It was summer season 2022 and Arts Minister Tony Burke was riffing with a pleasant viewers on the Woodford People Pageant.
Foreshadowing the discharge of Labor’s nationwide cultural coverage, Revive, Burke informed festival-goers that Australia’s home TV and movie business confronted an “computerized structural drawback”. Australia’s comparatively small English-speaking manufacturing sector couldn’t compete with cheaper content material churned out by US and British producers, he stated. “The one method you repair that drawback is with Australian content material quotas.”
Content material quotas had been an election promise for Labor, alongside its dedication to the brand new cultural coverage. On the unveiling of Revive in February 2023, Burke dedicated the federal government to introducing laws by the second half of 2024.
However as 2024 winds to an in depth, the content material quota is nowhere to be seen. No laws has been launched, and business and customers are none the wiser on what new content material guidelines may seem like.
Quotas work by imposing a regulation on the quantity of native content material required from a platform or broadcaster. For many years, strong native content material guidelines meant greater than 50% of prime-time Australian tv needed to be regionally made. Since quotas for Australian kids’s content material had been eliminated beneath the Morrison authorities, regionally made kids’s tv has dwindled.
As a result of they weren’t broadcasters, the streaming platforms have by no means confronted native content material guidelines, they usually’re not eager on any new regulatory impost. The large platforms have pursued a lower than discrete lobbying marketing campaign in Canberra towards them.
The native display screen sector is beginning to ask whether or not content material quotas are coming in any respect. It’s doubtlessly a giant deal, as quotas would offer a coverage underpinning additional enlargement in native manufacturing.
Display screen Producers Australia’s Matthew Deaner is asking: what’s the hold-up?
“Regulating these digital platforms which have upended our business is lengthy overdue now, as that’s completely the place audiences have moved to,” he wrote in an electronic mail to Crikey. “For the sake of Australian audiences with the ability to proceed to see and expertise their very own display screen tradition, it’s vital that this deadlock is handled expediently and that delaying ways are concluded.”
Rumours from Canberra counsel the laws is certainly being delayed, as Burke has encountered difficulties inside cupboard. One supply informed Crikey that the commerce division had intervened to dam display screen quotas, involved concerning the implications for Australia’s free-trade settlement with america. Commerce Minister Don Farrell’s workplace declined to touch upon the report.
The opposition and the Greens are additionally asking questions.
Shadow arts minister Paul Fletcher calls the federal government’s quota deadlock a “confused mess”. He factors out that the federal government ought to have anticipated there can be issues imposing a quota that might work alongside the free-trade settlement.
“Why, after being in authorities for greater than two years, has the Albanese Labor authorities nonetheless not finalised and launched laws to present impact to this coverage?” he requested.
Fletcher had a plan to herald a voluntary 5% quota earlier than leaving workplace; in distinction, Labor hasn’t delivered something but.
The Greens spokesperson for tradition, Sarah Hanson-Younger, blames lobbying from the American platforms.
“The large digital giants like Netflix and Amazon have been busy undermining the necessity for regulation of native tales on our screens,” she informed Crikey. “These massive US firms have bullied and bluffed for months, and now we hear the Labor authorities is simply too scared to push forward with the reforms promised.”
The Greens again a 20% native content material quota, and would presumably vote for a invoice if it had been offered, however the dangerous blood between the Greens and Labor on housing laws.
With Burke as arts minister, Labor’s monitor report in cultural coverage has been progressive. The Albanese authorities has delivered elevated cultural funding for artists and cultural establishments, restored funding for digital video games, and elevated the Location Offset from 16.5% to 30%.
However quotas are a keystone cultural coverage reform. Take Spotify, the Swedish audio streaming big. Business estimates put Spotify’s market share of audio streaming in Australia at round 70% — a close to monopoly. There are not any necessities for Spotify with regards to streaming Australian music or podcasts to native audiences.
A spokesperson for the Division of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Growth, Communications and the Arts informed Crikey that quotas are nonetheless on the agenda — however that they’re now ready on promised media reforms.
“The federal government is working to introduce content material quota laws as quickly as attainable,” the spokesperson informed Crikey. “We’re decided to get the session proper and are taking time to listen to views on how greatest to help ongoing funding in, and manufacturing of, Australian tales. The necessities will probably be applied as a part of the federal government’s broader reforms to media laws.”
If quotas actually are being packaged up with media reforms, the trail to laws could possibly be difficult. The federal government faces tough technical points with its quest to impose an age restrict on social media use. There’s additionally the vexing drawback of what to do concerning the now-moribund Information Media Bargaining Code, with a Labor-chaired parliamentary committee not too long ago recommending a digital platforms levy (you’ll be able to think about how the platforms will react to that). And not using a invoice earlier than the Parliament, a swathe of coverage and regulatory particulars stay unclear.
All of this means that native content material quotas are an issue for 2025. With a federal election due within the first half of subsequent 12 months, it’s trying much less and fewer doubtless Burke will get native content material guidelines legislated on this time period of presidency.
Would you help native content material quotas that get extra Australian content material on our screens? Tell us your ideas by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please embrace your full identify to be thought of for publication. We reserve the fitting to edit for size and readability.
