James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in favour of the second reading of the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (2021 Measures No. 1) Bill 2021. Frankly, many of the issues that we are dealing with here are addressing a legislative framework that dates back at least to the early 1990s. I think to begin with we should just reflect on what the policy arguments were initially for having local content requirements as part of broadcasting licences and what the environment was when the policy debates were happening so many decades ago in this area. Of course, it was well before the internet and it was well before modern streaming services. It was when the government issued broadcasting licences, issued the spectrum, and part of the policy framework was a sensible decision that there should only be a certain number of television stations. There were three commercial stations in most markets—Seven, Nine and Ten—on top of which there were the ABC and SBS. So in most of parts of the country you would have access to five free-to-air networks, three of them being commercial.

Obviously a commercial television licence gives you an enormous ability to earn advertising revenue. The view was that, in exchange for the licence and charges related to that, certain requirements and expectations should be put upon those broadcast licensees. That, essentially, has been the case right up until now. We've had requirements, including content requirements and locally produced content requirements.

When we're honest about where that content has been produced, yes, it has been produced in Australia, but in Sydney and Melbourne in particular. As a member from Adelaide, not from one of the two major cities, this is a policy position that has benefited two cities in this country virtually exclusively. That has not been mandated—I accept that—it has just been a consolidation of that industry over the last few decades. There was a time in Adelaide when we produced Humphrey B. Bear and Touch of Elegance. Some of the older members might recall some of the channel 9 programming. That was lost to Adelaide decades ago. Channel 10 now doesn't even produce a news bulletin out of Adelaide. It's recorded and broadcast out of Melbourne. So as far as the non-Sydney-and-Melbourne parts of the country getting much benefit from these content rules is concerned, it's virtually non-existent now. I don't have an issue with that, but it's important to acknowledge and respect that the content that's produced under the current requirements is produced almost entirely in two cities, rather than across the country. As someone who has the South Australian Film Corporation in his electorate, I'm a huge supporter of the creative industry sector and content production. I think it should be happening just as much in Adelaide and across the rest of the country as it is in the two major capital cities.

Back in the 1990s, in 1992—I think one of the amendments relates to the Broadcasting Act 1992—that was the world that we lived in. It's a very different world now. Previous speakers have talked about how we consume content. In my case, it's quite rare for that to be through broadcast media. I'm sure most people in this building consume streaming services regularly. I think 14 million Australians consume streamed content in every given week across the platforms that we all know, such as Netflix, Stan, YouTube, Amazon et cetera. We've got Apple TV, with access to all of those. Many people probably have accounts across all platforms. It's the common habit now to consume content through those platforms. That is the here and now, in 2021, but we don't make decisions just for the here and now. We in this building have to make decisions for the future. No sensible person could possibly suggest that the trends of the last five or six years around streaming are not going to continue. We've seen in the last 12 months unbelievable take-up of streaming content, thanks to our changed lifestyles because of COVID restrictions et cetera. The technology exists for us to have content on demand and to make our own choices about the content. Those are the circumstances we are in, and the policy environment is that we have to respond to those circumstances.

This bill and the government's agenda in this area more broadly have to be taken into account together because we are about encouraging and supporting content creation in Australia. We want to see much more than we've had in the last few decades under the existing regulatory regime. We want to bring a renewed approach to encouraging content on the strongest growth platform, which is online streaming. The streaming platforms don't have any requirements for locally produced content on them. We're not proposing to introduce that. We're proposing to undertake reforms that are going to make the priority of the government's approach to content creation one for all platforms and are going to encourage local production rather than demand it.

My concern has been with the way we've mandated locally produced content. In some ways, the decisions are not made to produce great local content. Instead, probably, they are made so as to tick a box and, in some cases, choose the easiest and cheapest way of producing local content so that the requirements of the legislation are met. Instead of focusing on really good, high-quality content that can be not just run on the broadcast channels but also exported around the world, the attitude is 'because we have to meet certain legislative requirements, let's just do it in the quickest and easiest and cheapest way possible'. I want to see the creative sector in our country have a lot more ambition than that.

I mentioned that the South Australian Film Corporation is located in my electorate of Sturt. They have just completed production on a film called Mortal Kombat, the largest-budget film ever produced in South Australia at $50 million. That's a feature film that has been now released internationally. It's going very well. Unfortunately, the R rating on it makes it a little difficult to access for some. And it might not be every person's preferred genre, but it's the kind of content that is internationally popular and it's the kind of content that people around the planet want to consume. That was produced in my electorate of Sturt, in the city of Adelaide, to be consumed across the globe. That's the kind of content that we as a government need to focus on encouraging. We know that production subsidies and supports are simply the reality of the industry—giving rebates on in-country expenditure.

