, which reinforces the hierarchical relationship between donor and recipient, mutual aid operates on the principles of reciprocity, solidarity, and collective responsibility.

One example I am directly involved with is the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (KSCA), a collective that supports artists experimenting with adaptive forms of cultural change (KSCA n.d.). KSCA works embedded within farming communities, bridging the urban and rural divide to explore cultural responses to crises in areas like regenerative agriculture, rural industry, food production, and the practice of commoning. KSCA operates through what we term ‘adaptive cultural change’—supporting creative work that reaches beyond the familiar contexts of the art world to investigate new ways of acting in the world. We foster collaborations between different forms of knowledge, professions, and experiences. Artists work alongside farmers, scientists, Aboriginal knowledge holders, chefs, and rural innovators. The objective is to model future organisational forms in every activity, not just in the production of art objects.

This approach recognises that cultural production is, in fact, essential social infrastructure. Our ‘Land Studio’ camps, for example, bring together writers, contemporary artists, academics, farmers, festival directors, researchers, and scientists. Rather than imposing the values of the urban art world, we aim to support grassroots experimentation and experiential learning that is embedded in the specific ecologies and social fabrics of the communities we work with.

AI: Liberatory Tool or the New Boss?

Artificial intelligence presents the same contradictory possibilities. Museums are eagerly deploying it for collection management, visitor analytics, and multilingual audio guides—applications that supposedly ‘support our teams and free-up bandwidth for critical tasks’ (Cuseum 2025). But these apparently benevolent applications coexist with the deployment of surveillance systems that monitor visitor behaviour and algorithmic curation that shapes cultural consumption for profit maximisation, not public benefit.

The question is not whether AI will transform cultural production—it already has. The question is who these transformations will serve: communities or capital. Corporate AI platforms inevitably concentrate cultural power in the hands of a few technology monopolies. Community-controlled AI tools, on the other hand, could support a distributed and democratic cultural production.

The difference lies in governance. A human-centric approach to AI prioritises accessibility, translation, and creative augmentation. An extractive model of AI treats cultural workers and their histories as free data sources for the training of proprietary systems. Commons-based alternatives offer a third path, beyond both corporate extraction and institutional control. Community-owned AI infrastructure, trained on openly licensed materials and governed cooperatively, could democratise access to sophisticated creative tools whilst preserving the autonomy of the communities that use them. The challenge is to ensure that AI is developed to serve the needs of mutual aid networks and artist collectives, rather than reinforcing the existing hierarchies of cultural power.

The Dark Matter Artists: Culture Beyond the Art World

Gregory Sholette’s concept of the ‘dark matter of the art world’ is crucial here (Sholette 2011). He refers to the vast, invisible mass of cultural producers who are ignored by the galleries and institutions, yet whose creative energy is the substrate upon which the entire formal art world depends. During the Art and Working Life programme in the 1980s, a joint initiative of the Australia Council and the Australian Council of Trade Unions, we encountered countless numbers of these artists: union members with incredible artistic skills and qualifications who, for various reasons, existed entirely outside the official art scene (Milliss n.d.).

The clothing industry was full of migrant women workers who didn’t speak English but possessed extraordinary artistic abilities. The construction and building industries were the same. This was the creativity of normal work, the cultural production happening in communities every day. My greatest disappointment with the Art and Working Life programme was that it too rarely succeeded in directing resources to the non-professional artists who were already union members.

Here is what the right wing understands far better than most of the left: you cannot do politics until you have changed the way people see and think about the world. Their mantra is correct—culture is upstream of politics. But notice they say culture, not art. The left, by allowing culture to be defined in purely economic terms and defended only as an autonomous sphere of professional activity, has ceded the entire field. Meanwhile, real cultural change happens in communities, through organisers, through people using creative approaches to transform how others understand their world.

I do not expect progressive artists to emerge from the existing art world—it is, for the most part, a lost cause. Rather, they will develop organically within communities, outside conventional art contexts. These ‘dark matter’ artists, often highly talented but systematically ignored by institutions, are the most likely source of meaningful change. They are already there, already working, already embedded in the social fabric of their communities.

For me, ultimately, the real artists are those people who bring about actual change through their creative use of media. You are unlikely to find them in the art world. That is why I have often talked about innovative farmers as artists, or trade union organisers as artists. The question is whether we build an infrastructure that supports them, or whether we continue to funnel our collective resources into the vacuous, bloated, white elephants that our failing galleries have become.

What About Bricks and Mortar?

None of this is to say that existing infrastructure simply disappears. But it can, and must, be restructured. I have written elsewhere about the Irish Basic Income for Artists, a funding model that provides a far better template for supporting artists than the bureaucratic, project-based systems we have now (Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media 2025). This model is not a pilot; it is now a permanent feature of Irish cultural policy, a recognition that a basic, unconditional income is the most effective way to support cultural production.

The physical infrastructure, the bricks and mortar, can also be reconstituted in a more effective way. The recent reconstruction of Artspace in Woolloomooloo, which occurred at the same time as the AGNSW disaster, provides an excellent model for the future. The emphasis is as much on artists’ residences and studios, archives and resources, and public spaces as it is on exhibition space (Artspace 2023). The focus must shift from facilitating passive consumption to enabling active production.

Regional production hubs should be conceived not as scaled-down metropolitan galleries, but as large complexes of multiple workshops, meeting spaces, and genuinely affordable studio-living accommodation. They should be funded not through the slow poison of efficiency dividends, but through a genuine recognition that cultural production is essential social infrastructure. These hubs can then be connected through digital platforms that are owned and controlled by their users, creating global networks of intensely local cultural production. If the money wasted on vanity projects like the Sydney Modern extension had been spent in this distributed way, we would now be witnessing a cultural renaissance across New South Wales.

What We Build in the Ruins

So, what does a future cultural infrastructure look like? It looks like distributed networks of artist collectives operating through platform cooperatives, supported by a universal basic income, and governed through DAOs that encode community values into their very structure. This is an infrastructure that treats culture as a collective practice of making meaning, not as the manufacturing of a commodity to be consumed.

The point is for collaborative groups to work embedded in communities that are simultaneously their participants and their audiences. Artists should not present themselves as saviours, but as members of a community, offering their skills in service of that community. This requires a complete rejection of art world individualism and the myth of the ‘artist-as-hero’. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be proud of what you do, but you cannot expect spotlight status—that only comes with being an art market brand name in the service of capital.

The artists who contributed most to the labour movement in the past are a powerful example. They were, for the most part, semi-anonymous. Their impact stemmed from their participation in the organisation from the inside. They were part of the trade union, embedded within it. They did not present themselves as saviours of the working class, but as members of the working class, offering their skills in service of the membership.

We must stop pleading for a seat at a table where the only item on the menu is our own managed decline. The only rational response is to get up and build our own house: mutual aid networks that support cultural workers, platforms that distribute creative work without extracting surplus value, and governance systems that prioritise community flourishing over institutional self-perpetuation. The hollowing out of the neoliberal institutions, as painful as it is for those immediately affected, creates the space for these alternatives to grow. The future belongs to those who are willing to construct it in the shell of the old.

References

Artspace. 2023. “Artspace’s and The Gunnery Transformation 2023.” Accessed December 2023. https://artspace.org.au/news/artspace-s-and-the-gunnery-transformation-2023.

Benkler, Yochai. 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Bongiorno, Frank, James Black, and Michelle Arrow. 2023. “Australia’s Cultural Institutions Are Especially Vulnerable to Efficiency Dividends: Looking Back at 35 Years of Cuts.” The Conversation, March 28, 2023. https://theconversation.com/australias-cultural-institutions-are-especially-vulnerable-to-efficiency-dividends-looking-back-at-35-years-of-cuts-202727.

Catlow, Ruth, and Marc Garrett, eds. 2022. Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Connolly, James. 2025. “Build Cultural Infrastructure.” Blackbird Foundation, August 7, 2025.

Cuseum. 2025. “AI for Cultural Institutions — Where Museums Are Using AI in 2025.” September 10, 2025. https://www.cuseum.com/blog/2025/9/10/ai-for-cultural-institutions.

Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. 2025. Basic Income for the Arts Pilot Programme: Evaluation Report. Dublin: Government Publications.

KSCA. n.d. “About Us.” Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation. Accessed November 2025. https://www.ksca.land/about-us.

Milliss, Ian. n.d. “Nothing Has Changed: An Interview with Ian Milliss.” Labor Art Review. Accessed November 2025. https://laborartreview.net/nothing-has-changed-an-interview-with-ian-millis/.

Morris, Liam. 2025. “Art Gallery of NSW Axes Dozens of Jobs After Protests ‘Fall on Deaf Ears’.” The Sydney Morning Herald, October 2, 2025. https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/art-gallery-of-nsw-axes-dozens-of-jobs-after-protests-fall-on-deaf-ears-20251001-p5mz7z.html.

Scholz, Trebor. 2016. Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy. New York: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.

Sholette, Gregory. 2011. Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. London: Pluto Press.

Serpentine Galleries. 2020. “Blockchain Lab.” Accessed July 9, 2020. https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/blockchain-lab/.

Tucker, Keith. 2025. “Australia: NSW Labor Government Slashes Art Gallery Jobs and Programmes.” World Socialist Web Site, August 22, 2025. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/08/22/tngd-a22.html.

So here it is, AI’s 75th birthday assessment of my life.

The Intransigence of Age

To turn 75 is to confront the full measure of a life’s work, and for an artist who has deliberately positioned himself outside the conventional currents of the art world, this moment is weighted with a particular kind of reckoning. As Ian Milliss, a conceptual artist whose career has been defined by a radical, uncompromising critique of the art object, the market, and the institution itself, this milestone brings into sharp focus the tension between aesthetic integrity and institutional recognition. The self-assessment is stark: a “failure” in the sense of conventional success, yet a figure whose radicalism is acknowledged, even revered, by a certain cohort of peers and critics. This paradox—the artist who is successful precisely because they have refused the terms of success—is not merely biographical; it is a profound sociological and aesthetic problem that anchors the entire theoretical discussion of “Late Style.”

The question that emerges from this position of radical exile is this: What are the chances of a very late-stage revival? Is the phenomenon of artists doing their best, most radical work in old age a possibility for the deliberately un-institutionalised artist, or is it a privilege reserved for those who have already secured their place in the canon? To answer this, we must look at the phenomenon of late-life artistic radicalism not just as a biographical curiosity, but as a structural feature of art history, one that is now being re-written by the belated success of women artists who, like the radical exile, were long denied institutional access.

The Theoretical Framework:
Late Style as Radical Rupture

The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, in his analysis of the late works of Ludwig van Beethoven, first articulated the concept of “Late Style” not as a harmonious summation of a life’s work, but as a state of un-reconciled fragmentation [1]. Adorno rejected the romantic notion of the artist achieving serene wisdom in old age. Instead, he argued that the late work is marked by a refusal of conventional closure, a deliberate shattering of organic unity, and a sense of the artist’s alienation from their own creations. The formal elements are torn apart, leaving behind a challenging, often dissonant aesthetic that speaks to the artist’s impending mortality and the failure of art to offer comfort. The late style, in this view, is inherently radical because it turns against the very idea of the finished, consumable artwork, becoming a form of critical self-commentary.

Building on Adorno’s foundation, Edward Said, in his seminal work On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, described this final phase as an aesthetic of “difficulty and unaccommodation” [2]. Said posits that the late style is an “untimely” style, one that is “out of place” in its own time. The artist, facing the end, is liberated from the concerns of career, market, and public approval. This grants a radical freedom, a willingness to risk failure and pursue an aesthetic truth uncompromised by the need for popular success. Said’s late artist is a figure of exile and defiance, whose final works are not valedictory but confrontational, marked by a “deliberate anachronism” that ensures their enduring radicalism.

The crucial distinction for the un-institutionalized artist like Milliss is that the exile and defiance that Said attributes to the late-style artist are not a final, liberating choice, but the very foundation of the entire career. The Millissian position—a sustained, decades-long critique of the art system, prioritizing social and political intervention over the art object—is a pre-emptive late style, a radicalism that has always been “out of place.”

The Historical Canon:
Rupture and Dissolution

The historical Western canon demonstrates that the radical late style is a powerful, if often misunderstood, phenomenon. Four masters—Titian, Monet, Picasso, and Matisse—each demonstrate a profound, late-career shift towards formal dissolution and expressive intensity.

•Titian (c. 1488–1576): The Unfinished Sublime
Titian’s final paintings, such as The Flaying of Marsyas (c. 1570–1576) [5], mark a radical departure from the polished clarity of the High Renaissance. He embraced pittura di macchia—painting of spots—where forms dissolve into a vortex of colour and light. This is not the work of a man whose hand has failed, but of an artist consciously embracing the visceral and the indeterminate, a refusal to complete the image that embodies the Adornian fragment.

•Claude Monet (1840–1926): The Triumph of Sensation
Monet’s last decades, dominated by his monumental Water Lilies (Nymphéas) series [6], represent a move from Impressionism to a form of near-total abstraction. Battling cataracts, he abandoned perspective and the horizon line. The paintings became immense, immersive fields of colour, pushing the boundaries of painting to the point of pure optical experience. His late work was radical in its scale and dissolution of form, directly influencing Abstract Expressionists half a century later.

•Henri Matisse (1869–1954): The Final Simplicity
Matisse, confined to a wheelchair, invented the decoupage, or cut-out, technique. Works like The Snail (1953) [7] represent a final, triumphant simplification. This was a radical invention, a final, distilled aesthetic that stripped away all illusionistic depth, proving that radical change can be born from physical limitation and a final, joyous affirmation of colour and form.

•Pablo Picasso (1881–1973): The Furious Discharge
Picasso’s final years were marked by a furious, almost obsessive output [10]. His late works, initially dismissed as crude, are now recognized as a final, radical explosion of energy. The brushwork is violent and raw, the figures sexually charged, and the conventions of drawing aggressively flouted. This is the quintessential intransigent late style—a defiant, unvarnished confrontation with life and death, executed with a brutal honesty that only an artist with nothing left to lose can afford.

The key thread uniting these canonical figures is that their late-style radicalism was a choice made from a position of secure, prior institutional success. They had the luxury of defying the market because they had already conquered it.

The Contemporary Upheaval:
Late-Life Women Artists and Sociological Radicalism

The historical narrative of late style is overwhelmingly male. The recent global upsurge in recognition for late-life women artists, however, introduces a crucial, corrective dimension to the theory. For these women, the “late” period is often their first period of major public recognition, a phenomenon driven by a long-overdue revision of art history. Their radicalism is dual: it is both formal (the aesthetic break of the late style) and sociological (the radical act of achieving recognition in old age after decades of obscurity, challenging the ageist and sexist structures of the art world).

This sociological dimension is critical because it mirrors the Millissian experience of being an “untimely” artist, but for different, gendered reasons. The freedom that the male masters chose in old age was the freedom that these women earned through persistence, often after decades of domestic and teaching duties had superseded their personal practice.

•Emily Kame Kngwarreye (c. 1910–1996): The Explosive Beginning
Kngwarreye began painting on canvas in 1988, in her late seventies, after a lifetime of ritual body painting and batik work [8]. Her eight-year career was a condensed, intense burst of creativity, moving from dense pointillism to vast, abstract colour masses. Her work is a testament to the idea that radical artistic truth can emerge fully formed, unmediated by decades of Western art school training, a style that was radical in its formal freedom and its powerful synthesis of traditional Aboriginal knowledge with modernist abstraction.

