Jo Pickup, Outcry over SA Museum restructure reveals systemic government funding cuts, Arts Hub, 4 September 2024

An overwhelming public backlash to a proposed SA Museum restructure prompted the SA State Government to tell the Museum to hit ‘pause’. But how much are SA Government funding levels to blame for the Museum’s need to restructure?

Earlier this year, details of an organisational restructure were shared with SA Museum staff in line with what its CEO Dr David Gaimster called a ‘reimagining’ and ‘transformation‘ of the SA Museum in coming years.

But as staff learned the details – which included cutting 27 research and collections division positions and replacing them with 22 new curatorial research and collection management jobs – waves of fury erupted within the Museum’s ranks and throughout the local community, as many South Australians realised the extent to which their beloved Museum was stripping back part of its core work in the area of scientific research.

As prominent Australian scientist and former SA Museum Director Tim Flannery told Adelaide news source InDaily at the time, ‘The [Museum] collections are there for research and, without research, the collections wither and die and, with that, the Museum withers and dies’.

Since then, there has been a large public protest on the steps of SA Museum, and over 10,000 people have signed a hand-written petition against the restructure.

This intense public backlash is arguably what led the South Australia State Government to call for a parliamentary review of the Museum’s moves to restructure, and that review process is now underway.

The review is being led by three appointees, Department of the Premier and Cabinet’s chief executive Damien Walker, South Australia’s Chief Scientist Craig Simmons and Queensland Museum CEO Jim Thompson.

As the panellists meet with stakeholders – and while much anger towards the SA Museum is aired by former research staff and at least one major philanthropic donor to the Museum – it’s clear that while the SA Government is the instigator of the Museum restructure review, it may itself have serious questions to answer in terms of its own role in the Museum’s need to restructure due to its declining funding support offered by the SA Government to the Museum over the past decade.

Dangerous funding decline over many years

As South Australian Deputy of the Opposition John Gardner told the SA Museum parliamentary review panel hearing last week, the SA Government’s 2022 budget, ‘cut hundreds of thousands of dollars from the [SA] Museum’s annual budget … [which] was the straw that broke the camel’s back in many ways, because there had been a series of cuts over previous governments that could no longer be withstood’.

Gardner added, ‘The South Australian Museum has the world’s leading collection of opals … the world’s leading collection of Aboriginal cultural artefacts … [and] some of the world’s oldest, if not the world’s oldest, fossil remains. It is an extraordinary collection and it needs to be valued in the way … the 10,500 South Australians who have signed the petition do.’

Similarly, back in April, Adelaide Lord Mayor Dr Jane Lomax-Smith, who at the time was speaking in her capacity as a former SA Museum Board Chair (2011-2020), came out in defence of the SA Museum’s moves to restructure, while expressing the same concerns raised by Gardner in Parliament – namely that steadily declining state government funding to the Museum is at the heart of the problem.

Lomax-Smith told the ABC, ‘I’ve seen Treasury reports; this is not something that happened overnight. This has been building up for many decades’.

She continued, ‘No government has been really honourable, or really effective in managing these assets… [So] I understand what [SA Museum] is doing. It’s rational. It would be unthinkable for any director with a public service job to spend more money than they have’.

Starving state cultural institutions to death

Parliamentary Leader of The Greens SA, Tammy Franks has been another strong voice signalling alarm over the SA State Government funding decreases for public service institutions like SA Museum in recent years.

Franks is especially concerned about the SA State Government funding cuts to the Museum that are evident when looking at the funding picture over the long term.

‘We can see that the restructure has been predicated on the fact that the Museum has had funding cuts over years and years – for well over a decade,’ Franks tells ArtsHub.

‘It hasn’t had CPI increases, and it has had actual cuts in the form of so-called efficiency dividends,’ she continues.

‘Also of concern is that as staff have retired they haven’t been replaced, and as we heard in the parliamentary inquiry this week, a million-dollar donation to employ a research scientist in minerals has gone unspent.

‘So, there is money there that isn’t being used, and the Museum’s general revenue has been stripped back to such a point that the Board and the management were loathe to even ask the Government for the money they need to run the Museum properly, and they looked instead to slash and burn staff.’

South Australian Government budget papers reveal SA Museum’s State Government funding has been cut from 2022-23 to 2023-24, from $6.3 million in 2022-23 (32% of the Museum’s overall funding), to $4.8 million in 2023-24 (28% of its overall funding).

Looking back over the past decade, the SA Government’s funding commitment to the Museum actually increased over the five-year period from 2014-2019, going from $4.8 million in 2014-15 to a peak of $6.8 million in 2019-2020 (a 40% increase from 2014 to 2019, without adjusting from inflation).

But in the past four years, that funding has steadily declined – from its peak of $6.8 million in 2019-20 to its current level of $4.8 million (representing a 30% decrease in the past four years).

‘At the very least [the SA Museum’s funding] needs to be restored to the level of funding it should have been receiving over the past decade, and the [State] Government needs to recognise that you don’t get to keep a cultural institution without that kind of investment,’ Franks says.

‘It needs to realise that if you put an institution on a starvation diet, at some point, it’s going to starve to death.’

The SA parliamentary review hearings into SA Museum’s restructure continues for another three weeks. ArtsHub will continue to follow the review and its outcome.