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Judi Stack
Judi Stack, Chairman, FACTS
I will wrap up with the FACTS' position on this whole review. It is quite clear that we have a very strong commitment to Australian content and Australian programs. The primary reason for this commitment is that our audiences really like them. Regulation is a bit like tax regulation: no matter what you create, people will find ways of getting around it if it doesn't actually work for your business. What we have seen over the last couple of decades of Australian content standards in Australia is that, overall, we have exceeded the content requirements and regulations; we have gone beyond the bounds; we have done things that we haven't had to do. That is not true of all networks, and it has varied at different times, but is true overall. We will continue to do those things because, as Bob Donoghue said, Australian cultural resilience is fantastic. The market will respond to that cultural resilience, and I think that that is where we have to ground this whole debate at the end of the day: what audiences think about these programs and whether they will work for audiences.
Certainly the commercial and public broadcasting sectors have different roles, but the best measure for the commercial television sector is community response, which is broadly measured in audience ratings. That is how we measure ourselves; that is how people measure what they want to watch and vote with their feet; and that is how we sell those spots to advertisers, so that they can help us fund more of the programs that people want to watch.
Ultimately, our message is that the market does not require fixing. There is no failure of the market for the Australian commercial television industry, insofar as the objectives of the Act are concerned, which are to deliver cultural outcomes for the Australian people. The hours of Australian programs on commercial television have increased over the years and continuously exceeded the standard's requirements.
The objective of the Australian content standard, which Kim Dalton started the workshop off with, is principally a cultural one. Certainly, that is underpinned by a healthy independent production sector, but ultimately the reason we have market intervention at all is so that we see ourselves and understand ourselves as an Australian community on our television screens.
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