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Sharon Connolly

Sharon Connolly, CEO, Film Australia

Consider this list: RPA, Year of the Dogs, Our Century, Railway Adventures across Australia, Rats in the Ranks, Bush Mechanics, In the Shadow of the Shark, Facing the Music, Quentin, Mabo, The Human Journey and Cunnamulla. These are just a few of the series and one-off documentaries that have captured audiences, ratings, attention, awards and profile in the last few years. I doubt that there are many people who could question that those programs have left their mark.

In addition to those achievements, I think that there are other indicators of documentaries' reach. One of the things we have been persistently told by surveys over the years is that Australian documentary is one of the categories of programming that Australian audiences say they want to see more of. The fact that government continues to pour public money into the production of documentaries indicates that they have some sensitivity to the number of people who believe that documentary production is important, and presumably want to see those documentaries.

In spite of the ratings, audiences, profile, awards, subsidy, and so on, the networks over the years have continued to argue, as they do in the FACTS submission, that there is no demonstrated evidence of demand for what they call 'traditional documentary'. Just from that opening list, I conclude that there is. But one of the difficulties which documentary faces is the absence of much data to support the case that there is a demand for documentary. One of the difficulties for those of us who have made submissions to this review about documentary, is that we have had some trouble in getting reliable data on the networks' expenditure on documentary programming. On 31 January 2002, the ABA contacted many of us to say that the figures published in the discussion paper were not necessarily accurate according to the networks; and the networks were having another go at putting some figures together. I understand that these are yet to be released [since the workshop, these have been made available at: http://www. aba.gov.au/tv/content/ozcont/review_2001/pdfs/doco_exp2.pdf].

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