Screen quotas welcome, but some are wary of loopholes

A bill announced on Tuesday will mandate that streamers with more than a million subscribers invest ten per cent of their total expenditure for Australia, or 7.5 per cent of their revenue, on new local drama, children's, documentary, arts and educational programs.

"We have Australian content requirements on free to air television and pay television, but until now there has been no guarantee that we could see our own stories on streaming services," said Arts Minister Tony Burke.

Lobby group Save Our Arts has warned of potential loopholes in the bill, saying Australian content must be new, clearly defined, and discoverable.

"We would also like to see as part of this legislative package algorithmic prominence addressed, so Australian content is not made, then buried," it said in a statement.

Scripted content, including genres like drama, comedy, and kids' television should also be baked into the new rules, the group said.

The quota levels to be legislated are less than the local screen industry had been campaigning for, with longstanding calls for global streamers to reinvest a minimum of 20 per cent of local revenue in Australian productions.

Still, the Australian Writers' Guild was among industry groups to welcome the bill.

 "Our members work in a volatile market where streaming platforms wield enormous power," said the guild's chief executive Claire Pullen.

"There is a growing disparity between broadcast and streaming in terms of how they give back to the community and our local industry, even as streaming comes to dominate how we watch shows and films".

Laws to set minimum spending on Australian content for streamers such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+ were promised as part of the national cultural policy in early 2023.

But global streamers resisted, while the Australia-US free trade agreement and US President Donald Trump's tariffs on overseas-produced films were also hurdles to overcome.