In many cases, maybe most, it’s the writers who will foot the bill. I hope that the ASA, Australian Poetry and the AWG will raise this matter with Arts NSW. But sadly it seems part of our contemporary reality that artists (and academics) are being expected to subsidise ever more of our work. Not only in terms of time, but in actual dollars and cents. We don’t expect firemen or bank tellers or university administrators to part-finance their work; I wish we didn’t expect writers and researchers to do so. But that’s probably ridiculously utopian of me.