The Same Names Keep Winning Arts Grants. It's Not What You Think.

By Cat Dibley. This article first appeared on ArtsHub.com.au

Every time I write about arts funding, the same reaction rolls in: it's rigged, it's broken, throw it in the bin. I understand it completely, and I'm not going to talk you out of the feeling, because what you're looking at is real. But I've spent over a decade on both sides of Australian arts funding - as an applicant who's won millions, and as an assessor and funding manager who has designed programs and scored applications - and from that seat, "rigged" is the wrong word for what's actually going on. Not because the system is fair. Because the real story is more useful than a conspiracy, and unlike a conspiracy, parts of it are yours to change.

Here's my read on why it looks rigged, and what's underneath.

Two things you can see, and one you can't

People decide the system is rigged for two reasons, and both are things you can see with your own eyes. The same names keep winning. And it clearly favours people with resources. Both are real, and I'll take them one at a time - starting with the one that's exactly as bad as it looks.

Grant writing favours the resourced

A competitive application takes time, expertise, and energy that not everyone has. There's nowhere obvious to learn how to do it. Hiring help is expensive. It takes forever, and every hour you spend on it is an hour away from paid work. So before you've spent a dollar, writing a grant has already cost you - and it costs the most for the people who can least afford it. Being able to absorb that cost, whether in unpaid hours or in a fee you pay someone else to do it, is its own kind of privilege.

That barrier is not evenly distributed. If you're from a culturally and linguistically diverse background, First Nations, regional, or living with disability, it compounds - and in specific, concrete ways. Applications that assume English is your first language. Forms and timelines that lack comprehensive accessibility. For First Nations applicants, the added and often unfunded labour of observing ICIP protocols properly - work that protects Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property, and that non-Indigenous applicants simply never have to do. And a skill that's entirely learnable, but only if you can geographically reach the mentors, the professional development, and the informal knowledge sharing that make it so. This is real, it's unfair, and it's the part of "rigged" I'll validate without hesitation - not because anyone is choosing favourites, but because a system that rewards the well-resourced advantages the already-advantaged by default.

Work is being done on this - plainer guidelines, more support and education for first-time applicants, a gradual shift in how programs are designed. It is not “fixed”. But it's worth knowing this disadvantage is a barrier to entry, not a rigged result - and barriers can be lowered. Some already are.

The bias is real. It's also not the whole story.

Now the same-names problem. Some of it is bias, and I won't pretend otherwise. Recognition bias is real - a name an assessor has seen before carries credibility that a stranger's doesn't - and in a sector this small it can compound.

But here's what doesn't get said often enough: funders know this, and there are real mechanisms holding it in check. Moderated panels, multiple assessors, conflict of interest declarations, criteria that have to be scored and justified rather than simply felt. None of it is perfect, but it means bias is seldom the whole story. Which raises the obvious question: if it's not mostly bias, why do the same people keep winning?

The answer is the part almost nobody explains.

What actually decides who gets funded?

Grants are scored against a set of criteria - artistic merit, impact, and viability among them. And the single biggest source of confusion in the whole system sits in that first one, because "artistic merit" does not mean to a funder what it means to an artist.

To an artist, "artistic merit" sounds like a simple question: is the work good? To a funding body it means something more specific - is the work strong, is it well-made by artists with a track record of delivering, AND, most importantly, is it in service of what this program is actually for. That last clause is the one that catches people. Merit is not judged in a vacuum. It's judged against the aim.

An example. Say a fund exists to create arts impact in regional NSW. A project that flies four metro artists out to spend a week in a regional town can be excellent on its own terms and still score lower on merit than a project rooted in that community - because for this fund, "meritorious" includes serving the regional purpose, and a week-long visit doesn't serve it the way embedded local work does. The metro artist walks away certain their work was overlooked. It wasn't overlooked. It was scored against a brief they didn't realise they were answering.

So it isn't the "best" art in the abstract that wins - there is no such thing, and it is not my job or an assessor's to crown it. What wins is the project that makes the strongest case for what this program set out to do. That's not corruption - it's the job the funding was created to do. But if nobody ever translates that for you, all you see is another project funded ahead of yours for reasons you can't make out, and the only explanation left standing is that it must be rigged.

There's one thing worth asking for that makes this visible, and almost nobody does: your scores against each assessment criterion. What did you score well in? What scored lower? And roughly where did that sit in the overall applicant pool - top quarter, middle, further down? That tells you which responses need work and which are already hitting the mark - a low mark where you were sure you'd done well is the exact spot where your reading of the brief and theirs came apart. It's the closest thing the process gives you to a map.

The gap, and who can close it

So here's the honest shape of it. Funding is written in bureaucratic language, the framing is about policy impact rather than art for its own sake, and even the words you think you understand - like "merit" - carry a meaning nobody hands you. That's a translation gap. It sits on top of a real barrier to entry that falls hardest on the people with the least. The deeper structural inequity is the slow, serious fight - being worked on, not won.

Some of this the artist does own - but not the part you might expect. Not decoding the bureaucracy; that was never theirs to carry. What's theirs is clarity about their own work - being able to describe, plainly and specifically, what they're making, who it's for, and what it will actually do. That's a craft, not a gift, and it can be learned.

And funders are not sitting still. I've watched program teams work hard at exactly this - rewriting guidelines, redesigning forms, building in support - and some have brought me in to help them do it. Effort is not what's missing here. The people inside these institutions often see the problem more clearly than anyone, and they are already moving on it.

So this isn't a callout. It's just that the more powerful half of the fix was never really the artist's to make - it sits with the people who design the programs, which is exactly why the work already going in matters so much.

The direction is clear, and it goes beyond the questions on the form. The aims of a grant, the process, and the questions themselves all have to be translated out of bureaucratic language and into the artist's. Real work and outreach already goes into it, but I still speak to artists every day who can't tell me what the grant they're applying for is actually for, because its purpose is written in the same register as the guidelines around it. If we want the best and clearest answer from artists, we have to ask in their language - and make sure they can see what they're being asked to serve. We can't expect them to translate without a dictionary. None of that lowers the bar for what gets funded. It widens who can credibly reach it. Fewer strong projects fall over on a technicality, and the money does more of what it was built to do in the first place.

And the list doesn't end with language. Timelines and formats that actually work for applicants living with disability, not partial measures bolted onto an old form. Grant-writing education that reaches regional and remote artists, not only the ones within reach of a capital city. Application processes that ask less unpaid cultural labour of First Nations applicants, rather than treating ICIP work as a free add-on. And, further out, self-determination in funding - First Nations communities shaping not just who receives funding but how work is assessed: what counts as value, what is important in First Nations projects as determined by First Nations people - which is part of the answer, and further along in some places than others.

The point

The same names don't keep winning because the game is fixed. They keep winning because they've worked out something nobody published - how to make a strong, high-impact case for exactly what a program set out to fund. That knowledge can be learned and it can be shared, and the barriers around reaching it can be lowered. None of that asks anyone to pretend the system is perfect. It just asks the sector to decide the system is worth making legible.

You were never wrong about what you were seeing. You were just handed the wrong word for it. "Rigged" is a locked door. "Untranslated" is a door with a key - and cutting more of those keys, on both sides of the table, is the most useful thing anyone frustrated with this system could do with that frustration.

Cat Dibley is an arts sector consultant based in NSW. She has personally secured more than $3.6 million in arts funding and assesses for state arts programs, local councils, and international funds including the American Australian Association. She works with councils and arts organisations to design and strengthen their funding programs, and coaches artists through the applications those programs assess.