Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to rise and speak in support of the Screen Australia (Transfer of Assets) Bill 2010. The purpose of this bill is to amend the name of the National Film and Sound Archive to the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. The bill also transfers part of Screen Australia’s film library and associated assets and liabilities to the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Following the establishment of Screen Australia and the National Film and Sound Archive in 2008, it has become clear that the functions associated with Screen Australia’s film library and related sales and digital learning functions are best placed with the National Film and Sound Archive. Whilst this may appear to be an administrative change, I believe this will have significant benefits for Australia’s film industry. It will enable the NFSA to be internationally recognised as Australia’s premier audiovisual collecting institution. Anything that enhances the image of Australia’s film industry I believe is worth pursuing. As the immediate past chair of Screen New South Wales, formerly the New South Wales Film and Television Office, I strongly believe the Australian film industry is deserving of government support through a variety of measures and represents a valuable investment in both monetary and non-quantifiable terms.

It is useful to revisit first principles when we consider the role of government in the screen sector. A useful starting point is the statutory functions of Screen Australia. I refer to section 6 of the Screen Australia Act 2008, which includes amongst the functions of Screen Australia being to support and promote the development of a highly creative, innovative and commercially sustainable Australian screen production industry; to support or engage in the development, production, promotion and distribution of Australian programs and the provision of access to Australian programs; and to support and promote the development of screen culture in Australia. The charter and values of Screen New South Wales also neatly capture the contribution of the screen industry to both our culture and our economy. To paraphrase, the screen industry makes a significant contribution to our society socially, culturally and economically. Development and support of the screen industry is a necessary part of maintaining the vitality of our economy as a whole. Diversity in screen content, culture and creation is important. It is an important part of working towards creating opportunities for the widest possible diversity of people to participate in the making, viewing and appreciation of screen content. We live in the digital age. The world no longer sees screen as purely film or television. People now make, share and see moving images on digital formats and platforms at home, at work, at school, in the cinema and on the move in cars, planes and trains. We need to be flexible to adapt to the implications of the digital age. Our role is to stimulate compelling screen experiences and provide high-quality service to screen practitioners.

The Australian government has a comprehensive package of measures aimed at boosting support for the Australian film and television industry, of which the Australian screen production incentive is its primary mechanism. This provides tax incentives for film, television and other screen production in Australia and is available in three streams: the producer offset, to encourage the production of Australian film and television projects; the location offset, which is a 15 per cent rebate which supports the production of large-budget film and television projects shot in Australia; and the PDV offset, a 15 per cent rebate which supports work on post, digital and visual effects production, or PDV, in Australia regardless of where a project is shot.

There were two important changes to the offsets contained in the 2010-11 budget, a reduction in the minimum qualifying expenditure threshold for the PDV offset from $5 million to $500,000 and the removal of the requirement for production spending between $15 million and $50 million in Australia to spend at least 70 per cent of the total production budget in Australia in order to qualify for the location offset. Like, I am sure, those speakers who will follow in this debate, I am passionate about Australian film. I am sure we all have our favourites. They have made an important contribution to our cultural identity, from Breaker Morant to Picnic at Hanging Rock to Gallipoli, to name a few. In recent years, during my role as the former chair of Screen New South Wales, there have been some of the most beautiful and moving pieces that I have seen, such as Ivan Sen’s Beneath Clouds, Blessed by Ana Kokkinos and, from the 2010 Sydney Film Festival, Wasted on the Youngwhich I thought was the standout film. Then there are documentaries, television series and features and the burgeoning digital effects sector, for which Australia has rightfully earned a reputation for excellence.

A case in point is Animal Logic, the producers of the Oscar-winning Happy Feet. The 2009 DBCDE paper, Australia’s digital economy: future directions discussed Animal Logic as a case study of success, tracking its beginnings in advertising to attracting the best human capital, the necessary creativity and the right people of talent. It also discussed the issue of broadband. In the future directions paper’s interview with Greg Smith of Animal Smith, he said the following under the heading ‘how broadband changes the game’:

The continued growth of broadband infrastructure complements and supports Animal Logic’s business growth. In its ongoing advertising work, broadband capability allows commercials at a higher resolution and quality, which facilitates greater creativity and production values. When online advertising was primarily banner advertisements there was less scope, but with broadband, advertising can be the same or close to broadcast quality, which increases the creative potential.

