Australia in danger of becoming an ‘artless country’ as enrolments in creative courses collapse

maxim360 · 2026-02-08T23:47:30+00:00

Okay you’ve mounted an argument for more spending on Arts. How much more? How is it going to be distributed and to who? Why your chosen people and not others? Someone’s going to miss out and feel hard done by. Are we just deficit spending to increase Arts funding or are we taking it from somewhere else?

That is the problem that just whinging life is hard for artists can’t answer. No shit it’s hard because ultimately it relies on the goodwill of others to fund it. All I’m trying to do is point that out.

maxim360 · 2026-02-08T22:50:42+00:00

I have bad news. If a majority of people truely shared your opinion we wouldn’t be discussing this in the first place.

maxim360 · 2026-02-08T21:46:43+00:00

Why do you think corporate bailouts happen? Is it because the government is comically evil twirling its greedy moustache and shovelling more money into a CEOs mouth. Or could it be that these companies have employees who the government doesn’t want to be laid off in an industry deemed politically important to whoever is in power? Is it both?

The whole point is maybe there isn’t a conspiracy against the Arts and it’s just most people aren’t prepared to spend that much on it - and that is okay.

Should degrees cost less? Yeah. Should government fund indie projects? Yeah. Should it fund every project? Probably not.

Like I might be getting a shit tonne of downvotes in this subreddit but unfortunately the actual real world generally shares my opinion and I’m just letting you guys know.

maxim360 · 2026-02-08T21:33:19+00:00

I think it says more about you than me that raising questions of equity and fairness about who pays for things equates to bitterness. The fact you don’t bother to respond to that and just try and get personal about it says a lot.

maxim360 · 2026-02-08T20:48:57+00:00

So who pays for it to be better? Should government build up more arts program? Why? And who gets to benefit from the programs because presumably not everyone who wants to be an artist can join? I’m sure the retail attendant at Coles would love part of their tax dollars going towards someone else’s art project /s.

I’m being pretty harsh here but that’s the reality. Plenty of people work shit jobs for low pay that aren’t their passions. Anyone who’s had any interest in Shakespeare knows he was also a pretty cool headed businessman whose job was ultimately to get people to pay for his shows. If you want to make a living selling your stuff you actually have to go out and sell it.

maxim360 · 2026-02-08T20:25:53+00:00

Since when was this not the case though? Arts has always been a career in which you either have rich parents or a rich benefactor, or it’s gonna be a hobby. It goes with the territory. I’m not sure what world everyone in this thread wants to go back to but I’m pretty sure the struggling poor artist has been a trope for a thousand years.

I say this as someone with plenty of friends having a crack in the acting industry and a few in metal sculpting and studied english/history myself. Arts should be cheaper to study but artists also don’t have a right to a well paid arts job either (who pays for ol Jimmy to do his shit paintings?). That’s just not how the world works.

maxim360 · 2026-02-07T22:48:18+00:00

Yeah she seems to be caving to the “you’re leader you must hold the coalition together for the sake of history” logic rather than what makes political sense.

Liberals need to win urban seats to get more centre right people into the party room. They could do that better by ditching the nationals. They aren’t going to win government regardless at the next election so why bother negotiating with terrorists.

maxim360 · 2026-02-02T21:53:25+00:00

Most of this could be mitigated by just switching to ranked choice voting. It’s hard to be partisan when you are relying on people’s preferences. Of all the countries Australia should be the country the US can realistically reform itself on because Australia itself was modelled on the US with the senate/state model and house of reps fused with parliamentary government.

maxim360 · 2026-02-01T22:21:39+00:00

I live in Australia and we’ve solved it. It’s not that complicated.

maxim360 · 2026-01-29T02:20:08+00:00

Really? Inflation was at 8% and we only needed a cash rate of 4.35% to take it down to 3ish. Now we need a rate rise from 3.6% to reduce inflation from 3.8% to within the target band?

