Empty Tanks, Empty Seats: Why Australia’s Performing Arts Sector Says the Pressure Feels Like COVID Again

For years, the resilience of Australia’s performing arts sector has rested on movement. It depends on artists travelling vast distances, companies loading sets into trucks and vans, publicists plastering posters across towns before opening night, and audiences making the decision to leave home and buy a ticket. In a country as geographically spread as Australia, the business of live performance has always been inseparable from the logistics of getting people and productions from one place to another.

Now, that fragile equation is under severe strain.

Across the sector, producers, touring organisations and peak bodies are warning that a fuel driven cost surge, combined with weak consumer confidence and falling ticket sales, is creating a climate of fear that recalls the instability of the pandemic years. For some, the crisis is showing up in budgets and balance sheets. For others, it is visible in audience behaviour, in half filled houses, slower advance sales, and a growing reluctance to commit to travel heavy regional seasons. Together, those pressures are beginning to reshape decisions about where shows go, whether they can afford to tour at all, and who gets cut off first when the economics stop making sense.

Few examples capture that tension more clearly than Signor Baffo, a small scale comic character who has built a strong following at Adelaide Fringe. The show, created and toured by Melbourne producer Jared Harford alongside performer Joshua Burton, looks modest from the outside. It is intimate, portable and designed to move efficiently. Its footprint is light, requiring little more than a van, costumes, props, and the ability to get from one town to the next. In normal conditions, that lean structure should be a strength.

Instead, it has become a measure of just how unforgiving the touring environment has become.

Harford, whose work also reaches far beyond the Australian festival circuit, including recent success in London’s West End with an adaptation of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry that earned him an Olivier Award nomination, is now confronting the same problem as many independent producers. Even a stripped back touring model is no longer protected from the cost shocks rippling through the economy. Rising diesel prices, inflated freight charges, more expensive distribution costs, and the absence of meaningful safety nets are turning what should be viable regional touring into a financial gamble.

For artists operating outside the largest commercial institutions, the danger is not abstract. A remote breakdown, a disrupted route, or a sudden budget blowout can threaten an entire season. Harford’s concern is not only that a tour might lose money, but that one unforeseen problem on a regional route could turn a difficult trip into an impossible one. The arithmetic is brutal. Revenue is uncertain, expenses are climbing, and the consequences of cancelling can be catastrophic.

This is the contradiction at the heart of the current moment. Governments and funding bodies continue to emphasise the importance of reaching regional audiences, broadening access, and ensuring that people outside metropolitan centres are not left behind. Yet many of the artists and organisations doing that work say the financial support has not kept pace with the real world costs of delivering it. Touring has always involved risk, but the risk is now landing in an environment with little buffer and no meaningful insurance against the kinds of disruptions that can wipe out a season.

The strain is not limited to independent acts.

Sydney based touring service organisation Arts on Tour, which works with companies including Bangarra Dance Theatre and Belvoir Street Theatre, has already notified clients of a seven per cent increase in freight costs linked to diesel prices. In regional touring, freight can consume as much as half of an overall budget. On longer tours, that increase can add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of getting a production on the road. For organisations managing multiple touring schedules, the question is no longer how to make a tour profitable. It is how to keep it alive at all.

That kind of budgeting pressure has consequences far beyond the spreadsheet. When freight, fuel and logistics costs rise sharply, producers are forced to search for savings elsewhere. That might mean trimming marketing, reducing staffing, scaling back production elements, or questioning whether certain regional stops remain viable. Every one of those choices carries a cost. Some affect artistic quality. Others reduce audience reach. The most serious lead directly to cancellations.

The emotional toll is also becoming harder to ignore. Sector leaders describe a climate of escalating anxiety, shaped not only by higher expenses but by the uncertainty of not knowing where the ceiling is. The instability feels relentless because it is arriving from multiple directions at once. Touring costs are up. Household budgets are tight. Interest rate pressure is making audiences more cautious. Theatre, always vulnerable to shifts in disposable income, is once again being treated as optional spending.

That audience hesitation matters just as much as the fuel bill.

Live Performance Australia has reported a noticeable softening in ticket sales, with audiences increasingly sensitive to price. Producers, however, have little room to respond by lifting ticket prices. In many cases, they cannot pass on the extra cost without further damaging demand. The result is a familiar squeeze. Costs climb, but income does not follow. Margins narrow or disappear altogether, and the sector absorbs the pain internally.

Regional venues feel the effects especially sharply. Audiences outside capital cities often face their own travel costs simply to attend a performance. When petrol prices rise, it does not just affect the truck carrying the set. It affects the family deciding whether to drive in for the evening, the retiree weighing up the expense of a night out, and the community member choosing between entertainment and other essentials. In that context, empty seats are not only a reflection of artistic demand. They are increasingly a measure of economic stress.

For producers planning future work, the uncertainty is beginning to alter timelines and ambition. Some are reportedly considering delaying projects until there is greater clarity about the broader economic and geopolitical outlook. That caution may be commercially rational, but it carries cultural consequences. Delays mean fewer productions, fewer jobs, fewer opportunities for artists, and less access for audiences, particularly in the regions where touring is often the main route to live performance.

Industry bodies are now urging governments to consider targeted assistance, especially in relation to touring costs. They are also calling for longer term policy measures that could reduce the financial risk involved in mounting and moving productions around the country. Those proposals reflect a growing recognition that the market alone cannot stabilise a sector exposed to such volatile operating conditions, particularly when it is being asked to fulfil a national cultural role.

Creative Australia has acknowledged the pressure that rising costs are placing on artists and arts organisations and says it is monitoring the impact on funded activity. That recognition matters, but for many in the sector the problem is already immediate rather than theoretical. Monitoring conditions is one thing. Keeping a show on the road is another.

Harford’s planned July tour of Signor Baffo from Melbourne to the Gold Coast and back through eight regional stops captures the dilemma in human terms. A tour that should represent connection, delight and cultural access is now overshadowed by the possibility that the tank may swallow everything. Instead of building profit or reinvesting in future work, earnings risk disappearing into fuel. The journey itself becomes the threat.

What the sector is describing is not a replay of COVID in the literal sense. Venues are open, performances are happening, and artists are still getting on the road. But the atmosphere is hauntingly familiar. There is the same sense of fragility, the same fear of cancellations, the same uncertainty about what fresh disruption might arrive next, and the same feeling that an industry built on passion is once again being asked to absorb crisis conditions with limited support.

Australia’s live performance economy has always relied on more than applause. It relies on roads, freight, fuel, confidence and access. When those systems fail or become unaffordable, the cultural consequences are immediate. Empty tanks do not just threaten touring schedules. They threaten whether live performance can reach the communities that need it. And empty seats do not just signal a slow night at the box office. They signal a sector once again wondering how much more pressure it can survive.

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