The NGA's funding woes symptom of larger malaise

And it's still having to beg for enough funding to keep its doors open full-time and its public collection free to view on any day of the year except Christmas.

The National Gallery isn't being dramatic when it comes to its funding woes, although it has chosen - as have others before it - to pinpoint the ways in which funding cuts will hit the hardest if the federal government's reviled efficiency dividend is to continue.

Revelations this week that the gallery's board chairman, Ryan Stokes, wrote to Arts Minister Tony Burke begging for more funding, and warning it could face having to close two days a week, are part of a long and wearying litany of such calls from Canberra's increasingly beleaguered cultural institutions.

While this move came to light via a freedom of information request, published by Nine newspapers, the NGA isn't the first institution to submit dire warnings about funding.

Not so long ago, the National Library of Australia warned it would be unable to adequately fund Trove, its free digitised newspaper database, if funding cuts continued.

The Australian War Memorial once threatened to pull its daily Last Post ceremony without a cash injection.

The National Archives has warned for years that untold numbers of official records will be rendered inaccessible or degraded beyond repair without funds to digitise them.

And just four years ago, an official audit revealed that parts of the National Gallery had ceilings that leaked when it rained, to the point at which staff had to put out buckets to catch the drops.

These are all legislative authorities with legal mandates to perform certain roles and functions to do with Australia's cultural heritage.

And Australians pay for these roles and functions to be fulfilled.

But in the past three decades, these institutions have been subject to relentless cutbacks - also known as efficiency dividends - that have steadily eroded their budgets and led to cuts in staffing, reduction in public programs, and ongoing struggles to perform the very functions they're established to perform.

The National Gallery has been particularly hard-hit in recent years, and not just because of COVID and bushfires.

In response to the revelations of Mr Stokes' letter to the minister, Senator David Pocock made a valid point: the NGA is a multi-million dollar organisation that is being forced to make the kind of tough decisions that should not normally be faced by such a prominent institution.

Never mind that efficiency dividends are a lazy budget measure that punish small agencies that have proved, over and over again, their ability to be both efficient and ruthless when it comes to cost-cutting.

When money to collect and preserve a $7 billion art collection needs to be diverted to ensure the building that houses it is properly waterproofed and climate-controlled, it's clear there are some misplaced priorities.

Senator Pocock invoked "huge subsidies for multi-national fossil fuel companies" to emphasise this imbalance, but in reality, the decision is not even as stark as that.

There no longer seems to be any consideration at all given to institutions which don't receive adequate funding, but rather a contentedness to maintain the status quo - a failure to determine actual inefficiencies.

But it can't go on. Mr Burke is avowed and long-term supporter of the arts, so it's time for him to show the arts the money.