Immigration Museum ‘set up to fail’ as state bailouts end

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The Immigration Museum has been “set up to fail” and is at risk of closure, a report has warned, in a sign of the strict new era of budget discipline for the state’s cultural sector.

The Rebuilding Trust report, commissioned by Premier Jacinta Allan, found the museum was “not currently under safe stewardship” within Museums Victoria and suffering “perceived neglect”.

The Immigration Museum in Flinders Street, Melbourne, on Friday.

“Within government, concerns have been raised about the financial sustainability and possible closure of the Immigration Museum,” says the report, the outcome of Victoria’s Multicultural Review.

However, a government spokesman said on Friday afternoon the “Immigration Museum is an important part of Victoria’s history and will continue operating for years to come”.

Museums Victoria runs the Immigration Museum on Flinders Street in the CBD, along with Melbourne Museum in Carlton and Scienceworks in Spotswood. Museums Victoria chief executive Lynley Crosswell, announcing job cuts in August, said that while Melbourne Museum turned a profit and Scienceworks broke even, the Immigration Museum “operates at a deficit – it costs around $2.5 million a year to run”.

Speculation about the museum’s future follows the Allan government ending a long-standing practice of providing hundreds of millions of dollars in financial top-ups to cultural institutions that overspend their budgets.

The crisis gripping Museums Victoria, which in August said it would axe 55 jobs, is the canary in the coalmine for the entire state-funded cultural sector as it confronts this new reality.

After years struggling with the pandemic’s long tail and rising costs, the pillars of the state’s identity – from the museum to the State Library and the Arts Centre – must adhere to strict new budget rules.

The government, burdened with record debt after a decade of cost overruns on mega-projects, has ordered all its agencies to live within their means for the first time in years.

In May, Finance Minister Danny Pearson spelled out in parliament that the new Financial Management Act introduced “a requirement for agencies to stick to their set budgets”.

Museums Victoria chief executive Lynley Crosswell.

Museums Victoria’s Lynley Crosswell cited this Allan government act in August when announcing the sackings within her organisation. “An amendment to the Financial Management Act will compel government agencies to operate within the budget. So while in the past some agencies may have gone into the red or operate at a deficit, with government providing a safety net, that is no longer an option,” Crosswell told staff in a leaked briefing.

For Victoria’s cultural institutions, this represents not a procedural tweak but a shock to the system. For years, they have relied on budget overruns totalling hundreds of millions, later patched over by government top-ups.

Budget papers reviewed by The Age show that over the past five years Victoria’s major cultural agencies received an extra $409 million on top of their initial allocations.

Together, these agencies – the NGV, Arts Centre Melbourne, ACMI, Museums Victoria, the Geelong Arts Centre, the State Library, the Melbourne Arts Precinct Corporation, the Melbourne Recital Centre, the Wheeler Centre, VicScreen and Docklands Studios – account for 76 per cent of the state’s creative industries funding, the Parliamentary Budget Office found.

The pattern for these agencies was consistent:

2020-21: budgeted $425m, received $467m
2021-22: budgeted $394m, received $504m
2022-23: budgeted $427m, received $493m
2023-24: budgeted $405m, received $438m
2024-25: budgeted $411m, received $569m

That safety net is now gone.

And at Melbourne Museum, which on Saturday opens the doors for the first time on its Our Wondrous Planet exhibition, new internal documents paint a picture of an institution already in operational dysfunction.

Leaked briefing notes show its ticketing and membership system repeatedly crashes, causing lost revenue and long queues. Problems became so acute staff were told to honour all memberships that had expired since June.

And WhatsApp messages seen by The Age between frontline staff and managers show the strain, with one officer describing a holiday weekend as “insane”, after being left alone to manage huge queues. A January staff briefing told officers long queues “are to be expected” and were “a good sign of visitation and visitors will likely be expecting to wait”.

Kiani the Orangutang will go on display at the Our Wondrous Planet exhibition, which opens at Melbourne Museum on Saturday.

On Friday, a spokeswoman for the Museums Victoria said “we pride ourselves on providing a good experience for every visitor”, and that measures were in place to manage high visitor numbers during peak periods like school holidays (which begin on Saturday in Victoria).

She said the role of the Immigration Museum and other multicultural museums “in promoting respect, empathy and understanding across our rich and diverse cultures is more important than ever”.

What is unfolding at the museum is the sharpest expression of wider pressure on the arts and culture sector. A June parliamentary inquiry into the creative industries found the sector still reeling from COVID, which “severely damaged” its financial viability. For many artists and smaller organisations, stagnant grant funding has failed to keep pace with surging production costs, making survival precarious.

Creative Industries Minister Colin Brooks’ office said in response to questions about funding to cultural agencies that Victoria was “Australia’s cultural capital, and by investing in our creative industries, we’re supporting local talent and driving economic growth across the state”.

Evan Mulholland, the state opposition’s arts and creative industries spokesman, said the budget discipline to be imposed on cultural agencies was the result of Labor’s infrastructure overruns in the past decade.

“Somebody has to pay, and it is always our arts sector that is the first to pay the price through savage cuts,” Mulholland said. “Victorians are paying $20 million a day just to service the interest on Labor’s debt. This is affecting services across government, and our cultural institutions and creative scene are being starved of funds as a result.”

Evidence to the parliamentary inquiry suggests the problem predates the latest fiscal clampdown. A submission by think tank A New Approach found Victoria’s per capita government spending on arts and culture has declined over the past 15 years and was now the second-lowest in Australia. Only Queensland spends less.

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