After the furore surrounding the former Adelaide Festival Board’s decision to disinvite Palestinian-Australia author Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah to its 2026 Writers’ Week program, many are left in dismay about how the actions of a few governing powers of an arts organisation could have triggered such a mess.
Not only has the debacle caused numerous authors to miss out on connecting with readers, Australian booksellers have lost out on sales, audiences have been stripped of their access to an internationally recognised (and free) literary event, and the program has lost its director.
And while it’s easy to look back and point to what should have been done – 20/20 hindsight is a beautiful thing – it’s quite another to look forward with a view to improving processes and practices for the future.
Two of the nation’s most experienced arts administrators, managers and leaders – both of whom have spent many years serving arts boards as company directors or CEOs, and who have also served as arts board members themselves – believe today’s arts sector environment does indeed raise some new arts governance priorities.
However, they also recognise several core factors behind good board management that are as important today as they were 20 or more years ago.
Arts board management 101 – quick links
Effective arts governance: what hasn’t changed over time
Rob Brookman AM is a leading Australian theatre producer, festival director and arts administrator with an arts career spanning over four decades.
He has held leadership positions in some of Australia’s most prominent festivals and performing arts organisations, and was a co-founder of both Arts Projects Australia (in 1996) and WOMADelaide (in 1992), where he was WOMADelaide’s Artistic Director and/or Artistic Advisor for 15 years.
Brookman has served on numerous arts boards. He was Deputy Chair of Playing Australia’s board (1992-1996), Chair of the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award Committee (1994-1998) and has also sat on the boards of the Melbourne Festival and Belvoir Theatre.
Most recently, he has been appointed to the Adelaide Festival board after the events that led to the cancellation of the 2026 Adelaide Writers’ Week.
Brookman believes one crucial quality of effective arts boards that has not changed over time is the ability to maintain an appropriately balanced team with the right mix of skills and experience to carry out the tasks at hand.
But unfortunately, he sees a dearth of this kind of balance in many arts boards right now.
As he tells ArtsHub, ‘I think it’s extremely useful if an arts board member has had the experience of servicing an arts board in their role at a general manager or CEO of an arts organisation themselves.
‘But I don’t think there is a strong enough culture within our sector at the moment [of] recognising that somebody who has actually done the job [of an arts executive or arts CEO] is incredibly useful when it comes to governing the people who do that job.’
Brookman also believes artists have a vital role to play at board level. However, just like any other board appointment, their skills and experience must be fit for purpose.
Read: Let’s get arts practitioners on boards (from 2017)
‘It’s important to make sure artists are not chosen for board positions simply because of their high profiles or their artistic reputations alone,’ he tells ArtsHub.
‘They must have the skills and experience required to add value to the board’s governance capacities in some way.’
Like Brookman, esteemed Australian arts producer Jo Dyer – who has held leadership positions at arts organisations like Sydney Writers’ Festival and Sydney Theatre Company, and who has served on numerous arts boards over her decades-long career – sees the paucity of arts practitioners currently on our boards as a concern.
As she tells ArtsHub, ‘It’s a problem that many people, like Ralph Myers in his Philip Parsons Lecture way back in 2014, have spoken about across the years.
‘And what’s concerning about this lack of arts people on boards is that when [arts organisational] problems arise that relate to the fundamental aspects of the way artists live their lives, those factors are very foreign to the non-arts industry leaders who are being brought onto arts boards of institutions.’
She adds: ‘This is particularly the case when the appointment of board directors is overwhelmingly in the purview of government’.
Further to that, Dyer cautions against arts board members applying ‘one-size-fits-all’ principles to their board responsibilities across the sector.
‘It’s important to remember there are some fundamental differences between what’s required from board members of small-to-medium arts organisations compared to the large arts institutions,’ she says.
‘If you look at the people on the boards of small-to-medium arts organisations, they are often people who work in the arts themselves, and they are able to provide those small teams with operational support, mentoring and sounding board advice, as well as governance.
‘Those roles are quite different to those of the large institutions’ boards, which are not operating with quite the same level of precarity as the smaller ones can be, and so they can be much more outward-looking and more concerned with extending the reach of the organisation while providing necessary governance oversight.’
New pressures arts boards must address
Aside from championing these lasting qualities required for effective board management, both Dyer and Brookman identify several new dynamics worthy of boards’ careful attention.
The first shift they observe relates to certain cultural changes around board practices – especially in their attitudes towards, and appetites for, risk.
As Brookman tells ArtsHub, ‘I think that we live in an increasingly risk-averse world, and I feel that [arts] board appointments are being made more regularly with a view to risk mitigation, rather than with a view to supporting the major project of the organisations.
‘I feel as though the emphasis has shifted from support to control and that, I think, is key to what I would see as the deterioration of the quality of arts boards in this country,’ he adds.
Read: Arts boards in crisis: how have we landed here, yet again?
For Dyer, it’s not only about shifts in culture and practice at board level. The polarising political discussions happening in society at large are also a significant factor.
‘What we have seen in the last few years in particular is that the type of risk management that is required of boards is not purely financial. Rather, it is much more about managing the different perspectives that different stakeholders have on key political, and often very febrile, issues,’ she says.
‘And you cannot fix these problems that emerge by silencing the artists on whom you rely, and whose work is the raison d’être of the organisation itself.’
It’s also about the money…
In addition to the politics, the question of money is also high on the list of board’s greatest challenges right now.
According to Brookman: ‘It’s unsurprising to say that one of the hardest things about the operating environment for arts organisations right now is about finding the resources you need to carry out your mission.’
He describes the proverbial ‘death by a thousand cuts’ as being a recurring theme over his many years in the sector.
‘Time and again we see a government of a particular persuasion come in and say, “We’ve been ignoring the arts for too long. We need to do something about this.” And they come in and let a thousand flowers bloom, only for that funding to be cut to crisis level a few years later,’ Brookman says.
‘These inconsistencies in the allocations of the limited financial resources available are certainly one of the hardest things we are managing right now,’ he adds.
‘This is so disappointing, because we currently have no shortage of talented artists, and no shortage of great people to work with them as managers, producers and marketers.
‘We have built a very professional industry in terms of our operational systems and structures, and the people who work in our sector. But inconsistencies in government funding, and the fact that government arts funding is still well behind CPI [Consumer Price Index increases], continues to pose serious limitations,’ he concludes.
