Dear CB,

It's happened. After eleven and a half years we have a change of government in Canberra!
I could have written a thought piece for you outlining how SPAA will respond to the new challenge but our industry colleague at Screenhub - David Tiley, has covered it all in fine style in this article from yesterday's edition.
With Screenhub's kind permission we re-print the article here for SPAA members.

Regards

Geoff Brown
Executive Director



The Election: what's next? Is that a honey jar? An angry bear in the way?

by: David Tiley
Screen Hub
Monday 26 November, 2007

With the tears and cheers over, the screen industry wakes to the reality of a new government, and a rejigged agenda with some new possibilities. For both the screen and IT sectors, it is a matter of new weapons, and new battlegrounds.
By Monday morning, SPAA was plotting its new direction. Elsewhere, the broadband activists had the emails out to call for a radical rethink in digital policy.
As SPAA's Geoff Brown said, "I'm glad we rang Peter Garrett's office on Friday to wish him well." He has indicated to Rudd that SPAA would like to keep him, to provide continuity. The big ticket television issues belonged to Stephen Conroy, the political tough who hounded the ABC and SBS relentlessly in the Senate Budget Committee, as we reported in detail.
Conroy certainly has the stature, and communications is a defining policy zone for the ALP. Rudd is expected to announce the full lineup by Thursday.
The Writers' Guild is also wondering about the new ministry, though it is expecting, in Stephen Asher's words, "a far more engaged and interested arts minister." Both the AWG and the DGA has a good relationship with Peter Garrett, though he could end up with the environment portfolio divided off from arts. If so, Bob Debus is a possible minister, who has impressed the AWG when he held that portfolio in the NSW state government. [editor: but.. but.. NSW FTO, pots of money, lack of..]
Since the producers' offset received bipartisan support, the industry expects the legislation to roll through parliament. But SPAA will agitate about some technical changes - particularly to allow the offset to be acquitted in the year in which the budget items were expended, as in the UK system. It will have to be paid on a provisional basis, whch would make the initial certification more significant and add a nightmare edge to final acquittal.
As expected, SPAA will be pushing to get the ALP to honour its promises about the ABC as a first term objective; although the party never committed to increasing the budget significantly, the new legislation will require an extra fifty million to implement. There are similar issues about SBS, with the added frisson of ALP hostility to advertising.
SPAA also expects to revisit the Free Trade Agreement with the US, a treaty which the ALP detested at the time. There may be enough wiggle room to get some content regulations on digital FTA channels. Even within the current limits, the government can ensure that Pay TV is committed to maximum amount of regulated Australian content.
All this is business as usual for the industry's activists. But there is a rabbit waiting in the hat with a most enticing pair of ears, and Brown has dusted off his magician's hat and cane.
ACMA, the communications regulator, is trapped inside Senator Helen Coonan's determination to deregulate. That hard-line philosophical commitment is bound to change. SPAA wants to see ACMA given the power to determine quotas for independent production with the broadcasters, and to arbitrate on terms of trade.
Here, it would resemble Ofcom, the British regulator, where a similar system is credited with empowering UK companies to sell formats and programs to all the major broadcasters, as a platform to create independent markets.
Although this has been SPAA policy for the last three years, it has been politically impossible until now.
Paul Budde, the indefatigable broadband analyst and campaigner is optimistic about the FttN (fibre to the node) plan from Labor, which he claims involves "some $5 billion worth of direct or indirect government spending". The sector will hit the new government in the next month with a new industry vision formulated in the last month before the election. It will include "ideas and suggestions for an infrastructure that supports e-health applications (video monitoring of patients, elderly people, remote diagnostics); smart grid (linking the electricity network to broadband, allowing utilities and their customers to save energy); and tele-education - as well as e-entertainment, of course. But if Telstra doesn't co-operate, he fears as knock-down drag-out fight through the courts which could take three years.
Meanwhile, Marty Gauvin, the CEO of Hostworks, an important supplier of IT and systems services to business, has circulated an email which is critically important to the screen sector. He points out that FttN improvements will only clog the system further and the real issue occurs between exchanges. Without sufficient bandwidth, we will have gridlock.
For general domestic users, the problem will gradually slow the system down. We already have the most websites per person in the world, but that will continue to translate into "most frustrated users per capita" in the world.
Enterprises which own dedicated bandwidth, which includes our major post-production businesses, are safe - but only for the moment. Try and buy a ten gig link in the market, and you are likely to find it is simply not there to trade.
For digital experts like John Harris, from Impress Media, this means we can't become "a net data exporter". The data he is talking about is the programs we make, downloaded as video or run ultimately as IPTV.
As far as Gauvin is concerned, this means we can't "really begin to engage in the global online economy."
"The new government has an opportunity here to demonstrate real leadership. While the bulk of what online consumers want is overseas, Australia will continue to be diminished in its ability to have a content industry based here."

UPDATE: we have heard a completely unsubstantiated and dark rumour that the ALP is very unhappy with DCITA. Its new masters may subject it to a great deal of bureaucratic stress, which it may not survive.

David Tiley

David Tiley is the editor of Screenhub, and can be contacted at:
editor@screenhub.com.au. or 03 9690 6131.