This is important. He goes on to say:

With the rollout of high-speed broadband as part of the National Broadband Network, the ability to improve content production quality will only increase. Bandwidth requirements always grow to fill the available capacity. It can also give the company greater flexibility in how it manages its production facilities.

With high-speed broadband, Animal Logic’s work could, for example, be carried out seamlessly by pods working in different locations. It makes sense for Animal Logic to maintain its base in Fox Studios because it is convenient for the director and others shooting a movie nearby to quickly drop by and see how the visual effects are developing. However, allowing people to work in other locations around Sydney can increase the talent pool because it gives people greater choices in terms of cost of living, and travel time. Locating teams away from the inner-city of Sydney can also reduce business costs.

I regularly engage with practitioners in film industry circles who are excited about what the NBN will do to envigorate the sector. The case study of Animal Logic encapsulates some of the very real benefits that will be derived from the NBN for the arts sector.

As someone who remains passionate about the Australian film industry, it would be remiss of me not to take this opportunity to acknowledge the present challenges being faced by the sector, particularly in the current climate of parity or near parity of the Australian dollar with the American dollar and the impact of that on the industry’s global competiveness. It is an unfortunate downside of the combination of our high dollar and our competitors matching or exceeding Australia’s production incentives. According to AusFilm, which commissioned an economic impact study of the Australian Screen Production Incentive program, $2.2 billion of inward investment has been generated in Australia under the scheme. Unfortunately however, today it is becoming, and in some cases it has become, financially unattractive for high-end international feature production in Australia. The result is a downsizing of the domestic industry, with wide-ranging negative impacts on everything from the skilled crew base to caterers to local impacts, particularly when you consider the boost that can be generated to local economies—particularly regional towns—by onsite filming.

I look forward to what I understand will be a comprehensive review of the offset scheme to address these very real concerns. Indeed, I note the announcement by Minister Simon Crean of 17 February at which he released his review of the independent screen production sector. It found significant improvement in the Australian screen and television industry and a major lift in government investment—in fact, government support has trebled from $136.7 million to $412.1 million in three years since the introduction of the Australian Screen Production Incentive.

However, the review also identifies several challenges and highlights that there are opportunities to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the screen tax offset in some areas. I also look forward to this review gathering as many submissions as possible from the sector and also from people like me who are passionate about film. Comments are invited until Friday, 11 March.

One thing is also clear, and I get this a lot from industry: international production crews love coming to Australia. I want to stress that because it is unfortunate that when it comes down to it money is the bottom line, not the quality of our crews and not the quality of our industry in Australia.

The second element of this legislation provides for the transfer of Screen Australia’s extensive archive of documentary films to the NFSA. Currently, Screen Australia’s film library includes over 5,000 films produced by its various predecessor agencies. The transfer of these assets is important because the NFSA has the professional archiving experience and facilities to preserve, curate and exhibit these films.

It is useful to remind ourselves of what we are dealing with when we consider the NFSA. It has more than 1.6 million items—over 330,000 audio recordings, over 440,000 moving images and over 870,000 associated documents. Some of these are of priceless national and cultural significance, such as the earliest surviving footage of the Melbourne Cup from 1897 and The Story of the Kelly Gang from 1906, which was indeed the first acknowledged feature film in the world. There is also the Indigenous collection. One of the very important functions of the NFSA is to collect, preserve and effectively manage the diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures depicted through film and sound.

