This article is part of Greenlight — The Latch’s commitment to the Australian film industry. For more content in this series, click here.
Get ready for a movie where Winnie the Pooh eats five tubs of Vegemite, for content quotas are coming to our streaming services. Yup, the Australian Government is mandating it so the likes of Netflix and Disney + will have to make a certain amount of Australian content for their Aussie audiences.
Details for this scheme are still on the thin side, but the Australian film and television sector has previously argued that 20% of a streaming services revenue should be reinvested into making us some local content. It’s also expected that this programme will be up and kicking by July of next year.
When discussing this proposal, our Minister for the Arts, Tony Burke, has been talking with enthusiasm and energy. Moreover, he’s bet a lot of chips on this working.
As Burke said, “For nearly a decade, our streaming services in Australia have had zero requirements to provide Australian content… The days of there being no guarantee of Australian content on streaming services have to come to an end, and they come to an end on July 1 next year.”
“We’re going to be spending the first half of this year locking down the consultation to work out exactly how the quotas will work, exactly how they’ll apply, and what sub-quotas there’ll be. And then we’ll spend the second half of the year with legislation in the parliament.”
Burke finished this explanation by saying, “We are not willing to compromise on the timeline.”
Many people in the film and television sector have stated that they’d support such Australian content legislation. This includes Matthew Deaner, the CEO of Screen Producers Australia.
As Deaner said, “It’s not a big ask of a business that is mostly creating content in other markets and earning billions of dollars in our market to contribute a portion of that earning back into creating content that’s localised and is still its own investment for itself.”
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