GOVERNMENT HITS THE SNOOZE BUTTON ON VIDEO STREAMING SERVICES

It was way back in 2013 that I first sounded the alarm about the impact TV streaming might have on Australian content.

I was Arts Minister at the time and raised the issue during a panel discussion with the Coalition’s George Brandis in Parliament House.

What would happen, I mused, when Australians could access their content directly from internet-enabled TVs, allowing them to bypass our traditional broadcasters – and our local content quotas?

We needed to be ready for the changes this new technology would bring so we didn’t leave our content producers disadvantaged and struggling to compete with a new deluge of mostly American content.

Maybe it seemed a little like science fiction. After all, at the time the closest things we had in Australia to streaming platforms were ABC iView and SBS On Demand, which people mostly accessed on PCs and phones. It would be another two years until Netflix would arrive on our shores and truly fire the opening shots in the streaming wars.

But even in 2013 it was obvious where the technology was going. Netflix was starting to become more widely accessible on smarts TVs in the US – no set top box or gaming console required – and they’d just launched their first prestigious original show, House of Cards.

Unfortunately, Labor lost power a few months later - and now Australian producers have lost nearly a decade of opportunity to the Liberal National government’s short-sighted inertia.

For the last eight years Labor has continued to sound the alarm but the Liberal Arts Minsters George Brandis, Mitch Fifield and Paul Fletcher have just kept hitting the snooze button.

Last week in these pages Mr Fletcher finally seemed to have an awakening and acknowledge there was a problem: streaming platforms don’t have enough Australian content!

Does he have a plan to do anything about it? Of course not. Nowhere in his article did Mr Fletcher even commit to acting.

Apparently he still thinks he can convince giant global corporations like Disney to fix this market failure all on their own, even though they reject the suggestion there’s any problem at all.

Over the last eight years the government has announced reviews and inquiries and options papers and consultation processes on screen reform - but has done nothing to regulate streaming services.

That’s a problem because every day of delay makes this task harder.

Every day the streaming services get more entrenched and more powerful. Change becomes more difficult.

Free-to-air TV channels have had content quotas for six decades.

They haven’t always liked them but these quotas have been critical to creating local jobs and driving the production of the Australian stories we all love. Now they’re competing with global behemoths with deep pockets who don’t have to abide by the same rules. When the networks quite rightly point out this is unfair the Government’s response has been to try and lower everyone’s obligations in a race to the bottom that would be disastrous for our local creatives.

Earlier this year the Government watered down commercial TV quotas, effectively abolishing any requirement for them to make local childrens’ content. They also sought to halve Foxtel’s local content obligations but Labor and the crossbench were able to block that in the Senate.

The screen industry estimates that by extending content quotas to streaming we could create 10,000 Australian jobs. That would be a great way to help our creators recover from the battering they’ve taken during the COVID crisis – particularly given the government’s failure to properly support our artists and entertainers over the last 18 months.

It would also deliver a cultural dividend. Imagine the next Love My Way or Underbelly or Wentworth but backed with the dollars and production values of an Apple or an Amazon.

Our creators are incredibly talented and there’s nothing – apart from a bit of political will - stopping them producing more incredible content that could delight audiences at home and abroad.

Taxpayer investment in Hollywood productions supports temporary jobs which helps support industry infrastructure – and Labor backs that. But it delivers no cultural dividend. Thor: Ragnarok is a terrific movie but it’s hardly a quintessentially Australian story.

Other countries are taking action. The EU introduced a 30 per cent local content quota in 2018 – and the streaming services didn’t flee those markets. Canada is pursuing a similar policy.

If only Australia had a government similarly committed to creating jobs and protecting our culture.

This opinion piece was first published in The Australian on Monday, 4 October 2021.