One of Australia's most experienced and influential arts administrators has slammed the heads of Australia's major performing arts organisations for their silence amid more than $100 million in cuts to the Australia Council for the Arts.
Michael Lynch, the former head of the Australia Council, Sydney Opera House and Sydney Theatre Company, said he was "really disturbed" at major companies' - who were quarantined from the measures - refusal to protest the cuts announced by former arts minister George Brandis in   May 2014. (Lynch described Brandis' actions as the fulfilment of a "revenge strategy" of former prime minister Tony Abbott against the arts). 
"The major organisations seem to have been struck dumb by the minister's decisions and only a very few uttered any reaction to what was being done to artists and in particular small and medium arts organisations," Lynch said in a Currency House address in Sydney on Wednesday morning.
Lynch recently returned home after many years working overseas, establishing one of the world's biggest and most costly arts precincts, Hong Kong's $2 million M+ project in West Kowloon, and prior to that running London's South Bank and Royal Festival Hall.
"Having come from Hong Kong and China, the idea that we would trifle with arts with some sort of illusory promise if we keep quiet, that really disturbs me," he said before delivering his speech.
Lynch said he felt the rise of noted arts patron (and his local member) Malcolm Turnbull to the prime ministership when he returned six months ago would be like "entering nirvana" for the cultural sector.
Yet six months on, nothing had changed for the arts. Lynch challenged Turnbull to restore arts funding in the upcoming   May budget and warned that without it there would likely be more job cuts at the Australia Council. (A further $50 million was cut from the arts in the   May 2015 budget, including $36.8 million from mainly from major cultural institutions in Canberra.)
"I arrived a week after our new visionary Malcolm took control," he said. "It's been one of the most bizarre six months in my experience of the place," Lynch said of Turnbull's elevation. "It was like entering nirvana when I walked in."
Lynch said separating funding for major performing arts organisations by the Australia Council in the 1990s was a deliberate act to protect funding for smaller to medium bodies and encourage emerging artists.
"For a long time, when I was running the Australia Council, we were always trying to keep options open at both ends ... we wanted younger more creative tech savvy voices coming through.
"The thing that most concerned me, was that over the course of the year, the casualties looked like being the young, the new, the small, that was never the intention of setting up the major organisations [funding]. It was to segregate money and would be a broad platform that would give some opportunity."
At this stage in his career, Lynch said he was unafraid to throw a few truth bombs.
"I guess I'm sort of in the fortunate position now where I don't give a stuff who I offend," he said. "But I still want to play a constructive role."
Live Performance Australia announced on Wednesday morning that Lynch would receive the Sue Nattrass Award for exceptional service to the live performance industry at the 16th annual Helpmann Awards on   July 25.