Ross Cadell (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is a strange place we come to, but one of the great things I love here is the knowledge you get. There are many downsides, but then there are the things you're exposed to that you didn't know. Prior to the environment and coms committee inquiry, led by Senator Hanson-Young as the chair and Senator Grogan as the deputy chair, I didn't know a lot about the disbursement of funds for music, and it opened my eyes. As previously said, we on this side won't be voting for the Copyright Legislation Amendment (Fair Pay for Radio Play) Bill 2023, but what we can do from the crossbench and the opposition benches is raise legislation like this that puts a light on problems, and Senator David Pocock has done that very well with this bill.

We need a bigger look at how we fund our artists and our recording artists. What came out of the committee, when I was there, is that there is a lot of money going around every aspect of this industry, but very little is getting to those people who make it. Senator Davey spoke about some of these things earlier. She mentioned she was a Taylor Swift fan, and, when I was going back through the Hansard of the committee, I noticed I dissed Taylor a little bit in that committee, so I apologise to all the Tay Tay fans out there. But here we are now.

Let's look at some of the numbers. We have the ABC—that is, triple J and every aspect of ABC radio—paying $136,000 for their rights to play songs as much as they want, so $136,000 all across Australia for all the stations. We had, as Senator Thorpe said, commercial radio paying $4.4 million last year for every song going out there across Australia. We have that money, as I think ARIA put to our committee, Senator Hanson Young, and that was $39.6 million being distributed in total to artists by ARIA. That's under $40 million going to Australian artists, and half of that goes to the record companies. Australian artists end up with less than $20 million being distributed to them. Is that good enough? No, it is not. We heard from APRA AMCOS, on behalf of rights holders, who don't have this cap. They have a turnover of $670 million for rights holders, not the performers. And, believe it or not, APRA AMCOS retained 13 per cent of that money to run their commissions, so the people administering who gets the funding in Australia end up, on my calculations, with about $87 million in fees. That is around about four times what the artists get from ARIA. If you are working in the industry to work out who gets what for the right holders, your area gets four times as much as that.

I know we're coming to the time when the debate will be interrupted, but it is not right. We have streaming platforms like Spotify and others, and all these laws come in before there was a digital media music industry out there, when tick-tock was a noise clocks made and twitter was a noise a bird made. These things have to be looked at, and although we are not supporting this bill, it has shone a light on a problem in Australia because we are not supporting Australian artists. We need to get that message out there, and we need to do this soon. If you have a look at even APRA AMCOS rights holders—