The AMPAG Archive

The AMPAG archive — media releases and news, 2004–2020

For sixteen years AMPAG was the public voice of the major performing arts companies on funding, philanthropy and policy. The organisation’s archive — media releases, position statements and the AMPAG in the Media news clippings file — remains one of the cleanest contemporaneous records of how the sector responded to events: the GFC, the Mining Boom, the National Cultural Policy under the Gillard Government, the Brandis Catalyst Fund affair, the 2019 election, COVID-19, and the federal restructure that ended AMPAG’s role.

We’ve kept that archive intact because it’s still cited — by researchers, by arts journalists writing context pieces, by submissions to parliamentary inquiries on arts funding. Where editorial backlinks point at specific old AMPAG URLs, we’ve redirected them to the matching restored post.

Browse the archive

• Media releases (2004–2018) — official statements from AMPAG on budgets, policy, philanthropy reports and sector responses.
• AMPAG in the Media (2009–2016) — curated news clippings of major performing arts coverage in the Australian press during the AMPAG era.
• Major Matters blog (2014–2016) — longer-form pieces by AMPAG staff and major company directors on policy, touring, and Indigenous engagement.

Key archived themes

• Philanthropy and private giving — annual Giving Survey results and trends from 2004 onwards, including the influential AbaF/Creative Partnerships submissions.
• Funding policy — AMPAG’s formal positions on the Major Performing Arts Framework, federal Budget responses, the 2015 Catalyst restructure, and the National Cultural Policy.
• Touring and access — case studies on regional touring programmes and AMPAG’s lobbying for sustained federal touring support.
• Indigenous engagement — Bangarra, Indigenous education and remote-community programmes covered through the Major Matters series.
• The COVID period — sector responses to the 2020 lockdowns and the JobKeeper interactions with major companies.

A note on attribution

Archive posts that originated as AMPAG official statements are credited as such. News clippings in the AMPAG in the Media section are credited to the original outlet (Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian, ArtsHub, Daily Review etc.) with a link to the original story where it remains available — and where it doesn’t, with a note that the original is no longer online.

If you’ve arrived here from a research citation pointing at an older URL pattern (/_blog/Media_Releases/post/... or /2release.asp?id=...), the redirect should have brought you to the matching restored post. If you’ve hit this page instead, it means we haven’t yet restored that specific item — drop us a note via contact with the URL and we’ll prioritise it.