The government is to cut funding to the arts by $87.1 million over four years, mainly to the Australia Council, the country’s central arts funding organisation, and to Screen Australia, its main film-making body.

A $1.8m cut over four years will also be made by terminating the Adelaide Festival centre’s Asia Pacific Centre for arts and cultural leadership, which funded arts administration and exchange programs between South Australia and Asia.

The coalition will, however, provide $1m to help pay for a boarding hall for the Australian Ballet School in Melbourne.

The Australia Council funds a huge variety of arts programmes throughout the country, from theatre to literature. Screen Australia is behind many of the country’s greatest film successes, from Samson and Delilah to Muriel’s Wedding to Animal Kingdom, as well as successful feature-length TV shows such as the recent INXS movie. This week will see the Screen Australia-supported film The Rover, which stars Robert Pattinson, open in Cannes.

Screen Australia will receive a $25.1m funding cut over four years: $5.2m in 2014-2015 and $5.3m, $7.3m and $7.3m in the following three years. It will also lose out on an additional $10m due to termination of the Australian interactive games fund which it administered.

Earlier this month, when the Commission of Audit recommended that Screen Australia received a 50% cut, filmmaker and former Screen Australia board member Robert Connolly said that any cut would have a heavy impact on Australia's film industry.

He said: "Screen Australia delivers is the opportunity to tell our own stories on our screens. If you reduce [government] support, you are reducing the amount of Australian content on our screens and I don’t think Australians want that."