Australia’s oldest and most prestigious arts festival made a loss in 2024, despite an injection of $2.3m from the South Australian government six months earlier.
Adelaide festival management confirmed on Friday it will post a deficit, just a week after the unexpected departure of its artistic director.
A spokesperson would not quantify the losses, only saying they would be revealed when the festival posts its financials to the SA government next month. In the meantime, the festival has reserves from previous years it can access to fund next year’s program.
The 2024 festival was the first curated by British artistic director Ruth Mackenzie, whose sudden departure midway through her tenure became public this week.
Mackenzie will no longer deliver the 2025 and 2026 festivals as per her contract.
A festival spokesperson told the Guardian Mackenzie had resigned to take up an executive position in the Department of Premier and Cabinet, and her departure was not related to the festival’s financial circumstances.
The SA arts minister Andrea Michaels declined to respond to the Guardian’s questions over the circumstances surrounding the artistic director’s resignation, saying only that the appointment of Mackenzie in a newly created role to oversee the government’s cultural policy was “a coup for South Australia”.
That new cultural policy, which the government promised to deliver in mid-2024, is now overdue.
When asked in a radio interview on Adelaide’s FIVEaa on Tuesday if Mackenzie had left the festival on her own choice, Michaels said: “Well she accepted the [government] role … and we’re really keen to have her on board.”
Mackenzie could not be reached for comment.
The newly created government job – program director, arts, culture and creative industries policy – was not advertised, Michaels confirmed, but told the Guardian Mackenzie had an “extensive background in public policy”, including as an adviser for the Blair Labour government in the UK, as well as her bona fides as an artistic director in cultural organisations around the world.
Opposition arts spokesperson John Gardner said the minister had some explaining to do.
“If Ruth Mackenzie is doing such a great job that she deserves to be elevated into this senior position in the department, then why remove her from such an important role at such a critical time,” he told FIVEaa.
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Mackenzie also prematurely left her previous role, as artistic director at Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet, amid controversy.
In August 2020, Mackenzie told the Guardian her sacking had been “brutal” and “inexplicable”.
In parliament on Tuesday, Gardner asked the minister if there was a shortfall in sponsorship or a loss of any major donors ahead of the 2025 Adelaide festival.
Michaels said she was aware of a couple of sponsors who had pulled out, but that was unrelated to the 2024 festival.
A festival spokesperson confirmed to the Guardian that in 2023 three sponsors withdrew support “due to misalignment with our values when we included Palestinian writers in Adelaide Writers’ Week”.
The spokesperson said the deficit they expected to announce next month was due to more free events being staged in 2024 and a downturn in ticket purchases, which was in line with other recent festivals around the world.
Brett Sheehy, who directed the festival from 2005 to 2008, has been brought in as locum artistic director, while the board and management conducts a new recruitment process.