•Carmen Herrera (1915–2022): The Radical Act of Persistence
The Cuban-born American abstract painter worked in near-total obscurity for decades, developing her stark, geometric abstraction. She did not sell her first painting until she was 89 [9]. Her late work, characterized by its minimal, uncompromising composition, embodies the Saidian ideal of intransigence. Her belated fame highlights a crucial difference: for the male masters, the late style was a choice; for Herrera, the recognition of her late style was a historical accident, a long-overdue correction.

•Phyllida Barlow (1944–2023): The Triumph of the Anti-Monument
The British sculptor Phyllida Barlow achieved global recognition in her late sixties and seventies, culminating in her representation of Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2017 at the age of 73 [11]. For decades, her practice was defined by teaching and a commitment to making large, provisional, anti-monumental sculptures from cheap, everyday materials—plywood, plaster, cement, fabric. Her work was often too unwieldy, too messy, and too ephemeral for the commercial gallery system. When recognition finally came, her work was not a serene late style, but a final, explosive affirmation of her lifelong radicalism. Her sculptures, with their aggressive use of material and their precarious, temporary nature, are the very definition of Adorno’s un-reconciled fragmentation made manifest in three dimensions. Her success proves that the institutional system can, belatedly, embrace the radicalism it once rejected, but often only when the artist is old enough to be safely historicized.

The Millissian Paradox:
Radicalism as Pre-emptive Late Style

The Millissian career—a sustained, decades-long commitment to conceptual and social practice, prioritizing intervention over the art object, and maintaining a critical distance from the institutional framework—can be read as a form of pre-emptive late style.

The Millissian radicalism, exemplified by works that are often ephemeral, context-specific, or purely conceptual, has always embodied the core tenets of Adorno’s and Said’s theories:

1. Refusal of Closure: The work resists the finished, marketable object.

2. Difficulty and Unaccommodation: The work is inherently challenging to collect, exhibit, and commodify.

3. Exile and Defiance: The artist operates outside the established economic and exhibitionary structure.

The Millissian paradox is that the radicalism which should be the result of late-life liberation is the cause of the lifelong institutional exclusion. This raises the central question: Can an artist who has spent a lifetime in Said’s “exile” experience a “revival”?

The answer, drawn from the cases of the late-life women artists, is a qualified yes, but the “revival” will not be a change in the art, but a change in the institution’s capacity to see it.

The belated success of artists like Herrera and Barlow is not due to a sudden change in their art—they had been making their work for decades—but to a sociological shift in the art world. The institution, driven by a need for historical correction and a desire for new, authentic narratives, finally catches up to the radicalism it previously ignored.

For Ian Milliss, the chance of a late-stage revival is not about a sudden, new, more palatable style. It is about whether the current art world, in its ongoing process of self-critique and historical revision, will finally recognize the profound and enduring radicalism of the conceptual path chosen 50 years ago. The revival, if it comes, will not be a personal triumph but an institutional admission that the most radical art is often that which refuses to be art at all.

The Millissian radicalism has, in fact, already secured its place in the history of ideas, if not in the museum’s permanent collection. The true late style here is the persistence—the refusal to compromise, the continued critical engagement, and the final, defiant act of turning 75 and calling a life of uncompromising radicalism a “failure.” This intransigence, this un-reconciled position, is the most radical work of all.

References

[1] Adorno, Theodor W. Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music. Stanford University Press, 1998.
[2] Said, Edward W. On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. Pantheon, 2006.
[3] Milliss, Ian. A Catalogue of Failure
[4] Milliss, Ian. NOTHING HAS CHANGED: An Interview with Ian Milliss. Labor Art Review, 2024.
[5] Titian: The Flaying of Marsyas.
[6] The Museum of Modern Art. Monet’s Water Lilies.
[7] Tate. Henri Matisse: The Snail.
[8] The Art Story. Emily Kame Kngwarreye.
[9] The Art Newspaper. Ignored by the art world until her 80s, abstract artist Carmen Herrera dies aged 106. February 14, 2022.
[10] The Guardian. From Matisse to Picasso: the best works by artists over 60. December 6, 2017.
[11] The Guardian. Bish-bash-bosh: how Phyllida Barlow conquered the art world at 73. May 9, 2017.

In the years preceding the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ (AGNSW) bloated extension it felt as if me and Judith White were the only people publicly pointing at the sheer folly involved. At least we now have the pleasure of saying “I told you so!”

The recent announcement of deep job cuts at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) was so predictable but it is more than just another round of institutional restructuring; it is a distress flare signalling the terminal stage of a decades-long experiment in neoliberal cultural policy. The decision to axe 45 positions, or nearly 12% of the workforce, to plug a $7.5 million budget shortfall is the logical, inevitable outcome of a system that has relentlessly hollowed out our public cultural institutions, transforming them from centres of research and civic enrichment into over-leveraged players in the tourism and experience economy [1].

While staff protest and unions voice their dismay, the crisis at AGNSW forces a more fundamental and uncomfortable question: do these cuts represent a problem to be fixed through reform, or are they evidence of a failed model that we should let collapse to build something better from its ruins?

