Transcript - Radio Interview - RTR FM 92.1 - Tuesday, 2 October

TOM REYNOLDS, HOST: It's estimated that the Australian art sector contributes more than $112 billion to the national economy, and it has been severely impacted by COVID 19, with hundreds of events cancelled or scaled down and tens of thousands of people losing income. In the midst of this crisis, the federal parliament has just tabled a report on the arts industry, outlining ideas on what Australian governments can do to better support the arts industry. Receiving 5000 submissions, the report was published last month with bipartisan support and has been broadly welcomed by industry groups. Joining me now to unpack the report is co-author and representative for the seat of Perth, Patrick Gorman. Good morning, Patrick.

PATRICK GORMAN, SHADOW ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR WESTERN AUSTRALIA: Good morning Tom, and good morning to your listeners.

REYNOLDS: Thanks for taking the time to join us. Now let's jump in and have a discussion about the Sculpting a National Cultural Policy. That's the title of the report, what is a national cultural policy?

GORMAN: What we recommended in this report, which took in, as you said, we had a huge survey of about 3000 responses, we had 352 formal written submissions. What was really clear through all of that was that there wasn't enough coordination across Australia, making sure that all of the things that we try and do to support the arts, which, as you mentioned, is a huge part of our economy, more than $100 billion a year, but it's not all linked together, and there's not an overarching goal of where we want to go as a country, so by having a national cultural plan that could be developed in partnership with the state, local government, the arts community, we see that that's how we kind of get Australia even further along in terms of aspirations for making sure that we have world-class writers, you know, a film industry and television industry that really puts out amazing content to the world, making sure that we support our musicians. Doing all of those things requires that we do all that boring, behind the scenes, bureaucratic work of collecting it all together. That's what a national cultural plan is about.

REYNOLDS: Okay, so are there other countries which have similar plans in place? Are there other places we can look to that have done similar ideas and done it well?

GORMAN: Well, there are. And what you see in a number of other countries is that they have standalone or title-name departments for the arts and culture. That's something that we also recommended, was that there was a need to elevate the arts back up to being a title priority of the department within which it sits, and one of the really, really interesting submissions and hearings that we had was that we had a conversation with the Swedish ambassador, who talked to us about how they had prioritized song-writing as part of their national cultural plan. Saying, well, could we prioritize song-writing? That will flow through into a whole range of other benefits in terms of showing how we value the arts. And that's been incredibly successful for them. I'm sure your listeners would know the number of Swedish producers and songwriters who are behind many of the songs that we hear on a day to day basis. So, yeah, there are examples of this being successful. And what was clear was just that lack, those gaps in coordination where we want to do those big ideas. Like some of the big ideas we've put in this report, they're going to need to have that as part of a more systems based approach.

REYNOLDS: Now there were a total of 21 suggestions in the report. I wanted to look at a couple of the other ideas and a little bit more detail. One, in particular, was around quotas. Now, as we know, television and radio stations are required to meet local content quotas. But streaming services don't. Can you tell me about the delightfully named over-the-top service providers, what are they and how do they relate to content quotas?

GORMAN: The over-the-top service providers! Definitely a term that I hadn't heard until we started this inquiry and probably one that I wouldn't use in day to day conversation with my mates. But that's basically the streaming services. The Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime's of the world, who are coming through our telephone lines and our internet services into people's homes, and as you said, they aren't required to do the same local content obligations that the television radio stations are. Now, those local content

obligations have been incredibly successful for Australia. It's given us some of Australia's best content, our best stories, and our best music. So what we said was, well, I don't think it's reasonable. I think for a lot of people, it's not reasonable that when you're paying $10 a month to Netflix, that every single cent of that goes to producing content overseas. We want to see, you know, two out of those $10, 20% stake here in Australia to make Australian drama, documentaries, I'm a fan of horror films, so maybe even a few Australian made horror films, and children's content as well. So that's the idea. And that means we don't get caught up in this 'Do they pay enough tax? Don't they pay enough tax?' We're talking about pre-tax dollars. We're talking about the amount they take from the customer, their total revenue. Let's put 20% of that into producing Australian content. And that will just be fabulous for Australian artists, telling their stories and getting their story onto those international platforms. That means that they'll find audiences that they never knew existed.

REYNOLDS: Now, on that point, around the 20% quota, the EU has put a 30% quota. Why are ours so low and why do they keep getting pushed down? We know television quotas have been reduced, and it seems every few years that they're nibbled away a little bit.

