A leaked proposal for staff and service cuts has ignited outrage, exposing how Victoria’s premier cultural institution is drifting from its mission to preserve knowledge toward corporate vanity projects, writes Dr Rosemary Sorensen.
IN THE WAKE of revelations that a secret document recommends cuts to staff and services, writer Kaz Cooke made it very clear on Bluesky what she believes is the role of the State Library of Victoria.
Cooke wrote:
‘The Victorian ALP government will proudly open the new #StateLibrary underground train station with giant murals taken from its collections as clueless Library management is dismantling its public services & failing to properly research, protect, and tell the stories of our past & present.’
This followed a report in The Age by Kerrie O’Brien, which outlines a leaked proposal to reduce the number of librarians and other staff, as well as services.
Flinders University academic Heather Robinson wrote in The Conversation:
‘Depriving Victorians of a fully functioning state library is gambling not only with the cultural heritage of the state, but with our community’s sense of inclusion, cohesion and international reputation.’
It's been a tough period for the State Library Victoria (SLV), starting with the shock decision to cancel a workshop for young writers and the follow-up denials that it was censorship of writers who supported Palestine, when it clearly was and proved to be. Paul Duldig, who retired in August (replaced with an acting CEO, John Wicks), oversaw months of unrest and changes to the board and executive.
In an interview with the Australian Financial Review in June this year, soon-to-retire SLV Board Chair Christine Christian gave as the reason for the scandalous Board intervention and cancellation of the workshop, “the possibility of unaccompanied minors being exposed to what could be considered hate speech”.
Christian is, according to the reporter, “blunt” about this. When she goes on to talk about the board decision, she blames the people who complained, rather than seeing anything untoward in their pre-emptive agreement that professional writers might expose children to what “could be considered hate speech”. The board members, Christian explained, “did reach out, we tried to explain that this had nothing to do with censorship or limiting the rights of writers to express their views. We tried very hard. Unfortunately, this action was not widely understood.”
This is nonsense. It was perfectly understood by many people that this perceived risk was offensive to the experienced writers contracted to deliver the workshops and that this fear of hate speech was, in fact, a way to exclude anyone who had publicly criticised Israel.
In this extraordinary interview, Christian goes on to say:
“It seems like every week you pick up the paper and some chair or board member of a cultural institution over something or other, or there’s been a blow-up. It feels like… well, it feels like this is the new world, a polarising world to say the least, and a kind that would once have been unimaginable.”
“Something or other” is a pathetic way to refer to the distress and despair expressed by so many people about institutional cowardice in the face of ruthless lobbying against bearing witness to a genocide.
This new world of which Christian speaks is only unimaginable if you’ve not read any of the vast and stunning Holocaust literature about how a democratic country succumbed to the mad dictates of an evil authoritarian ruler.
Only unimaginable if you don’t value the historical knowledge that is within the vital cultural institution called a library.
A petition is currently calling for the SLV management and government ‘to withdraw any proposed changes and hold a public meeting, where Victorians can have a say in how their library is run’.
What needs to be debated at such a meeting is as basic as the question: what’s a library for? It would appear that, under the current and immediate past leadership, a core function of this cultural institution includes “programs, scholarships and advice to budding entrepreneurs”. Indeed, Christine Christian donated $2 million to the Library for that purpose.
StartSpace, set up with Christian’s money, provides free membership for what it calls “co-working”, plus, for $350 a month membership, access to the “Loft” with conference and printing facilities, as well as training programs and mentor sessions. When then-CEO Kate Torney announced its opening in March 2020, her statement underlined that “StartSpace functions solely to benefit the community and does not operate for profit”.
Torney also mentioned that “leading international professional services firm PwC” (the company contracted but failing to review Robodebt in 2017) was, at that time, providing a training program on a pro-bono basis.
So, while the professional services of a company implicated in the illegal Robodebt scheme are acceptable, writers contracted to deliver workshops to teenagers were, on the advice of the Board led by Christian, not trusted to deliver their program without breaking the law.
At the end of October, the startup hub announced recipients of $10,000 scholarships donated by a Library benefactor, one to a designer of ‘modular, regenerative infrastructure that protects livestock and vineyards from climate extremes’, the other to a company that ‘uses AI to personalise chemotherapy dosing from routine CT scans’. As well as the $10,000 ‘seed funding’, the recipients receive ‘bespoke business coaching’.
Acting CEO John Wicks called the scholarship recipients “scholars” and noted that three-quarters of these scholars are still operating and growing their businesses, winning awards and securing new investment.
Good for them, but what’s it got to do with a library? By allocating space in the building to this, by accepting money which appears to have been specifically given to fund this irrelevant library function, SLV is confusing – indeed, it might be said, sacrificing – its principles, why it exists.
Without the report, it’s not possible to know why the cuts to staff and services are necessary, and what it means for the Library’s future. How will the changes impact the mission, which is stated thus: ‘We are Victoria’s library of record, home to the State Collection, free to access and open to all. We enrich the cultural, educational, social and economic lives of all Victorians.’
The current Strategic Plan covers the period from 2022 to 2026, but a separate Engagement Strategy 2020-2024 (apparently not updated since) includes five goals, the fifth of which is ‘founders from all walks of life being supported to set up sustainable ventures’.
It would be useful, as the proposed changes (hopefully) are discussed publicly by the Board and executive, as well as the State Government to which it is responsible, to hear how and why such a goal is prioritised by a library as old and admired as the SLV.
The Victorian ALP government will proudly open the new #StateLibrary underground train station with giant murals taken from its collections as clueless Library management is dismantling its public services & failing to properly research, protect, and tell the stories of our past & present. #fiasco
— Kaz Cooke (@kazcooke.bsky.social) November 28, 2025 at 11:42 AM
Dr Rosemary Sorensen is an IA columnist, journalist and founder of the Bendigo Writers Festival.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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