Cate Blanchett tells Australian Performing Arts Market more funding is needed
From the AMPAG archive — restored from a 2010 news clipping in the AMPAG in the Media file, originally published in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Cate Blanchett, then co-artistic director of Sydney Theatre Company, used her keynote speech at the Australian Performing Arts Market in 2010 to call for sustained increased Government investment in the country’s major performing arts companies, framing the case in terms of cultural infrastructure rather than discretionary funding. The speech was reported widely at the time and entered the AMPAG In the Media archive as one of the highest-profile arguments made for the major performing arts sector during the post-GFC funding fight.
Blanchett’s argument was that the major performing arts companies were national infrastructure on the same scale and with the same long-run public value as transport infrastructure or research infrastructure — that they were the institutions through which the country’s narrative tradition was passed forward, and that they could no more be left to the market alone than a research university or a national museum could.
What was said
The speech set out three threads that ran through the rest of the decade’s AMPAG advocacy: that the major companies were a national institution rather than a private cultural producer; that the productivity of the sector — measured in audience reach, training pipeline, regional reach and international cultural reach — depended on a stable funding base; and that the funding of the sector had not increased in real terms for over a decade and was being eroded by indexation lag against actual sector costs.
The reception of the speech in the broader Australian press was substantial — the major dailies covered it the following day, and the speech was excerpted on ABC arts programming for several weeks afterward. AMPAG used the speech in subsequent policy submissions through 2010 and 2011 as a high-profile articulation of the case for sustained federal investment.
Why this matters in the longer arc
The “national infrastructure” framing the speech popularised became one of the dominant rhetorical frames in Australian arts policy advocacy through the 2010s. It was deployed in the 2013 Creative Australia consultations, in the 2015–16 fight over the Catalyst Fund, in the 2020 emergency-response advocacy during the COVID lockdowns, and in the 2022–23 development of Revive. Cate Blanchett herself remained a high-profile public advocate for the sector through all of those moments, including her testimony to the 2016 Senate Inquiry.
Original news item: Sydney Morning Herald, 2010; archived in the AMPAG In the Media file. Restored from the AMPAG site Wayback Machine archive.
