Concerns over Creative Australia’s peer-review grants process

A week after Khaled Sabsabi was re-installed to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale, industry insiders have raised the alarm about potential ‘manipulation’ of the nation’s top arts body.

Ralph Marshall, Paul Khodor, Benjamin Samuels and Yiss Mill of Jewish Klezmer-Pop Fusion Band Chutney. Picture: John Feder

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Artists judging government grants for books, theatre, film and visual arts have themselves recently received taxpayer funding from the same pool of funds, raising concerns that the nation’s top arts body is susceptible to “manipulation” and “cronyism”.

A week after Creative Australia reinstated controversial artist Khaled Sabsabi to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale, industry insiders have raised the alarm about “peer assessment” at the country’s top arts funding body.

Creative Australia’s peer assessment model of recommendations – in which grants are assessed by industry figures themselves – has meant 32.6 per cent of the panellists who recommend grants also have been grant recipients themselves in the past six years.

This amounts to $17.7m of a total $102m given to individuals in this time.

Artists have suggested the system of rotating peer assessors and grant recipients has allowed for an “ideological agenda” to enter the grant process instead of strict consideration of artistic merit.

The Australian found multiple instances of artists being listed on panels that assessed the works of studio colleagues, family members, and people who had judged the artist’s own works for Creative Australia grants.

For example, in 2020, Eleven Collective member Abdul-Rahman Abdullah was listed on a panel of 12 people that recommended $49,330 to fellow collective member Khaled Sabsabi.

And in 2023, collective members Abdullah MI Syed and Abdul Abdullah were listed on a panel of 17 people that recommended $35,635 to Hoda Afshar and $45,200 to Shireen Taweel, both also Eleven Collective members.

In 2021, Melbourne-based writer Emily Bitto was listed on a panel of six people that recommended, among others, $35,000 to Sydney-based writer Fiona Wright. And the following year, Wright was cited on a panel of 11 people and recommended $40,000 to Bitto.

The Australian is not suggesting any improper conduct took place, and is instead merely noting that there are panellists for grant recommendations that have been grant recipients themselves.

Creative Australia’s peer assessment process sees a panel of artists recommend who should get how much in grants and then Creative Australia staff “apply the available budget to the peers’ final rankings, and the budget allocation is approved by our executive team”, its website reads. The decision on who receives funding is ultimately made by the executive team.

The question of merit is one on the mind of Ben Adler, leader of Jewish klezmer folk fusion band Chutney.

Despite having won multiple international accolades, making his band’s recent album one of the most prominent Australian contributions to world music in the past few years, he was knocked back time and time again by taxpayer-funded arts grant organisations – including Creative Australia or, as it was known then, the Australia Council – before the band raised its own seed money to record its album.

“We are proud of what we have achieved thanks to the private support of those who believed in us,” Adler said.

“But when we reflect on our slew of unsuccessful applications across multiple years, we can’t help but wonder: Does our story suggest that Australia Council thought our klezmer fusion project itself was inherently unworthy, regardless of the quality of our execution, which has since been vindicated on the global stage?“

Adler said that when he sought feedback from the Australia Council for why his grant was unsuccessful, he was told: “Your application ranked in the lower third of the round. A ranking in this band indicates the application required significant improvement to make it competitive. The assessors did not record any specific feedback on your application that they wished to be conveyed back to you.”

“Which we read as, ‘you’re bad and there’s nothing you can do to make your application better’,” Adler said.

Since then, the band’s debut album, Ajar, won a triple gold medal at the Global Music Awards in California and has been nominated for two categories in the Hollywood Independent Music Awards.

A senior arts administrator, who has been granted anonymity to speak freely and express his opinions, claimed some arts funding had become more driven by a political agenda in the past few years, and was kicked into another gear by the social upheaval since the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel and the following wars.

“Particularly since October 7, 2023 the global art world has become divided by pro-Palestine, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic activism,” he said.

“Along with prior imported activisms, BLM, #MeToo, climate catastrophism, anti-white, anti-West, decolonial and critical race theories, LGBTQ, etc, agendas, a majority of art adorned with these badges is that which gets funded, exhibited and collected more than not.

“The national, publicly funded network of museums, galleries, contemporary art spaces, residencies and grants in recent years has more often than not presented career opportunities for artists pushing these ideologies.

“Earlier arts funding parameters of quality and excellence have long since gone out the window due to especially state and federal Labor policies of ‘social equity’; formalism and estheticism having gone the same way for what effectively is now political ranting.”

A former peer assessor and currently practising artist urged more scrutiny into the process.

“It needs stricter oversight, there needs to be more due diligence regarding (potential) conflicts of interest from Creative Australia staff,” he said.

“There’s a heavy anti-colonial agenda and pro-Indigenous agenda, and the scope of how embedded Indigenous agendas are into assessment – it’s ubiquitous.”

Analysis of Creative Australia data reveals there have been numerous instances of artists getting grants after being judged by creatives they had previously assessed themselves.

The Australian has identified five writers – Grace Heifetz, Fiona Wright, Julie Janson, Emily Bitto, and Ouyang Yu – who have swapped roles as artist and assessor with at least one of the other five creatives during the grant process.

Panels these people have been involved in have collectively recommended to each other $386,946 of taxpayer money during this time.

Creative Australia and all the artists mentioned were given a chance to respond to the article.

The revelations come a week after Venice Biennale alumni and Jewish artists called for Creative Australia chief executive Adrian Collette to resign after his reinstatement of Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino to the Australian pavilion in Venice.

Arts Minister Tony Burke last week backed Creative Australia’s decision to reinstate Sabsabi and Dagostino, saying the former’s work depicting a dead Hezbollah leader did the exact opposite of promoting terrorism.

Creative Australia’s abrupt cancellation of Sabsabi’s Venice appointment in February caused fury in the arts world.

Last week’s federal anti-Semitism review has pledged to withhold funding from arts bodies and festivals that fail to stop anti-Jewish bigotry.