“We’re all fighting to make Australian stories”

How Australian are our Australian dramas, and is there a risk of them being produced for international audiences?

Questions around Australian content, in the face of more flexible broadcaster obligations, was posed last week at Screen Forever conference.

Producer Tony Ayres, who recently made both Clickbait for Netflix and Fires for ABC, was well-placed to answer.

“I think that it’s really clear that we’re all fighting to make Australian stories. All of these platforms are, and it’s crucial for our culture, it’s also crucial to justify why we get government support. It’s not just an economic argument, it’s a cultural argument,” he said.

“We have an ecosystem. We don’t have a single way of making things or a single kind of product in our system. I think we have to, as producers, be really diligent about making sure that all of those parts of the industry… all basically feed off each other. We would not be very useful for American productions, unless we had the crews, the actor, the skill set that would make it attractive to come to this country.

“So even if you want that kind of production, you need all the other kinds of production. That’s just our recurring argument. I can’t see any other way of viewing it.”