Australian documentary makers are struggling to make a living and are losing the
grip of their rights to their own intellectual property, Kingston Anderson, general
manager of Australian Directors Guild told the Australian International
Documentary Conference in Adelaide yesterday.
The comments came after Ruth Harley, Screen Australia CEO on Tuesday told the
conference as a keynote speaker, the value of documentary production was the
highest on record to date and driven by more hours of high production value series.
In Tuesday’s address, Harley said: “It’s been a great year for documentaries with 430
hours of Australian documentary projects made in 2010/11 and a total of $133
million spent on documentary production. This is above the $118 million five-year
average for documentary production.”
Anderson’s point was backed by an ADG survey which showed that the income levels
of documentary makers have declined further in the last 12 months, from 55.5% of
2011 respondents earning less than $45,000 compared to 58.6% of respondents in
2010 earning less than $60,000 per annum. This is below the average Australian
wage for August 2011 of $68,700.
The other point the survey made was directors successful in reserving their
Collecting Society Rights decreased from 30.2% to 24.2% while the number of
directors receiving residuals was down by 20%.
Anderson said: “It is great to see that the increase in production across the board has
seen the highest number of hours (of produced content) for documentary. It is great
that the Producer offset is working and that the Enterprise Companies are surviving
and growing. The picture presented by Screen Australia is an optimistic one, but it is
an optimism not shared by ADG members.”
Anderson said: “It is clear that directors have been unable to secure their position as
both owners of their work and beneficiaries of their work.”
The problem was that national broadcasters, Anderson said, without who most
documentaries could not be made courtesy of funding, have changed from
commissioning a majority of one-off individual documentary maker films and
programs to commissioning series that are most often produced by larger production
companies rather than individual filmmakers.
Anderson said: “The national broadcasters have the right to produce the content they
feel is required if they want to chase audiences and, in the case of SBS, the
commercial imperative has become part of it charter. But the losers in this new
approach are the one-off individual documentary producers who make programs
about ideas and issues that they see affecting this country and Australian audiences
now and into the future who will lose the opportunity to watch programs of this kind
of depth and relevance.”
Anderson called for legislative change to ensure that Australian directors were given
the same authorship recognition their colleagues in most other territories including
Europe, Ireland and the UK receive, where directors are given a first economic
ownership in the films that they direct.
Anderson said: “We hope to get the industry, especially Screen Australia, to support
our campaign to get these rights. It is time for directors to be recognised as the
creators of much of the content on our screens and not be treated as ‘guns for hire’.”
Encore – March 2 2012