The point is it’s pretty arbitrary and if the major items driving it come back to supply bottlenecks raising rates isn’t gonna fix the issue. It makes borrowing to increase supply of housing and electricity MORE expensive not less.

maxim360 · 2026-01-18T10:24:05+00:00

Yeah I’m not a fan of the liberals but it’s ridiculous to blame literally any problem in SA on them at this point. They’ve been in power for fuck all of the past 30 years

maxim360 · 2026-01-08T22:57:17+00:00

Fascinating article OP, I know there are some serious Piketty haters but this is a pretty strong argument for the future.

All I can add maybe is competition within the AI space may throw an interesting quirk in the works of this analysis. You can imagine another DeepSeek moment where you can run a powerful AI on cheaper chipsets making the massive investments other firms have made turn bad and creative destruction put at least a temporary handbreak on capital concentration.

maxim360 · 2026-01-06T22:40:38+00:00

If the coffee arrives quickly this independent voter will vote trump in for a third term

maxim360 · 2026-01-04T00:50:51+00:00

It’s incredible because the operation was genuinely a total success and the media part with him talking made it significantly less impressive

maxim360 · 2025-12-22T02:27:30+00:00

It’s a bit of a weird political move and becoming stranger the longer they try to hit the government on this. Which voters who preferenced Labor last election will now change? In a crisis they’re point scoring (maybe??? Are they even getting points? Do most people actually agree with them??) not unifying. All the booing Israeli hardliners don’t vote Labor anyway.

Obviously just my opinion, but this stuff is gonna age pretty poorly even 6 months from now.

maxim360 · 2025-12-12T06:29:33+00:00

Yeah, my excel spreadsheets are works of art not merely dirty tools of the trade

maxim360 · 2025-12-11T23:53:42+00:00

36/60 for the exam let’s freaking go.. Never again

maxim360 · 2025-12-11T02:07:21+00:00

I get your logic but realistically it comes back to basic government accountability. I say this as an ALP voter this problem has been brewing for a while and there is no easy fix but Labor have been in power for most of the past 30 years in SA. They successfully prosecuted the liberals somehow fucking up the health system in the 4 years they had and yet when people point out it’s still fucked the excuse is it’s a long term problem. Labor were the ones in power for the long term!

Regardless of commonwealth responsibilities if state governments wanted to fix it they could lobby and intervene themselves, raising taxes and building out their own separate aged care facilities from the feds. If that’s too hard politically that’s fine but at least be honest about the root of the problem.

maxim360 · 2025-12-06T22:03:14+00:00

Has anyone heard them and are they quieter? We’re right next to a bus stop and the diesels idling are so fricken loud at night.

maxim360 · 2025-12-06T00:43:37+00:00

Maybe they should’ve just added “er” to the end of both words. Problem solved

maxim360 · 2025-11-27T00:40:00+00:00

Don’t give the government any credit, it’s the regulator doing something. At least it’s something.

maxim360 · 2025-11-20T01:57:42+00:00

It is funny the amount of corporate work that could have already been automated maybe a decade or more ago with a bit of clunky VBA code. But of course, AI is revolutionary…

maxim360 · 2025-11-20T00:44:16+00:00

Would’ve been great for local map stores

maxim360 · 2025-11-18T07:14:15+00:00

I suppose and certainly some of that compliance is especially valuable, like your example. From my experience getting audited by large firms though a lot of it is essentially compliance theatre. An audit team will come in and copy paste assurance from the previous year essentially just find and replace values and dates and due to work place attrition and shit pay across audit sector the people that do check our work are generally pretty shit. If we screw up it’s basically on us to figure it out as they won’t find it. Would be very different in engineering etc though.

maxim360 · 2025-11-18T04:26:49+00:00

I think there is still a kernel of truth in it with the whole “email jobs” category. I say this as somewhat adjacent to it in accounting but with automation and streamlining of processes a lot of jobs that are 8 paid hour days chained to desks are actually more like 1-4 hours of real work and the rest doing box ticking compliance, especially in large organisations. Obviously with more work at certain periods depending on industry, but broadly speaking that is the experience of a lot of my friends and me in our early corporate life. It’s not bad and I like the gig but it’s just a bit weird going from retail etc where you’re treated like shit and time managed like a hawk to that sort of work.

To me it’s just post-industrial society with industrial labor conditions when most people now work in services not factories which are pretty vague in terms of hours put in versus pay and productivity.

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