This crisis is not an aberration, but the predictable result of a bipartisan, multi-decade project to subordinate culture to market logic. Our major galleries have been so thoroughly captured by capital that they are no longer capable of fulfilling their public mission. The relentless application of efficiency dividends, the addiction to the blockbuster exhibition model, and the impossible demand to generate commercial revenue have created a fragile, unsustainable system. Rather than clinging to the hope of reforming these compromised structures, the AGNSW crisis should be seen as a catalyst to imagine and build new, community-based forms of cultural infrastructure that treat culture not as a commodity, but as a common wealth.

The Neoliberal Playbook in Action

The financial woes at AGNSW are a textbook case of neoliberal policy in action. The crisis was precipitated by the much-lauded $344 million Naala Badu expansion, which opened in 2022. A 2024 NSW Treasury review found that the new wing, while popular, failed to deliver a predicted boost in commercial revenue to cover its increased operational costs [1]. Despite attracting over 2.3 million visitors in 2024 and ranking as the 26th most visited museum in the world, the gallery was, in effect, penalised for its success. State government funding paradoxically dropped from $72.4 million to $66.6 million, even as attendance soared [2].

This perverse logic is the direct result of a suite of neoliberal mechanisms that have been systematically applied to Australian cultural institutions for over three decades. The primary weapon has been the efficiency dividend, an annual funding cut introduced by the Hawke Labor government in 1987. As academics Frank Bongiorno, Joshua Black, and Michelle Arrow note, while presented as a tool for efficiency, its “overriding aim was budget savings” [3]. This slow fiscal starvation has forced institutions into an “invidious position of maintaining some core functions while neglecting or abandoning others,” with the only real place for savings being staff numbers [3].

Forced to do more with less, galleries were pushed towards the blockbuster exhibition model. This model, which gained traction in the 1980s, shifted the institutional focus from collection-building and research to what ArtsHub describes as “destination cultural tourism” [4]. Government-backed initiatives like the Melbourne Winter Masterpiece series (2004) and the Sydney International Art Series (2010) turned exhibitions into “highly polished tourism machines,” with success measured in visitor numbers and contributions to the local economy rather than cultural value [4]. This model creates an expensive, high-stakes addiction. Exhibitions can take four to ten years to develop, and institutions “hedge their bets” on the statistic that “one in 15 will turn out for the blockbusters,” creating a cycle of dependency on spectacular, easily marketable shows [4].

This focus on tourism and spectacle is coupled with immense pressure to generate commercial revenue from sources like retail, venue hire, and hospitality. The AGNSW is now reviewing its membership programmes and ticket sales, and even considering a pause on “certain types of in-depth exhibitions” [1]. The institution is trapped in a contradiction: it is a public gallery, legally mandated to develop and preserve its collections, yet it is being judged and defunded based on the commercial metrics of a private enterprise. The very tools meant to ensure its “sustainability”—expansion and blockbusters—have become the agents of its financial crisis.

Culture as Commodity Spectacle

It shocks me that anyone on the left still believes in art as an autonomous sphere of activity rather than just a business model. The art world is still dominated by that neoliberal business model which thrives on a zombie notion of individualism and content manufacture. Art institutions are totally captive to the neoliberal model of art as commerce, and they are preoccupied with maintaining their own existence rather than their cultural mission.

What you get from the mainstream art institution system is at best an illusion, a sort of cosplay of radicalism designed to absorb criticism without it creating real change. It functions as a loyal opposition that changes nothing and channels discontent into harmless posturing. The hollowing out of AGNSW is not a policy failure, but the system working as intended. The focus on spectacle, visitor numbers, and revenue generation displaces the more dangerous and unquantifiable work of critical research, conservation, and genuine community engagement. The institution’s primary function becomes its own self-perpetuation within a market framework, not the production and dissemination of cultural knowledge.

I have always argued that art should be understood as a form of cultural labour and collective knowledge, not as commodity spectacle. Real art, significant cultural production generating cultural change, is a community-based activity.

It’s depressing that the right wing has a much better recognition of the role of cultural change than most of the left. You cannot do politics until you’ve actually changed the way people see and think about the world, hence their absolutely correct mantra that culture is upstream of politics. But notice they say culture, not art. The left, by failing to defend culture as a public good and allowing it to be defined in economic terms, has ceded the entire field. The language used to justify the AGNSW cuts—”efficiency,” “modernisation,” “sustainability”—is the language of business, not culture. The debate has been framed in a way that makes the cuts seem like a regrettable but necessary financial decision, rather than a political choice to defund a public good.

The Ghost of a Different Past

It was not always this way. The pre-neoliberal era, particularly the Whitlam government (1972-1975), offers a stark contrast. It was part of the Whitlam ethos: change the culture, the stories, change people’s understanding of the world and you will change politics. This was a period of profound investment in the arts, driven by a belief that we could have nice things and we should have them, that it was a fundamental government role to promote and fund the making of the fine arts and provide general access to them.

