Arts boss Adrian Collette says Creative Australia is ‘not about moral compass’

The country’s top arts organisation was not in the business of denouncing artists whose views might be deemed offensive, its boss has argued, because it operates with a legislative compass, not a moral one.

“Creative Australia isn’t in a position to deplore personal comments by anyone,” said Adrian Collette, chief executive of the nation’s principle cultural body during a testy exchange in Senate estimates on Tuesday night. “I have to be guided by our legislative responsibilities, which are not about moral compass.”

Collette was being grilled by Liberal senator Sarah Henderson, an experience he has endured repeatedly since landing the role as the nation’s top arts bureaucrat in 2023.

Her questionsfocused exclusively on what the organisation was doing to combat antisemitism. She made no reference to any other form of discrimination.

“I’ve raised continuing concerns that you’ve shown no regard for the funding of artists where they have engaged in hateful behaviour towards Jews,” said Henderson early in a 45-minute session that began almost five hours later than scheduled.

“We are not an investigatory body,” Collette replied. “We do not fund artists on the basis of religious backgrounds or cultural beliefs. We fund them exclusively on the merit and impact of their work.”

Creative Australia spent much of last year in the crosshairs over its handling of the Khaled Sabsabi affair, wherein the visual artist and his curator, Michael Dagostino, were selected to represent Australia at this year’s Venice Biennale, only to be deselected a week later over claims that a Sabsabi work from 2007, and another a year earlier, were antisemitic.

Following an independent external review that found the decision to dump the pair was flawed and had been made at a time of “heightened anxiety about the levels of antisemitism and Islamophobia evident in Australia”, Sabsabi was reappointed as Australia’s representative in July 2025.

The culture sector more broadly has been riven with debate and discord fuelled by the war in Gaza, with sackings, boycotts, cancellations, muzzling of free speech, and withdrawals of funding and sponsorship occurring across virtually all fields. Neither side has been spared.

Henderson, though, was remorseless in pushing the argument that Creative Australia had to do more to combat antisemitism. And Collette was unyielding in his insistence that it was not the organisation’s role to determine that a work or an artist might be guilty of such a charge.

“Sorry, we are not qualified to start adjudicating … on what might qualify as antisemitic or any other kind of behaviours that are discriminatory on the basis of race or culture or religion,” he said.

“If there is evidence which is brought up by a suitably qualified agency of unlawful conduct, then we would take that into consideration. But until that happens, we simply cannot start adjudicating on what might be or not be antisemitic intention or behaviour.”

Collette suggested such qualified agencies would include “the Human Rights Commission, or a court”.

Pressed on whether the existing framework was adequate to deal with the challenges of the current climate, Colette said: “We are seeking legal advice on how we can establish more robust expectations.”

The aim of that advice would be clarity around “how to strengthen our contracts and understandings in the event that we learn of unlawful activity on the part of someone we have funded”, he said.

He added that Creative Australia’s role was to “support freedom of artistic expression”, and that the organisation was “not responsible for the personal views of some of the artists we fund”.

He insisted that CA “would never invest in artistic expression that we judge to be antisemitic or Islamophobic or that in any way ran the risk of giving unlawful expression on the basis of religion or race or many other discriminatory matters”. But the only way it could make such an assessment “is if we had evidence, real evidence, that what they said was unlawful”.

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