Public Comment on 'SCREEN AUSTRALIA BILL'

Josko Petkovic, former Aspera president, made the following public comment on the federal government's proposed Screen Australia Bill, which is designed to combine the FFC, Film Australia and the Australian Film Commission in the one organisation.

The Hon Peter Garrett AM MP
Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts,
and

Mr Peter Young
Assistant Secretary
Film and Creative Industries Branch
Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts

Dear Minister

RE: Public Comment on 'SCREEN AUSTRALIA BILL'

It is most unfortunate that this piece of legislations is being considered without any previous reference to the peak body of all (19) Australian film schools namely to the Australian Screen Production Education and Research Association (ASPERA).

It is also a great pity that no structural articulation has been established in this legislation between the proposed new body 'Screen Australia' and the research programmes in the ASPERA sector.

Australia has for too long relied on a small group of heroic individuals and artists to sustain its film industry. Little will change with the proposed 'Screen Australia' legislation and yet the world in which this body will operate has greatly changed. The economic potential of the new media products and the competition that this potential inspires has created an industry that requires an ever-higher level of knowledge, research, conceptual and technological sophistication. The audiovisual industry that once required a mere undergraduate ³craft² has now become a most contested area of research and development, manifested in ever-more spectacular concepts and CGI effects that we now see in almost every feature film. To train industry professionals in this area can no longer be merely provided by an undergraduate tertiary programme alone.

Many of us that train emerging image-makers take it as self-evident that to participate in the global-image making industry is as demanding and complicated as any other complex industry. We also take it as self-evident that to train a successful screen industry professional requires continuous training from undergraduate programmes to postgraduate research and then to post-doctoral practice. In days ahead, we expect that the best and most innovative practitioners will be found in the postgraduate and post-doctoral sections of academia - as is the case with other complex industries. The proposed Screen Australia body will not be able to replicate this type of cutting edge development and will thus always remain disadvantaged in a global context.

The real tragedy of the Australian film industry is the catch 22 situation that the best and the brightest postgraduate image-makers find themselves in at the moment. ASPERA sector postgraduates are unable to get funds from federal and state film and arts funding bodies because they are considered as researchers. In turn, the Australian Research Council do not fund ASPERA researchers because they consider them as filmmakers and artists. Nothing about the new legislation will change this archaic and destructive bureaucratic impasse.

According I would urge you to ensure that the proposed 'Screen Australia', is structurally linked with the ASPERA research sector as a strict condition of its funding and with the funding of this R&D tertiary sector as its primary funding priority.

Another way of creating this type of industry-research linkage is for the Australian Government, in cooperation with ASPERA, to designate and fund all film schools in Australian universities, as national key creative industry centers, in recognition of and as a means to rectifying the long-term damage caused by the existing, exclusionary policies of federally administered arts and film funding agencies and the Australian Research Council.

Unless this type of industry-research articulation is built into the legislation we will condemn our film industry to a wasteful cottage status. Nothing much will change from the existing practices as in essence the new body will be a body without a head.

Yours Sincerely,

Dr Josko Petkovic
Member, ASPERA Advisory Council
Director, National Academy of Screen and Sound (NASS)
Research Centre
Faculty of Creative Technologies and Media
Murdoch University
South Street, Murdoch, W.A., 6150
Phone + 61 8 9360 2548
Fax. + 61 8 9360 6570
E-mail J.Petkovic@murdoch.edu.au
http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/nass/