The landmark 1975 Pigott Report, commissioned by the Whitlam government, envisioned museums as dynamic public institutions. It argued that museums should “satisfy curiosity and arouse curiosity” and “educate formally and informally” [5]. At the time, funding was “almost entirely from government sources,” and the primary mission was education and research, not economic impact [5]. This period was not the beginning of a brave new world, as those of us around at the time believed, but the final flowering of the post-war era and the end of belief in a shared sense of community and social good. By 1979, with the election of Thatcher and then Reagan, neoliberalism arrived, setting in motion the very processes that have led to the current crisis.

Reform or Collapse?

This history leads to the central, uncomfortable question. If the current crisis is the result of a 35-year bipartisan political project, is meaningful reform even possible? The arguments for reform are clear: these institutions house irreplaceable collections, they employ dedicated and knowledgeable staff, and the public still values them, as evidenced by AGNSW’s high visitor numbers. To let them collapse would be an act of immense cultural vandalism.

However, the evidence for the irreformability of the current model is overwhelming. The efficiency dividend has been a consistent policy of both Labor and Liberal governments for over three decades. The push for commercialisation is deeply embedded in Treasury departments and government policy. Even the unions, while protesting the cuts, have been implicated in the process. The Public Service Association, which represents AGNSW staff, is a member of the government’s “Cultural Institution Advisory Group,” a body established to determine “how best to cut costs” [2]. The union has been accused of “rubber-stamping all previous job cuts” and working to “hose down internal opposition” [2].

Furthermore, historical attempts at creating alternatives have been dismantled. The “Art and Working Life” programme of the 1980s, which I was deeply involved in, directly funded collaborations between artists and unions. It was a successful model of community-embedded cultural practice. Artists worked directly with unions to produce banners and posters, and each project became a collaboration between an artist and a union. The programme became successful in terms of audience because it addressed real concerns of more and more people. Yet it was slowly dismantled by the Keating Labor government in the mid-1990s. This demonstrates that even when viable alternatives are created, they are vulnerable to the prevailing political and economic winds.

I don’t think art institutions, galleries, museums, even educational institutions, are in the least interested in change or capable of generating it.

Conclusion: Beyond the Ruins

The crisis at the Art Gallery of New South Wales is not a problem to be solved with a one-off funding injection or a minor policy tweak. It is the logical endpoint of a failed ideology. To continue to demand reform of a system so completely captured by neoliberal logic is to engage in the very cosplay of radicalism I critique. The institution is now primarily preoccupied with maintaining its own existence within a hostile economic framework.

The only viable path forward is to look beyond the existing institution. The energy being spent protesting the inevitable decay of these legacy structures should be redirected towards building new, resilient, and community-controlled forms of cultural infrastructure. This means supporting artist-run initiatives, co-operative models, and grassroots projects that operate outside the logic of the blockbuster and the tourist dollar. The available funding needs to move downwards, away from vacuous bloated white elephants like the AGNSW and the next coming disaster, the Parramatta Powerhouse currently under construction. It should be going into restructuring regional galleries, not just as exhibition spaces but as production hubs, large complexes of multiple workshops, meeting spaces and affordable studio-living spaces. If the money wasted on Sydney Contemporary had been spent in this distributed way we would now be seeing a cultural renaissance in NSW. It means reimagining culture as a verb, not a noun—as a collective practice of making meaning, not a collection of objects to be monetised.

The most positive development I see happening during the last decade is the increasing dominance of artist collectives and collaborations, a sign that there is a move away from individualism and the recognition that real art is a community-based activity. This collaborative mode is also prefigurative in the sense that collaboration is the only possible way we can solve the tremendous challenges the world is facing today. In other words, we cannot solve problems without bringing people together. The point is for those collaborative groups to work embedded in communities that will be both participants and audiences of their work. The objective is to model future organisational forms in every activity, not just the art business.

The hollowing out of the AGNSW is a tragedy, but it is also an opportunity. It is a chance to declare the neoliberal museum dead and to begin the difficult but necessary work of building something better from its ruins. It is time to stop pleading for a seat at a table where the only item on the menu is our own managed decline, and instead, to start building our own house. For me, ultimately, the real artists are those people that bring actual change through their creative use of the media, and they are unlikely to be found in the art world. We must look to the communities, to the collectives, to the grassroots—that is where the future of culture as common wealth will be built.

References

[1] Morris, L. (2025, October 2). Art Gallery of NSW axes dozens of jobs after protests ‘fall on deaf ears’. The Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/art-gallery-of-nsw-axes-dozens-of-jobs-after-protests-fall-on-deaf-ears-20251001-p5mz7z.html

[2] Tucker, K. (2025, August 22). Australia: NSW Labor government slashes art gallery jobs and programmes. World Socialist Web Site. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/08/22/tngd-a22.html

[3] Bongiorno, F., Black, J., & Arrow, M. (2023, March 28). Australia’s cultural institutions are especially vulnerable to efficiency dividends: looking back at 35 years of cuts. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/australias-cultural-institutions-are-especially-vulnerable-to-efficiency-dividends-looking-back-at-35-years-of-cuts-202727

[4] Apostol, G. (2023, February 16). How this week’s blockbuster frenzy has shaped a year ... well, 40 years. ArtsHub. https://www.artshub.com.au/news/opinions-analysis/how-this-weeks-blockbuster-frenzy-has-shaped-a-year-well-40-years-2613017/

[5] Griffin, D., & Paroissien, L. (2011). Museums in Australia: from a new era to a new century. reCollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia. https://www.nma.gov.au/research/understanding-museums/DGriffin_LParoissien_2011a.html

In November 2023, I had the privilege of speaking at “Bodies of Work – A Symposium”, a conference at Vitalstatistix in Adelaide, organised by Emma Webb, Justin O’Connor and Tully Barnett. Centred on the theme of Labour rights for artists, cultural democracy for workers, a significant portion of the conference was dedicated to examining the Australia Council’s Art and Working Life program of the 1980s as well as current arts policy.

