SPEECH - THE AUSTRALIAN CONTENT SHOWCASE - PARLIAMENT HOUSE - TUESDAY, 11 AUGUST 2026

SUBJECTS: Australian television, streaming platforms, streaming quotas

MINISTER FOR THE ARTS, TONY BURKE: Thanks so much, Nina, and thank you all of you for settling for me.

First of all, to Serena, there is no word more generous than welcome. You don't have to give it, and you do. You welcome us so beautifully, and I want you to know from all of us, that the generosity that you are offering is absolutely offered back from each and every one of us. Thank you for the way you do it.

To my shadow Minister, Angie Bell, the Shadow from the Greens, Sarah Hanson-Young, very importantly very to the Arts Envoy, Susan Templeman, to Deirdre Brennan from Screen Australia, and to each and every one of you, welcome to the set of Total Control.

Nina, you actually touched really closely on what had been my dream. I was lied to by my careers advisor. True story. I asked if I could be a theatre director, and the careers advisor told me there were no courses. I then, as Arts Minister in 2013, attended a graduation at NIDA. I asked them, I said, ‘oh, when did you start with the director's course?’ They said, ‘oh, we've always had it’. So, I am here both in admiration and envy of each and every one of you.

I'm here tonight because the work you do matters. The work you do really matters. We will never understand. We can visit a film set and get the concept of how collaborative it is. I get what Nina said about all the different trades and everything that are involved, of the complexity of bringing everything together and the concept that the creatives who we see on the screen are not the only creatives who are bringing the whole thing together. But I want you to know that part of your world, for us, we know it from how it feels in our lounge room. Can I tell you how it feels in our lounge room matters fundamentally and changes what it is to be Australian.

You make sure that whether it's stories that we first heard through Australian novels, that then find their way onto screen, whether it's stories that we know through reading the crime pages of the papers that have ended up creating some extraordinary stories that you brought forward – my portfolio, half of it is the arts creation and the other half, the Home Affairs part, is sort of endless material for you. There have been some shows where I've watched and I thought, how did they know that?

But for all of us, what you then do is you make sure that we see that our stories. That we see stories in locations that we know. That we see stories among people where we recognise bits of their story and other people who are part of our community who we might not know terribly well, and we learn about them even before we've met them because you've made sure that we know them. But we don't know them in some sort of clinical, here's the Wikipedia page way, we know them because you let us know how other Australians feel. Because you make sure we ride the rollercoaster of emotion and excitement with them. That matters. That is absolutely fundamental nation-building.

For a long time streaming services have been doing a fantastic job on that. For a long time there's been stories where this new method means we don't have to match whether or not the cinema times are necessarily going to be there when it's available, or where it's just not what we want to see at that moment and then later on we know exactly what we want to see and it remains available for us in the moment that we are ready and need to see it.

Very few of us would start a movie that was nine hours long. And yet when we stream, we get to episode one, then we get to episode two and then we binge the rest and then you’ve got us. You are bringing complexities of storylines that once were not available to stream, are now available on those platforms. That's why it was so important for us to get those streaming quotas in. I know for different aspects of industry, we had to work back and forth, and every business in the world prefers less regulation to more, and I get that. Maybe if what you've been producing hadn't been so good, we wouldn't have been so determined to make sure that we got more of it and made sure that we kept it going.

But all of that is because the Parliament of Australia made a decision that what you were doing was too important for us to ever let go of, and we wanted to make sure that you were continuing forever. As new platforms and new competitors started to build more viewers, and from the time we passed that legislation to now, there are more platforms that have hit the threshold effectively. Why? Because you're getting more subscriptions because of the value of your product. Now we have a guarantee that as you grow, Australian stories grow with you. That means as an individual, we get the validation of seeing ourselves. We get that nation-building part of learning about other parts of our country and other people within our country who we otherwise might never have known.

Finally, we get that added bonus of the nature of the international way that your platforms operate, that the world gets to see us. They, for a long time, have seen people who come from here tell their stories. But now they also get a window into our stories and understand Australia not simply as some travel destination, and depending on the story, maybe a destination- there'd be some parts of the country, in particular noir versions, that you would never want to visit. Although I love Tasmania. But effectively, you make sure we know ourselves, we know each other, and the world knows us. That matters. It's really important. It's why this building before tonight had already decided that we wanted to commit to this being part of what you always do, why we believe in what you do, and why we’re so glad that you’re here.

Please know, in this particular art form, you don’t get to hear the audience applaud. We are applauding, we are applauding loudly, and there is standing ovation after standing ovation for the work that you do. Thank you for what you do.

ENDS