Ms TN is a bit slow off the mark this week - blame the massive bundle of proofs that thumped on my doormat yesterday, distracting me from the press releases in my inbox. But good news is good news, be it ever so second-hand. As Jo Roberts reports in today's Age, the Malthouse Theatre and Chunky Move have scored slots at the Edinburgh International Festival in August. The shows invited by festival director Jonathan Mills are Barrie Kosky's The Tell-Tale Heart, a sell-out hit at last year's Melbourne Festival, and Chunky Move's new work Mortal Engine, which premiered earlier this year at the Sydney Festival.

The Tell-Tale Heart is Kosky's second Edinburgh appearance under Mills's directorship - last year, his version of Poppea wowed the UK critics. Mortal Engine is a continuation of the collaboration between Gideon Obarzanek and Frieder Weiß that resulted in Glow, a bright little gem which, having toured Australia, is now off around the world. Roberts also reports that Mortal Engine is a strong tip for this year's Melbourne Festival, so prime that credit card: I saw a showing of this dance piece in rehearsal just before its premiere and, believe me, you don't want to miss it.

I see that the Sydney Festival has been generally greeted with hosannas, palm leaves and so on, with only a few grumpy souls daring to swim against the popular tide and ask "where's the meat?" Much as I hate to align myself with Fairfax critics - or, worse, the "elitists" - and given that my experience of the festival is limited to viewing the program (although I've seen a sizeable proportion of the programmed work and, yes, liked it), I have to place myself with the questioners. A keen sniffer of the wind, I wonder if this festival's unarguable commercialism will indeed be taken as the "gold standard" for Australian arts festivals. In the current funding climate, which is gleaming with the steel of promised razor gangs, it doesn't seem unlikely. And the prospect fills me with gloom. I hope it's unwarranted, but pessimism - if undesirable as a default position - is often borne out in contemplating Australian cultural policy.

Sydney attracted an attendance of an estimated 1 million people (as a proportion of population, a figure of 23 per cent), as opposed to half a million for Melbourne - around 13 per cent. It was an undeniable crowd pleaser, with headliners like Björk, Brian Wilson and Joanna Newsom, some interesting dance, a minimum of theatre and absolutely no "art" music, whether contemporary or classical. There's no doubt in this little blogger's brain that the artistic substance and energy lies with the Melbourne programs over the past few years. (Just compare the programs: MIAF 2007 here, Sydney 2008 here.) As a commissioner and programmer, MIAF artistic director Kristy Edmunds, following on from Robyn Archer, has led the way in curating some of the most exciting and ambitious festivals of recent years, in the face of some of the most vicious public attacks ever seen on a festival director.

The question is whether an arts festival is about, well, art, or whether it has to disguise itself as a big party in order to survive. Those of us who love art have had a good run in Melbourne these past few years. But Toto, I've got a bad feeling about this... are we going see the fabulous land of Oz dissolve back into the grey plains of Kansas? Maybe it was but a fitful gleam that oh so briefly illuminated the antipodean shadows. Maybe I need to get out of the country for a while to regain some perspective. Maybe I'm talking through my hat. Sydney was always a different city to Melbourne, after all. I guess time will tell.

While Melbourne slumbers in its theatre down-time, Sydney has got out its gladrags for the Sydney Festival. And our blogger colleague Nicholas Pickard is blogging it for the Daily Telegraph. Today he takes issue with the festival dissenters who are lamenting the lack of theatre and art music. (Slugging the local festival is a favourite Australian sport, up there with sacking cricket umpires). Actually, I'm with the arts snobs: I wouldn't mind seeing Joanna Newsome with the SSO, but give me Melbourne's October arts orgy any day...

We've all said the 2007 Melbourne Festival was a stunning success (some say life-changing). And now MIAF has released its figures. These figures have been the occasion for much festival bashing over the past three years, so they're worth a brief examination.

This year MIAF's total ticket sales were 76,897 - up around 16,000 from last year, and in the Leo Schofield ballpark of between 60,000 and 80,000 deemed desirable by chief festival Grinch Robin Usher. The average ticket price is an astoundingly low $29. And MIAF lists a long drumroll of shows that were sold out or at near capacity. The estimate for total attendance to all free and ticketed events, which the festival says is incomplete as figures are still coming in, is 475,000. Not bad for an event in a city of 3 million people that was said to interest nobody at all.

Total box-office return was $1,967,960. This will be the only figure some critics will look at, comparing it unfavourably with the Sydney Festival's $4 million, as if the success of an arts festival is only measured by economic profit. I guess it depends what you think an arts festival is for: after all, Sydney's program is avowedly more populist.

I don't want to miff my Sydney friends, but I can't say that the 2008 dance and theatre program has made me rush out to book my plane tickets up north. For one thing, we've seen quite a few of the Australian productions here already - five, by my count - a couple as MIAF premieres. And the program shows that if you want a $4million return, you don't headline Merce Cunningham or Peter Brook or Robert Wilson; you bring in Bjork and that other Wilson from the Beach Boys. Nothing against Bjork, we love her here, but the music program looks like the Big Day Out.