International benchmarks and the broadcast license fee
In this guest post, Brett Savill, the CEO at FreeTV, responds to Tim Burrowes’ article of yesterday about the government’s $40m sweetener to Australian TV networks.
We appreciate your bringing attention to the issue of TV license fees if only to point out a number of errors in your article.
The first is that license fee reduction was something the government wanted to hide. In fact, license fee reduction was extensively flagged in the May 16 Budget. Moreover, it was passed with bipartisan support.
Throughout the western world, countries are realising that the old way of licensing broadcasters no longer makes sense. Australia has been slow to respond, and you quote Mr. Stokes’ comments last week about our current fees being 15 times higher than the UK and over 100 times higher than the USA. The 25% reduction had bipartisan support because Australia is out of line with international benchmarks.
Maybe now Screen Australia won’t have to continue subsidizing commercial network’s Australian content programming and instead direct its funding towards independent Australian film financing. No?
Perhaps now Screen Australia can cease subsidizing the network’s Australian content obligations and programming and direct taxpayers funds to independent Australian films. Probably not. No media influence in that eh?
It would still appear, regardless of the drop in revenue, the networks still “have a license to print money”.