GORMAN: Yeah, there's a real, nibbled away is absolutely right, here's a real cannibalism in terms of what's happening in the media space at the moment, with the, you know, traditional television broadcast networks are competing in a world where they have requirements on them that their major competitors and streaming services don't. So in trying to level the playing field, the committee members thought that 20% was the appropriate way to do that, and this would result in a huge, hundreds of millions of dollars in investment in local content. It also meant that all of the streaming services are on the same level platform, some do better on Australian-produced content than others, but to me, they all have to do better than they currently are. And what we also want to do is

make sure that basically wherever you are in that environment, you have an obligation to support Australian content and to basically buy local. Australians love seeing our stories on TV. We've got great examples of, some of the Australian-made content by some of those streaming or non-broadcast ones like Foxtel. The Secret City, which was an incredibly successful Australian production, based on a fabulous series of books. There's a lot of content out there, and it's really, if we get it right, will mean that authors have more places to sell their content as well, because it might have a chance of being turned into television or streaming content. Musicians will have more chances to provide backing tracks, backing music or original songs into those shows, it all kind of builds on itself. And we also thought that this was doable. I think the government could do this in terms of 20%. It's not an unreasonable burden, it's actually quite a reasonable request of the streaming services.

REYNOLDS: Now, I did just want to touch briefly on the games industry as well. I know a couple of universities in Perth specialize in games or associated technologies. Until Untitled Goose Game propelled the Australian games industry into the limelight about a year ago, most people probably weren't aware that we even had a games industry. Can you tell us a little bit about the Digital Games Tax Offset? What is that and why was it important enough to be referred to in the report?

GORMAN: It's a new initiative with the government, and what we wanted to note was that this is something that is available to people who are looking at expanding investment into the gaming industry. It's really about encouraging that investment. And I'm a opposition member, I'm with the Labor Party, I've been quite critical of the government and how they've handled a range of things, including how they handled JobKeeper and how it excluded many artists, and how they treated the arts industry over the last few years. But I do believe it's important that where something is working well, that you also point that out. So it was important to put that in the report today, making sure that we have those sort of tax offsets to support the industry. That fledgling game industry that is, you say, bigger than any of us probably imagined. But there's so much more potential there, making sure that we point out that as well. And we also talked about making sure that the new Patent Box tax regime, which was introduced in the budget recently, is available to the gaming industry to make sure that again, we don't have some parts of the tech sector able to access certain tax offsets, and other parts of the tech sector, the gaming sector not able to access them.

REYNOLDS: And we are coming up to the end of our time together. But before you go, I did want to ask, out of those 21 suggestions, was there anything that you were particularly excited by or anything that you would especially love to see come to fruition?

GORMAN: I guess the other piece that we haven't spoken about is the re-emphasizing of the importance of the arts in our education system. You know, like many of your listeners, I've got fond memories of my music teachers. Rowan Smith, my music teacher in high school, was a brilliant teacher and really passionate about sharing and teaching music, a really great guy. And I want to make sure that we're supporting those teachers and the people who teach art. So there's a few things we recommended. One was making art part of the core curriculum. Sort of a new stream of arts as core curriculum, into the national curriculum process. Building in some more support for students who are doing music rather than sport. Currently through my office, we have the Local Sporting Champions program, which is a program that runs across Australia, supporting students who might be competing in a national or international competition to fund them to get to those competitions. We don't have anything equivalent for the arts students, to make sure we have a funding mechanism there and also recommending some financial assistance programs for students from low income, low socioeconomic backgrounds, that they can afford to get the instruments that allow them to reach their potential. So I think that we get that piece run our education system across the country, that is also how we ensure the next generation of artists and the amazing content that they create is there for all to enjoy.

REYNOLDS: I think that's a great point to leave things on. Now, Patrick, for anyone listening who wants to find out more about some of the really great ideas in that report, is there a particular place they can go online and read it for themselves?

GORMAN: Yeah, whack into Google, or whichever your favourite browser technology is, and type in Communications and the Arts Committee Report, and you will find it on its website. You can read it, all 300 or so pages. And if you've got any questions or further ideas, please get in touch with my office.

REYNOLDS: Wonderful. Thank you very much for your time this morning.

GORMAN: Thank you, Tom.

REYNOLDS: And that was Patrick Gorman, Labor member for the electorate of Perth.