Just before the end of 2025, under the heading, Backing Our Creative Organisations, Jobs And Cultural Life, the Minister for Creative Industries Colin Brooks MP announced the recipients of Creative Victoria’s Creative Enterprise Program (CEP) funding.
Glaringly, since the last round in 2022, the number of organisations receiving CEP support has dropped dramatically from 93 to 81 in 2026 – and with the introduction of two-year allocations rather than four in previous years, this number is likely to decrease even further. The tapering off of funding is more like ‘‘backing away’’ from our creative organisations.
As well as the overall number of recipients, the CEP funding pool has been reduced from $21.2 million in the 2022-25 period to $17.9 million for 2026-29. This significant contraction raises the question of the future of Victoria’s vital small to medium cultural sector.
Victoria’s guiding policy document, Creative State 2028 declares: ‘Creative Victoria will find new ways to amplify and leverage the unique creative potential of each community by leveraging existing infrastructure and forging new connections. Whether that is through Victoria’s well-established network of public art galleries and performing arts facilities, regional festivals, or the diversity of independent creative organisations and creative communities that drive local activity and opportunities.’
There are many research reports produced by governments and independent bodies that make plain the small to medium sector’s achievement in delivering economic, social and creative returns for the State – well beyond the Government’s meagre investment. Victoria’s creative economy is worth $41 billion (8% of the state’s economy). Public investment under the CEP program amounts to 0.01% of this figure. Yet these diverse creative organisations constitute most of Victoria’s cultural ecosystem, they employ most of the workforce, produce most of the innovative work, and reach many communities across the state and beyond.
The impact of reduced CEP funds is even more pronounced across the industry service sector (arts peak bodies) – the critical infrastructure that supports artists and creative organisations statewide. Under CEP, 14 service organisations were funded in 2022, dropping to 10 in 2026 and likely only to be eight by 2028. This represents a 55% reduction since 2022.
Creative State 2028: creativity is valued but barriers remain
The Creative State 2028 consultation found strong belief in creativity’s social, cultural and economic value, but significant barriers remain. Key issues raised in the consultation process include workforce insecurity, skills shortages, cost-of-living pressures, audience decline, and inequity for First Peoples and under-represented groups. Respondents called for better evidence, fair pay, business support, inclusive investment and help navigating technological and climate change.
Read: Creative State 2028: the Victorian arts sector responds
Public sector funding is fundamental to the health and fair distribution of the creative industries across Victoria. To address these challenges and shape Victoria’s creative future we can’t rely on short-term private sector fixes. Appropriate and sustainable government investment is essential if the creative sector is to have a future. The alternative is unthinkable.
The important role played by peak bodies
Victoria’s arts service organisations – also known as peak bodies, and including the likes of Regional Arts Victoria (RAV), Theatre Network Australia (TNA) and the Victorian Association of Performing Arts Centres (VAPAC), to name just three – have a key role to play in shaping this future. These industry service organisations are critical to a healthy creative sector, though their value is often overlooked, as their work is structural rather than visible.
Service organisations have a mix of advocacy, capacity-building, policy leadership, collaboration and direct support roles. They aggregate thousands of disparate voices into a comprehensible case for government in formulation of short or long-term policy and programmatic responses. They translate lived experience into submissions, briefings, and arguments that governments can grasp. Without them, arts policy is shaped almost entirely by increasingly secluded bureaucrats and market forces.
Most artists and small arts organisations are fragmented, precarious, and time-poor. During the COVID 19 pandemic in particular, no single company or artist could effectively negotiate with government about shutdowns, relief packages, or reopening rules. This was particularly evident in the Sustaining Creative Workers program – co-designed and delivered swiftly by three industry service organisations in conjunction with Creative Victoria. Another example was Multicultural Arts Victoria’s Shelter program – engaging VicHealth, Creative Victoria and City of Melbourne in critical support for the Flemington and North Melbourne’s public housing tenants during the hard lockdowns.
Similarly, in the wake of the 2019-20 bushfire season, the Creative Recovery program, delivered by Regional Arts Victoria in partnership with the State Government, funded hundreds of small arts and cultural projects – employing local artists to work with communities in heavily impacted areas to express shared experiences of loss and resilience.
During crises, this coordination matters. It prevents ad hoc, inequitable responses where only the loudest or most established organisations are heard. Peak organisations create coherence in a complex sector. They gather data, track workforce conditions, identify systemic failures and sector-wide needs, provide training, produce useful up-to-date information to improve the sector and, importantly, have a wide reach across local government jurisdictions. Artists cycle in and out of practice, governments change, funding priorities shift, but peak bodies hold continuity. They remember past policy failures, successful models and unfinished reforms.
According to Creative State 2028, Victoria has ‘an enviable network of regional galleries and performing arts centres’, and yet we don’t have public sector support for our peak body for performing arts centres (of which there are 78+ in Victoria), while our peak body for galleries (representing 75+ galleries across Victoria) was defunded in this round of CEP along with our peak body for writers (which has 3,000+ members).
Looking to the future
To remain a creative state in the foreseeable future, the Victorian Government would need to work more strategically with well-resourced, high-functioning peak bodies effectively representing the component parts of our cultural and creative sector. If we push these important bodies to the margins and allow them to deteriorate, advocacy becomes atomised, policy becomes reactive, and artists are left negotiating individually with systems designed to overwhelm them.
This is not the time to be backing away.
