WA government defers multi-year arts funding

The WA Department of Culture and Arts has announced it will undertake a ‘comprehensive review’ of its Organisations Investment Program (OIP) and defer the opening of the second OIP funding round until 2019.

The inaugural OIP round, which provided 67 organisations with $29m in funding over three years, was held in 2015, with the subsequent round scheduled to open in 2018. The department said the review is ‘intended to ensure the program is working effectively, provides value for money, and meets the needs of the state’s diverse range of arts and cultural organisations’.

The department will seek feedback from the arts and cultural sector as part of the review. The program is expected to open in March 2019 for funding commencing in 2020.

As previously reported by Books+Publishing, Fremantle Press and Magabala Books were the only two writing and publishing organisations awarded funding in the inaugural OIP round. Previous recipients of multi-year funding, WritingWA, the Literature Centre and the Australian Writers Guild, did not have their funding renewed in the inaugural OIP round, while Westerly journal, the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre and the Fellowship of Australian Writers were all unsuccessful in their bids for funding after being invited to apply.

Category: Local news