I want to tell a particularly pertinent story about film archiving. It is the story of the classic 1971 film Wake in Fright, directed by Ted Kotcheff, and how it was rediscovered. This film is the story of schoolteacher John Grant, who has an alcohol fuelled descent into hell one weekend in an isolated outback town. By the late 1990s the original negatives were thought to be lost. In 1996 the editor, Anthony Buckley, started searching for them. He located them in a bonded warehouse in London. But when he arrived to collect them he found that unfortunately the week before the canisters had been shipped to the US. He kept searching and eventually found the canisters of the original film in a set of dump bins, and 263 cans of film finally arrived at the NFSA from the US in two separate shipments in September 2004. A significant amount of work needed to be done on them to reconstruct and preserve the film. The NFSA did a fantastic job in undertaking this preservation work and in fact it was at the Sydney Film Festival in 2009, I believe, that it had a redigitised screening to a rapturous response. I was very fortunate to be there for that momentous occasion.

A large proportion of the NFSA material is stored as online education resources, which are a very effective tool for use in classrooms across the country. One of the most exciting parts of being a member of parliament is the opportunity to visit schools across one’s electorate. I have been fortunate to experience the benefits of an interactive classroom. The use of audiovisual material is becoming an increasingly important feature of education in the 21st century and, for this reason, it is essential that the NFSA is given the resources it needs to archive and preserve audiovisual material. It is essential that appropriate recognition is afforded to the authority so that it can continue to preserve an audiovisual record of our past, be it in films, television, news stories or documentaries. This is why this is an important piece of legislation, and I commend it to the House.

Mike Symon (Deakin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I speak in support of the Screen Australia (Transfer of Assets) Bill 2010, which will transfer Screen Australia’s film library and related sales and digital learning functions to the National Film and Sound Archive, consolidating these collections. This bill deals with consequential and transitional matters relating to the transfer of staff, assets, liabilities and other matters to the NFSA. The bill also changes the name of the NFSA to the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

As is well known, the Australian film and television industry has made an enormous contribution to the cultural life of our nation. The impact of quality cinema and television on the Australian community and the perceptions that the world has developed of our nation from exposure to this product cannot be overstated. Quality local television and film ensure that Australian children grow up watching local shows and films or at least have the opportunity to on our particularly good services such as ABC3. I recommend that all parents steer their children, if they watch TV, in that direction because there is a lot of Australian content there.

I think a frustration of many parents is that their children too often watch on TV imported product. While some of that is good, I think it is also very important from a parent’s viewpoint that children are exposed to their own country’s output. Australian children’s TV and films, both short and long, are some of the best in the world. I think they compare more than favourably with any of the imported products that come along. The other thing of course is that local production means jobs for people in Australia. The more locally made films and TV shows are promoted and shown at cinemas or on TV, the better it will be for people in the industry.

Films like Crocodile Dundee and television shows like Neighbours have made long-lasting impressions on the rest of the world of the Australian nature and character. Sometimes it is a little extrapolated but many times they get across the quirks that make our country the best in the world. Films that portray Paul Hogan as Crocodile Dundee live long in the memory. They have been used to advertise Australia year after year. Although some people might say that they are not the bee’s knees in arts films, they are certainly culturally important to Australia.

This bill is about the cultural heritage for current and future generations. Screen Australia and the National Film and Sound Archive were established as separate statutory authorities on 1 July 2008. The agencies have completed over two years of operation as separate statutory authorities and in that time it has become clear that certain functions associated with Screen Australia’s film library and related sales and digital learning functions would be best placed within the National Film and Sound Archive. The film library of Screen Australia contains substantial archival resources. The National Film and Sound Archive, as Australia’s premier collecting institution for audiovisual material, is the agency that would best preserve and support the development and exploitation of this fantastic resource.

Screen Australia’s library has a collection of approximately 5,000 films and associated material produced by the former Film Australia Ltd and its predecessor agencies or acquired from third-party producers. I am sure we have all seen over the years many films that have been financed with the help of Film Australia. The library collection also has over 60,000 items on film, video, sound and digital file formats and 150,000 stills, which the Commonwealth owns the copyright of.

