Ben Eltham

Ben Eltham is contributing author to CPD’s recent publication More Than Luck: Ideas Australia needs now. His chapter jointly written with Marcus Westbury, Cultural policy in Australia argues that Australia’s fragmented cultural policy needs to move beyond its ‘funding paradigm’. Ben is a researcher, writer, journalist and creative producer. He trained to postgraduate level in neuroscience and philosophy at the University of Queensland before spending the next decade devoted to his love for culture and the arts. Ben has worked as a producer at a number of arts festivals including This Is Not Art, Straight Out of Brisbane (where he was the founding director), Melbourne Fringe, Brisbane Festival and Adelaide Fringe. From 2001-2006 he was the Courier-Mail’s arts and theatre critic, from 2007-2010 he was NewMatilda.com’s National Affairs Correspondent and he continues to write regularly about Australian politics, culture and the arts for publications including the ABC’s The Drum/Unleashed, Crikey.com.au, Meanjin Quarterly, Overland, Inside Story, Artlink and Australian Book Review. He is currently completing his PhD at the University of Western Sydney’s Centre for Cultural Research.

Articles by Ben Eltham:

Defence shopping list points to more overseas trips

This week saw a minor flare-up in Australian defence politics, with the release of a video of Australian troops misbehaving in Iraq.

Apart from demonstrating yet again the power of user-generated media websites like YouTube to become powerful news sources in their own right, the episode also showed how hard it is going to be for Prime Minister John Howard to meet his target of 2,600 extra troops for the Australian Army.

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How to Support Starving Artists

Ben Eltham calls for an urgent rebalancing of our cultural investment away from big organizations and towards the creative human capital of our sector. At present individual artists receive 6.3% of Australia Council grant funding, with the rest going to arts organizations. According to Eltham, this imbalance explains the strikingly low average wage for individual artists and the brain drain that results. more

These are dog days for artists in Australia. But will a new cultural policy help?

Following on from the David Throsby extract published in Policy last week, Ben Eltham writes that the type of art and culture we fund in Australia is largely an accident of history and fashion. He argues that under the current system, large performing arts organisations lobby their budgets into the black while most individual artists get by on Newstart. Instead Eltham calls for a cultural policy prioritising research, innovation, new work, audience development, competitive grant processes and funding for individual artists.

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