It has been busy and difficult week for my family and I this week so it’s a smaller WTF now?!
Arts leader, diversity in the arts advocate and consultant Veronica Pardo has penned a powerful and crucial piece about the current moment in the arts, the Australian Parliament has passed the government’s legislation bringing together the public and educational lending schemes and new research demonstrates the crucial role of community radio in supporting Australian music.
Speaking of the failures of arts leadership, this week we keep tabs on the unfair dismissal case between Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) and pianist Jayson Gillham. Plus there are updates on Jo Loewenthal’s push for transparency in the global music royalty system and Paramount is proactively upselling the Paramount–Warner Bros. merge amid growing challenges to the merger.
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Rapid-fire
A short list of other things:
- Consultation on Australia’s next National Cultural Policy close this Sunday (24 May 2026). Shoot through
- Congratulations to Lee Lai on winning the Stella prize. Lai is the first non-binary winner and her graphic novel Cannon is the first graphic novel to win. Shoot through
- Congratulations to the winners of the 2026 NSW Literary Awards. Shoot through
What’s been going on?
Here's WTF happened this week:
Veronica Pardo outlines the crisis in Australia’s arts leadership
Veronica Pardo urges arts leaders to overhaul the systems they control that reinforce compliance and avoid conflict. She calls for conscious leaders that treating conflict as information, not a threat, and that seek to transform their organisations into cites of care, collaboration and creativity.
In one of the most eloquent explorations of the lack of criticality and in some cases outright complacency of arts leadership in this moment, leadership consultant Veronica Pardo takes to ArtsHub to calls for a seismic and systemic shift in how arts and culture thinking about and handle power, diversity and conflict in our organisations. This need for transformation is set against monumentous challenges:
