A creative flip-flop over terrorist imagery and arts grants

Creative Australia CEO Adrian Collette and chairman Robert Morgan (inset).

What faith would anyone hold in the leadership of Creative Australia, the taxpayer-funded arts council, when its chair, Robert Morgan, and its CEO, Adrian Collette, flip-flop with such alacrity over a political crisis of their own making?

Barely a week ago this low-flying duo proudly announced Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino as Australia’s artist representatives for the upcoming Venice Biennale 2026. By Thursday night, Sabsabi and ­Dagostino were practically untouchable, both having been roundly dumped by Morgan, Collette and the rest of the Creative Australia board amid a fuss over terrorist imagery in Sabsabi’s early work. You can build a thousand bridges, right?

Morgan’s failure to forecast the obvious backlash doesn’t speak much of his years running Clemenger Group, one of the largest advertising and crisis management behemoths in the southern hemisphere. There he was, a wealth of spinmeister expertise at his fingertips, and still none of it could save him or Collette from making egregious asses of themselves this week.

Amazing, then, that entrusted to both is an embarrassment of taxpayer dollars that funds an agency bizarrely in the grip of people who bear a disdain for this country, but who also harbour a virulent hatred of Israel and that other pet passion of theirs: “Zionists”, which is just fancy word for Jews.

An analysis of the grants being doled out by Creative Australia also shows a surprising level of affiliation between the people on the assessment panels and the recipients making their case for funding. Our attention was drawn to those who are amply connected through an artist’s body called Eleven Collective, started by Sabsabi in 2016. Its 14 core members have collectively received about $1m in grants since 2018.

Among them is Hoda Afshar, an artist awarded $71,000 by Creative Australia, including a grant valued at $35,635 and ­assessed by two artists – Abdullah Syed and Abdul Abdullah – both of whom are linked to ­Afshar through the Eleven Collective group. Syed and Abdullah also sat on a separate panel that in 2023 awarded $45,200 to another Eleven Collective artist, Shireen Taweel.

We asked Creative Australia about these coincidences. It told us that “robust processes” are deployed to ensure “transparency and independence of decision-making”. Fine, very well. So we then asked them to produce records of any conflicts being declared for the cases mentioned – we received no reply.

Syed told us he declared all conflicts. These were, he said, “taken very seriously by me”. Abdullah said all conflicts were ­declared prior to assessment.

“I wouldn’t have been directly involved in assessing those grants,” he added.

We’ll take them at their word, but none of this is particularly transparent for a taxpayer-funded body. Creative Australia insiders tell us, generally speaking, the whole process is laden with conflict.

And one more thing: we can only wonder why taxpayer dollars are being channelled to artists who post anti-Semitic remarks on the internet with such impunity, as Afshar did in the weeks after the October 7 massacres in Israel.

Wilder still is that Afshar was named a Sidney Myer Creative Fellow in 2021, entitling the Melbourne-based artist to a $160,000 tax-free grant from such a storied Jewish family.

“Out! Zionists out of our cultural spaces. All of them,” Afshar wrote on Instagram in response to news of rifts tearing asunder the arts community over the war in Gaza.

Happy to snipe at the Jews and try to push them out of the arts, it seems, while accepting their funds made available to nurture the industry. All class, kid.

We might as well mention that Sabsabi, too, received a $129,330 grant in 2020 from a panel that ­included artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, affiliated with Sabsabi through the Eleven Collective.

Abdullah (unable to be reached) mounted an attack on Australia in 2020, describing the nation as a “deeply belligerent, inherently bigoted and selfish country” on account of the colonial backstory. But that was after receiving $205,253 in government funding, some $51,000 of which was provided by Creative Aus­tralia.

Much aim also taken at Israel, of course. “End Zionism” in one post and another accusing Israel of “conducting a holocaust against the Palestinian people”. For those alone he was dumped as a board member of the National Gallery of Australia last year – appointed in the first place by Arts Minister Tony Burke. YB

New threat for Adgemis

It’s probably pretty small beer compared to the rest of his financial troubles, but Jon Adgemis’s hospitality group faces a fresh threat as his former brand agency heads to court to wind up yet another company.

This time it’s Adgemis’s Public Hospitality Group Pty Ltd (PHG). The company is not the direct owner of any of the pubs that made up his sprawling hospitality empire, but is listed as the head of the group in its own publications.

Jon Adgemis. Picture: NewsWire / David Swift

Heading to court is Present Company, the branding agency headed up by Marty Wirth, which lodged winding-up notices against PHG in December and will press its case in the NSW Supreme Court on Thursday.

Neither Wirth nor Adgemis responded to a call for comment on Friday, so it’s not clear how much money is at stake – but Present Company lists itself as the ­“strategic growth partner” for Public on its own website, and those deals don’t come cheap.

It’s still probably not a big deal in the grand scheme of Adgemis’s unpaid debts. The most recent filings by the receiver of his biggest company, Public Lifestyle Management (PLM), list more than $215m owed to creditors.

And, despite Adgemis making good this month on a $400,000 down payment on a plan to rescue at least some of his pubs from the ashes of his ambitions, it’s still been a torrid month for the pub baron.

This week veteran Sydney ­hospitality entrepreneur Paul Schulte launched legal action in the Federal Court to bankrupt Adgemis. That comes on top of a separate bankruptcy attempt last year from Richard Gazal over a claimed $26m debt.

On top of that, the Commonwealth Bank is flogging off Adgemis’s 95-foot luxury yacht, Hiilani, over his failure to pay the bills.

At the very least Wirth’s wind-up action must be an irritating distraction, though, given Adgemis still needs to come up with another $600,000 by the end of March to make good on his end of a bargain to rescue at least some of his former empire from the hands of external administrators.

If he manages it, and Archibald Capital coughs up the convertible notes needed to effect the deal, Adgemis will get the keys back to five hotels – the Bondi South Hotel, the Exchange in Balmain, the Claridge, the Bayswater and the Empire Hotel. NE