Network Insight Institute

Discussion - session 2

Discussion - Session 2

Ian Robertson, Holding Redlich: I'm a lawyer, but I am here today in my capacity as a member of the ABA. I would like to raise the issue that Joanne touched on, which is about quality and price. We are obviously very interested in this, and in whether other participants think that the point that has been made about price and quality being synonymous is correct. If the ABA was going to try to give some points advantage, say, to higher quality adult drama, how should we measure that? Is it licence fees? Is it budgets? Is it how many episodes are made per week? Is it whether it is shot on film or tape? Or is it something else?

I also wanted to ask Joanne a specific question, because one aspect of her comments surprised me. I can see why SPAA would want to increase licence fees as a general proposition, but I would have thought there needs to be caution in attacking quality in Australia. I would have thought that if Australian producers can brag about anything, it is the quality of what is produced here, which I think is, and remains, completely first class.

Joanne Yates, SPAA: I have two comments to make in response to that. The first one is I didn't mean to attack quality. What I meant to say was that we need somehow to measure quality in however we reward and value what we produce and broadcast for Australian audiences. Our submission includes a proposal designed to more adequately reflect on those issues. It involves keeping the points' system in place, but extending it and looking at budgets as a way of trying to increase the higher end productions, giving incentives for networks to look at higher end production, including telemovies, mini-series and so forth, that has been in decline in recent years.

I will also pick up on a point that Catriona Hughes made this morning, which was how to get the networks to invest more in feature productions. SPAA would see that the higher the level of investment in a particular production, the higher the likely quality of that production, by its very nature. That is not to say that you can't produce high quality programs for a lesser budget, but it has tended not to be that way.

Mark Armstrong: You were talking about incentives. Can you think of any incentives, apart from complying with a rule that is made? In the ideal world within this limited sphere, there would be an incentive for a network, where they could get some more money or a credit or recognition of some kind for going the extra mile. Is complying with the standard the only kind of incentive that SPAA has talked about? Another approach, as was done with the television production fund, is to give back some of the money that television networks pay in broadcasting licence fees. That was regarded as a big bonus, or a big favour from government. The licence fee money is an extra tax imposed on television. I think that the people who need to justify themselves are those in government who are taking the money away from the engines of growth such as audiovisual production, then spending it on economically unjustifiable rural roads and other examples we could enumerate.

Bridget Godwin, Seven Network: I wanted to address this issue about the nexus between cost and quality. Speaking from the point of view of a network which has traditionally employed what could be considered to be very efficient production techniques with a great deal of success, we absolutely reject the idea that that nexus is absolute. In fact we have managed to break that nexus, and achieve consistently high quality programs regardless of whether they are produced on tape or film or any other particular financial measure. We think that quality has a lot more to do with the kind of resources that you put into programs, the quality of the script, the quality of the performances, the type of people you get to do your production and the amount of time you spend in development, than whether you put it on tape or film. I also wanted to respond to a point that Joanne Yates made about how we make the standard work towards producing more feature films. I think we need to be careful about what the standard is supposed to be achieving, which is delivering what audiences want. I'm not sure that people are able to say that audiences' desires for Australian feature film are not adequately satisfied at the moment; and I don't believe that it should be an end in itself that feature films ought to be produced in preference to other types of programming, which audiences may demand or enjoy more.

Nick Herd, Sandstar Films: Mark made part of the point that I was going to make, which goes back to the point that Joanne made about other mechanisms to encourage more money for production. Mark mentioned the commercial television production fund and suggested that there was a linkage between the money from that and the money that the networks pay in licence fees. One of the reasons that the government found it so easy to end the fund when it did is because there was no linkage between the money paid in broadcast licence fees and the money that the government allocated to the commercial television production fund. We have to raise this issue again, because Australia is one of the few countries in which there is no linkage between the money which government takes from broadcasters in the form of payments for access to spectrum or whatever, and the money that goes back into funding production and other cultural forms of production. We are talking here about something like $200-220 million per year which the government takes out of the commercial television industry in licence fees. Some of that is returned in the rebate to regional television for the introduction of digital, but there is something in the order of $150 million a year leaving the industry and not coming back anywhere near the industry for funding production. That issue needs to be addressed again and taken up again with government.

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