NSW Ministry for the Arts
Australia's largest State arts ministry, the NSW Ministry for the Arts, advises the New South Wales Government on all aspects of the arts and cultural activity. It supports excellence and innovation in the arts with funds totalling more than $200 million

More than $160 million goes each year to the State's cultural institutions.

Around $20 million goes to an annual program of grants, fellowships, awards, lectures, training courses, seminars, special events and publications.

The Ministry is the principal supporter of the Sydney Festival. It also funds national flagship companies and other leading arts organisations such as Opera Australia, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Bangarra Dance Theatre, Sydney Theatre Company, Company B, the Flying Fruit Fly Circus, Legs on the Wall, the Biennale of Sydney and the Museum of Contemporary Art.

It sponsors the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, the most valuable and longest established publicly-funded writers' awards in Australia, as well as the NSW Premier's History Awards, inaugurated in 1998, and Sydney Writers' Festival.

It maintains Carnivale, the State's annual multicultural festival.

It gives special priority to Indigenous, multicultural and youth arts and cultural development in Western Sydney and regional New South Wales.

Its mission is to ensure that people everywhere share in the rewards of a vigorous cultural life - a society in which the arts flourish and the State's cultural heritage is also available to all and preserved for the benefit of future generations.