'The Australia Council’s six-year funding program, on which the Sydney Review of Books and other literary journals had been depending, has been suspended. If there is no corresponding program forthcoming from the Ministry for the Arts, our existence will be threatened. The cancellation of the June round of funding will have an immediate effect on the publishers of Australian literary titles, requiring the cancellation or postponement of some of those titles. Senator Brandis claims that the transferral of funds to the Ministry for the Arts means only a 12–13% reduction in the budget of the Australia Council. When the government-directed programs, which are quarantined from cuts, are taken out of the equation, the reduction is more like 27%. Literature has always been the poor relation to the other arts when it comes to funding – if, in addition, you take out the $6 million transferred from the Australia Council budget for the new Book Council of Australia, the situation for us looks pretty grim.' (Publication abstract)