Spanning a century of Australia’s history, it is one of the largest and most historically significant sources of archival, documentary and Indigenous footage and stills. Providing support to the independent documentary sector, Screen Australia offers a zero-fee licensing initiative, offering all media worldwide in perpetuity rights for up to 10 minutes of footage and 40 stills of Screen Australia’s copyright materials without fee. During 2009-10, 36 local documentaries accessed footage and stills under the zero-fee licensing scheme. This greatly assisted our local industry. This support to the local industry and the preservation of this cultural heritage will be continued at the NFSAA.

The National Film and Sound Archive is the Australian government’s collecting institution for the nation’s audiovisual heritage. This national collection includes more than 1.6 million items. So, in addition to the disks, films, videos, audiotapes, phonograph cylinders and wire recordings, the collection includes supporting documents and artefacts such as photographic stills, transparencies, posters, lobby cards, publicity, scripts, costumes, props, memorabilia including sound memorabilia and video and film equipment. That is a very extensive collection, and of course no collection of that size can ever be totally put on public display. But it needs to be stored, it needs to be catalogued and it needs to be accessible one day so that Australian people can see it and see what our history actually contains.

The NFSA provide their collection for loan and conduct a number of preservation projects, searching for lost films and preserving our film and sound heritage. Through cutting-edge research and preservation practices, the National Film and Sound Archive has become internationally recognised as a centre of excellence for restoration and preservation of audiovisual material. The National Film and Sound Archive has leading-edge technical facilities and teams of expert technicians skilled in handling all audiovisual media. Although in these days of digital production and digital storage it is far too easy to burn things onto your own computer and have a back-up file somewhere, in many cases the materials that our old films and images are stored on are quite volatile and must be stored with proper archival practices; otherwise they can be gone for good.

Screen Australia is the key federal government funding body for the Australian screen production industry. Its functions are to support and promote the development of a highly creative, innovative and commercially sustainable Australian screen production industry. Screen Australia and the industry I would say have been enjoying not only recent success but ongoing success. In 2009, 1.4 million more Australians went to the cinema to see Australian films than in 2008—a 45 per cent increase—and that momentum continues. Screen Australia invested in several distinctively Australian films that performed well at the box office—films such as Bran Nue Dae, The Kings of Mykonos, Beneath Hill 60 and Animal Kingdom. These successes reflect Screen Australia’s focus on audience engagement, creative storytelling and increased screen business viability. In the two years since its inception, Screen Australia should be proud of its impact on the Australian film and television industry. Noting the success of Screen Australia and its core duties, it has become apparent that the role of maintaining a film and sound collection does not appear to be a core activity of Screen Australia, so, by transferring its collection to the National Film and Sound Archive, Screen Australia will be contributing to the expansion of the NSFA’s collection and will retain its focus on supporting the Australian screen production industry. The 60,000 films, documentaries, stills and other shows currently held at Screen Australia will significantly add to the collection at the National Film and Sound Archive.

The Screen Australia (Transfer of Assets) Bill 2010 also deals with staff and administrative matters related to the transfer of the collection to the NSFA. Any assets and liabilities specified by the minister at transition time will cease to be assets and liabilities of Screen Australia and will become assets and liabilities of the NFSA. The bill will ensure the transfer of relevant Screen Australia employees currently working in connection with the film library and will ensure that all their entitlements transfer over to the NFSA. It is very important that that is done properly when you are dealing with skilled people, especially in an area such as this, where there is a worldwide demand but not many opportunities for training to get new people into the industry. Current Screen Australia staff are non-APS employees engaged under the Screen Australia Act 2008. They will be transferred to the NFSA, subject to the Public Service Act 1999, all accrued staff entitlements to annual leave, personal leave and carers leave will be transferred to the NFSA, and staff will retain continuity of service.

In addition to moving the cultural collections to the NFSA, this bill will have the effect of changing the name of the NFSA by adding ‘of Australia’ to the end of it.

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It being 6.30 pm, the debate is interrupted. The resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting and the member may seek to continue his remarks at that time.