A few years ago, prior to coming to this House, I was in the G'day USA program in Los Angeles in early 2019—I think it was January—meeting with a number of major film studios there, including Netflix, talking about undertaking production here in Australia, and at every single meeting the same point was made—that we seemed to have quite antiquated laws when it came to the support that was in place for content production and creation in this country, and, in particular, not recognising and allowing for the support that's required for the streaming services, something that we've since fixed and addressed. But, certainly, it was something that was preventing companies like Netflix, Disney, Apple and others from looking closely at undertaking significant production in Australia—because, through a quirk, they weren't eligible for the same production incentives that a feature film was capable of getting access to.

The state government in South Australia, equally, run rebate schemes on not just production but post production et cetera. That's been very important in developing the visual effects industry. I've got a great company in my electorate called KOJO. They work on a number of very substantive Hollywood productions. South Australia—and Australia—is very uniquely placed to grow and expand in the creative industries, not just in film and television but also in gaming.

We're lucky in the sense that, because of our time zone, you can effectively have operations in Western Europe, North America and Australia and work on a 24-hour cycle. As one team are ending their day, they're handing over to the next team, whose day is just beginning and so on and so forth. In Adelaide and across this country, we've got the ability to partner with North American firms and European firms to have that constant 24-hour development loop, so we've got a unique opportunity to dramatically grow this sector. But that needs to include bringing the way in which we regulate and encourage the sector into the 21st century, into the modern world of online streaming content and people making personal decisions about what they do and don't want to watch, rather than just turning on the television and having to watch whatever is being broadcast at that point. That is the future.

Now, I've got confidence in Australian content. There seems to be a suggestion that, if we don't force people to produce Australian content and tell Australian stories, it won't happen. I utterly reject that. That is complete rubbish. Australians are very interested in Australian content and Australian stories. They want Australian reality television. They want Australian drama. They want Australian documentaries. They want Australian comedy. They want to consume local news. Australian content has got an enormous future in Australia, but let's be more ambitious than that. More importantly, it's got a huge opportunity and a future across the planet. Content producers in Australia should be much more ambitious than just satisfying minimum content requirements on Australian television. There needs to be a focus on producing stuff that is going to be of interest around the world. You can produce something now in this country that can go onto a streaming service like Netflix, and anyone who's got an internet connection anywhere in the world can watch it. If we produce good-quality content that's holds an interest for a certain category of people around the world, that's where the growth is going to be. That's where the opportunity in the sector is going to be.

At the South Australian Film Corporation, in my electorate, we produce content for the globe, not for a percentage requirement that's legislated by the Australian government as a licensing requirement for a broadcast television station. We're much more ambitious than that. In this parliament, we should be much more ambitious than that. We should have a confidence, rightly, in Australian content being interesting and there being a demand for it in this country and across the world. We should change our mindset and not say, 'Let's have a law that says you have to have a minimum percentage of this and that and tick these boxes in order to get your television licence and earn your advertising revenue.' That's an attitude that might have had some value 30 years ago, but certainly in 2021 that's not the ambition we should have for the creative industry sector.

This should be a growth sector. We should have ambitions to be producing Australian content that is consumed across the planet, telling great Australian stories. We should be engaging with a sector that's got great on-screen and off-screen talent, a great workforce that's got a great heritage and history in this country but whose best days and years are to come. That means embracing what the future is. What we're doing here is part of a suite of measures. Our government is understanding where content creation and content consumption are going into the future and therefore understanding what the framework needs to be, through legislation and regulation, for encouraging that sector to achieve its full potential.

We must support that sector, and we do support it very strongly, but, instead of supporting it by having a straitjacket on the broadcasting networks of this country, we should be encouraging content creation that can lift its sight well above the horizon of Australia, that can give great Australian content the opportunity and capacity to thrive across the planet, to become a great export industry for this country. That will happen if our mindset shifts to one of being proud of a sector that we know can succeed through consumer choices. We know that content produced and created in this country can have an interest, can be demanded, across the planet. If that becomes the new focus of the creative industries and content production in this country, then we will see a great future for that sector, tens of thousands of jobs created and opportunities for so many companies, businesses, employers and people across that industry to have an excitement about their future. It will also see Australian stories told right around the world. I commend the bill to the House.

See this speech in context