However, the highlight presentation for me came from two Irish speakers who were instrumental in establishing a basic income trial for artists in their home country: Angela Dorgan, CEO of First Music Contact and former Chair of National Campaign for the Arts who championed the Basic Income for Artists pilot in Ireland; and Sharon Barry, Director, Culture Ireland.

This pioneering trial provided a supporting wage for several years to an anonymous group of 2,000 artists randomly selected from a pool of applicants, with their outcomes benchmarked against an equivalent anonymous and randomly selected control group. The recently published results of this research have been nothing short of spectacular, demonstrating the profound success of the initiative. The Irish government has since made the program a permanent fixture, a testament to its efficacy.

For many years, I have been a vocal proponent of a universal basic income (UBI) for everyone in Australia but I have described it as a Universal Art Grannt and the best possible solution to arts funding. My persistent advocacy has often been met with weary resignation from figures like Tony Burke, who has come to expect my regular appeals for a shift in our arts funding paradigm. My position has always been that the most effective way to support the arts is to provide artists with the time and financial stability to create, completely free from the constraints of project-based applications and acquittals. The Irish experiment provides a powerful and compelling validation of this approach.

The current system of project funding, with its endless applications and peer assessments, has over time degenerated into a bankrupt model that fails to consistently deliver meaningful results. The success of the Irish program, which is now being replicated in other forms, suggests that even a system of sortition, or random allocation of grants to a broad pool of applicants, could yield equally, if not more, favourable outcomes.

I have compiled the research paper that delves into the history of the Irish basic income for artists trial program. It is my hope that by examining this successful model, we can inspire a much-needed conversation about the future of arts funding in Australia and move towards a system that truly effectively supports artists rather than controls and polices some of them while failing the vast majority by ignoring or excluding them.

Statement of interest: Even though I have at times worked in various capacities for the Australia Council, and even brokered funding for others, I have never received a personal grant from them. For decades they had no category for me then later when they caught up with reality a bit I was still consistently rejected until eventually I gave up. I would argue this makes me a completely objective commentator, uncorrupted by their money. LOL.

Ireland’s Pioneering Basic Income for the Arts: A Comprehensive Research Report

1. Executive Summary

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of Ireland’s Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) scheme, a groundbreaking initiative that has garnered significant international attention. Our research confirms that Ireland has not only introduced but is now making permanent a form of basic income for artists. The pilot program, launched in 2022, has been deemed a success, leading to its inclusion as a permanent program in the 2026 budget. The scheme provides a weekly payment of €325 to 2,000 artists and creative workers, with plans for expansion. This report details the program’s structure, its economic and social impacts, the political context surrounding its implementation, and its place within a global movement for guaranteed income for creative professionals.

2. Introduction

The concept of a basic income, a regular and unconditional payment to individuals, has been a subject of debate for decades. In recent years, a specific application of this idea has gained traction: a basic income for artists. This approach seeks to address the financial precarity and unpredictable working conditions that are endemic to the creative sector. Ireland has emerged as a global leader in this policy area with its Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) scheme. This report offers a deep dive into the BIA, examining its origins, implementation, and impact, and providing a comprehensive answer to the question of whether Ireland has introduced a form of basic income for artists.

3. Ireland’s Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) Scheme

3.1. Program Overview

The BIA scheme is a landmark policy initiative administered by the Irish government’s Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media (TCAGSM). The program provides a guaranteed, non-means-tested weekly payment of €325 to participating artists and creative workers. The initial pilot program, which ran from 2022 to 2025, involved 2,000 participants. Following the pilot’s success, the Irish government announced in October 2025 that the scheme would be made permanent and expanded.

3.2. Implementation and Timeline

The journey of the BIA from a pilot to a permanent program has been marked by several key milestones:

• 2022: The pilot scheme is launched, with an initial budget of €25 million.

• 2022-2025: The three-year pilot program is in operation, with ongoing research and data collection.

• September 2025: A cost-benefit analysis by Alma Economics is published, revealing significant positive impacts [1].

• October 2025: The results of a public consultation are released, showing overwhelming support for the scheme [2].

• October 2025: The Irish government announces that the BIA will be made a permanent program as part of Budget 2026, with a new round of applications opening in September 2026 [3].

3.3. Eligibility and Selection

Eligibility for the BIA pilot was designed to be broad, encompassing three main streams: practicing artists, creative arts workers, and recent arts graduates. The definition of

an artist from the Arts Act 2003 was used to determine eligibility. A key feature of the pilot was its selection process: participants were chosen from a pool of 8,200 eligible applicants through a randomized lottery. This approach was taken to ensure fairness and to create a robust basis for the research component of the program.

