Global streaming services have transformed the way the world not only consumes but produces film and television. In Australia, 78 percent of households subscribe to at least one streaming service and we spend around $2 billion a year on those subscriptions, and yet the average amount of Australian content on those streaming services is less than two percent and in some cases, zero.

Is that because Australia is not capable of making high-quality film and TV for domestic consumption? No. Australian film and TV rates extraordinarily well domestically. In fact it’s not just Australians that like our stories, our cultural product is highly exportable with almost half of Australia’s production companies generating export revenue, compared with the Australian average of only 7.6 percent.

content quotas

Image credit: Future

That’s a figure that could be a lot higher with investment from streamers and the right policy framework from government. The Koreans are exporting their film, television and music, the Nordic countries successfully export Scandi-noir; it is well within the capacity of the 12th-wealthiest nation in the world to export what others call our ‘blue-sky drama’, ‘desert noir’, a genre all of our own,...