Almost always, it's said with a smile.

Canberra is growing, as a city, as a community. There are new suburbs springing up, while old precincts are getting a facelift. Braddon used to be car yards.

Narrabundah used to be the doldrums. Look at the all the apartments in Gungahlin, and what about the Kingston foreshore!

Often, Canberra's arts sector is mentioned. It's growing, it's vibrant, it adds to the amenity and atmosphere of the city.

And the ACT government sometimes appears to agree. Certainly it has stepped up during this ongoing crisis, stumping up a pool of $500,000 for 66 individual artists, as well as $1 million emergency funding for key arts organisations.

But, as the results of the latter have shown, the lack of policy and strategy around who gets what is a continuing bugbear for the sector.

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For years, the centres, galleries and workshops around the city that form hubs for the sector have been fighting over scraps of ever-shrinking funding as they work to do more with less for each passing year.

Or at least, that's how it seems. And it's not at all clear, not least to the average taxpayer and certainly not to the arts centres themselves, how decisions about arts funding are made.

Of the $1 million on the table for emergency funding, nine organisations applied, but just one organisation, the Belconnen Arts Centre, received more than half of the pool.

The money went to replace the centre's necessary funding that would otherwise have been announced in this year's postponed budget.

This is a legitimate need, but using emergency funding set out for all arts organisations struggling due to coronavirus goes beyond the fund's stated aims.

If the money was supposed to be coming from the territory's budget, why dip into what was ostensibly newly-created emergency fund to cover the costs?

Organisations were told the funds would only be used to help organisations that would not otherwise survive the rest of 2020. Indeed, they were warned not to apply if this were not the case.

More than half of the territory's eligible organisations did not apply, most likely because they didn't believe they would be eligible. But watching the goalposts shift as effortlessly as those on a tiny model playing field, these organisations are likely wondering whether they should have given it a go.

As it stands, there do not appear to be any policy, rules, guidelines or strategy around which organisations receive funding from the ACT government, when or for what.

Belconnen is a new centre - 10 years old - preparing to re-open with a $15 million expansion. Meanwhile, Tuggeranong Arts Centre has received no funding boost for nine years, while Gorman and Ainslie Arts Centres in the city centre struggle to maintain their heritage-listed buildings, much less provide adequate facilities for artists. And the Kingston Arts Precinct appears to have stalled, with participating organisations unwilling or unable to comment publicly.

Tuggeranong chief executive Rauny Worm maintains that the reasons for this lack of clarity or strategy are political - that Belconnen is a boon for prospective votes in an election year.

Maybe she's right; one would hope there's more to it than that. She is, at the time of writing, the only member of the sector willing to say this openly.

But arts, of all things, and at these of all times, should not be at the mercy of politics.