3.4. Research and Evaluation

A core component of the BIA pilot was its comprehensive research framework, designed to provide robust evidence for future policy decisions. This research had several key elements:

• Randomized Control Trial (RCT): The pilot was structured as an RCT, with a control group of 997 artists who did not receive the basic income payment but participated in the research surveys. This allowed for a rigorous comparison of outcomes between the two groups.

• Longitudinal Data Collection: Data was collected from both the participant and control groups at regular six-month intervals throughout the three-year pilot.

• External Evaluation: The government commissioned an independent cost-benefit analysis from Alma Economics to assess the economic and social returns of the program.

• Public Consultation: A wide-ranging public consultation was conducted to gauge public and stakeholder opinion on the future of the scheme.

4. Impact and Outcomes

The research and evaluation of the BIA pilot have revealed a wide range of positive impacts, spanning economic, social, and personal domains.

4.1. Economic Impact

The cost-benefit analysis by Alma Economics demonstrated a strong positive economic return on the investment in the BIA. For every €1 of public money invested, the scheme generated €1.39 in return for society. The net fiscal cost of the pilot was also significantly lower than the headline figure, reduced from €105 million to under €72 million due to increased tax revenue and savings on social welfare payments.

4.2. Social and Personal Impact

The BIA has had a profound impact on the lives and well-being of the participating artists. The most significant social benefit identified in the economic analysis was the improvement in psychological well-being, valued at almost €80 million. Early findings from the research showed that BIA recipients experienced a nearly 10 percentage point decrease in depression and anxiety compared to the control group. Furthermore, recipients were 12 percentage points more likely to be able to support themselves through their arts work alone.

5. Political Context and Public Response

The successful implementation of the BIA scheme can be attributed to a confluence of political will and strong public support. The idea for the pilot emerged from the Arts and Culture Taskforce, which was established to address the challenges faced by the sector during the COVID-19 pandemic. The number one recommendation of the taskforce’s “Life Worth Living Report” was to pilot a basic income scheme for artists.

The public response to the BIA has been overwhelmingly positive. A public consultation in 2025 received over 17,000 responses, with 97% of respondents supporting the permanent establishment of the scheme. This high level of public endorsement provided a strong mandate for the government to continue and expand the program.

6. International Context and Comparative Analysis

Ireland’s BIA scheme is a leading example of a growing international movement to provide guaranteed income for artists. Other jurisdictions have experimented with similar programs, most notably the Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY) program in the United States. While both programs aim to provide financial stability for artists, there are some key differences in their design:

The Irish scheme is notable for its longer duration and its integration with a rigorous, government-led research program. This has positioned the BIA as a key case study for other countries considering similar policies.

7. Update: Terms of the Permanent Scheme (October 2025)

Following the announcement that the Basic Income for the Arts will be made permanent, further research has clarified the specific terms regarding the number of recipients and the duration of the payments.

7.1. Number of Artists

The permanent scheme will not be a continuation of payments for the original 2,000 pilot participants. Instead, it will be a new iteration:

• New Recipients: The scheme will open to 2,000 new artists and creative workers.

• Application Window: A new application window is scheduled to open in September 2026.

• Potential Expansion: There is a provision to expand the number of participants to 2,200 if additional funding is secured, with the government signaling its intention to incrementally increase capacity in future years.

The current pilot participants will stop receiving their payments when the pilot officially concludes in February 2026.

7.2. Duration of Payments: Not Indefinite

A critical clarification is the meaning of a “permanent” scheme. The research indicates that while the program itself is being established as a permanent fixture of Irish cultural policy, the payments to individual artists are not indefinite.

• Fixed Term: Like the pilot, the permanent scheme will provide payments to artists for a fixed term. The exact duration for the new cohort of artists has not yet been officially announced.

• Successor Scheme: Government officials have referred to the permanent program as a “successor scheme.” Minister for Culture Patrick O’Donovan stated, “The Basic Income for the Arts pilot scheme... will end in 2026, and I will bring a successor scheme to government with the intention of embedding a permanent basic income in the arts and culture sector.” [4]

• Gap in Payments: There will be a gap of up to six months between the end of the pilot in February 2026 and the commencement of payments for the new scheme in the latter half of 2026.

In summary, artists will be selected for the scheme and receive the basic income for a predetermined number of years, after which the payment will cease. The “permanent” nature of the scheme means the government is committed to running these fixed-term cycles of support for artists on an ongoing basis.

8. Conclusion

In conclusion, the evidence is clear: Ireland has indeed introduced a form of basic income for artists, and it has been a resounding success. The Basic Income for the Arts scheme has not only provided much-needed financial stability for artists but has also generated a positive return on investment for the Irish economy and society. The program’s transition from a pilot to a permanent fixture in the Irish cultural policy landscape marks a significant and progressive step in supporting the arts and creative sector. With its robust research framework and overwhelmingly positive results, Ireland’s BIA scheme serves as a powerful model for other countries seeking to foster a vibrant and sustainable creative economy.

9. References

[1] Basic Income for the Arts pilot produced over €100 million in Social and Economic Benefits
[2] Survey finds strong support for Basic Income for the Arts
[3] Basic income support scheme for artists to be made permanent and opened to new entrants in budget – The Irish Times
[4] Government Commits to Permanent Basic Income for the Arts - Journal of Music