Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The former minister for communications, the member for Bradfield, used COVID-19 as an opportunity to abolish Australian children's TV content quotas on commercial broadcasters without introducing any content obligations on streaming services to take their place. Why? Well, perhaps he was keen to keep the commercial stations happy in the hope that he might get some positive media coverage for his ailing government. Maybe—who knows?

Thousands of Australian jobs were jeopardised at a time when we were desperately trying to keep people employed. Our kids need to see our Australian stories and hear our Australian voices on TV; it's an important part of how we build our sense of nationhood. An easy and cheap solution would be to put Australian content quotas on the streaming services. This would create jobs funded by international investment. Platforms such as Netflix are raking in billions of dollars per year in Australian subscriptions. Our money, Australian money, is going offshore. Quotas would bring some of that money back and return some of the jobs and opportunities that were lost under this mob.

Our screen industry needs a strong Australian content quota, and the Australian children's producers need a subgenre quota of 20 per cent. I think that's fair enough, given our Aussie kids are 21 per cent of the Australian population.