TRANSCRIPT - Sky News Chris Smith Tonight – Labor's Claims on Children’s TV Content, Referendum, Election Review
Chris Smith: Welcome back. Well new governments do have a tendency to get into power, excitedly formulate policy and make very quick decisions without enough due diligence on the history of issues and that's what my guest is accusing the Albanese Government of doing, exhibiting an astonishing ignorance about children's television habits. In fact, the Manager of Opposition Business and Shadow Minister for the Arts, Government Services and the Digital Economy, Paul Fletcher, says the ignorance risks harming Australian families. Joining me now to discuss that and a little bit more is Paul Fletcher. Good to see you in.
Paul Fletcher: Good to be with you, Chris.
Chris Smith: All right. Talk about this. Let's start with the children's content. This week, the government claimed that a commercial television compliance report showed that there was a reduction in content broadcast for Australian children, but they just focused on commercial television and, didn't think at all about the other sources of content for children. Am I right?
Paul Fletcher: That's right. They missed the point. So this report that came out tells us the programming on 7, 9, and Ten essentially says nothing about ABC, SBS or the streaming services like Netflix, Stan and Disney Plus. We had a very careful look at this in government and we changed the rules because what we found was virtually no children were watching children's television on 7, 9, and Ten. They're watching it on ABC and on the streaming services. We did a bunch of other things. We provided an extra 20 million dollars to the Australian Children's Television Foundation, so there could be more television produced children. We also increased from 20% to 30% what's called the producer offset for Australian television that means more television production of all kinds, including children's television production. And we also said that we would legislate to give the Minister a power to set an Australian content spend requirement for the streaming services. So we had a very clear plan to deal with all of this, but we started with what's the evidence of what people are actually doing. Now we see a new Labor government in, their media release, they seem to be suggesting that it was all going to be sorted out through Mr. Burke's National Cultural Plan. Look, if they're proposing to reimpose the quota on children's television that we changed to make it a quota across three kinds of content drama, documentaries and children's television, Mr. Burke should come out and say so clearly, but it looks like they've just misunderstood how this whole system works.
Chris Smith: They’ve misunderstood it. And of course, just because you're not getting enough content out of the commercial channels if that's if that's the case or kids aren't watching commercial channels, shouldn't you put the onus back on the commercial channels to produce more content.
Paul Fletcher: Well, we know it's not a hypothetical thing. We know that very few children were watching children's television on 7, 9, and Ten. At the same time what we wanted to do was support the Australian production sector to go after opportunities for drama, for children's, other things in the Australian market, but also the global market where streaming is exploding. That's one reason why we increased the offset from 20% to 30%. It's why we provided an extra 20 million to the Australian Children's Television Foundation, an extra 30 million to Screen Australia. So unfortunately what we've seen is Labor likes nothing more than regulation prescriptive rules set by Canberra and seem to be looking at doing that in ignorance of what's actually happening and what children are actually watching. The answer is they're watching very little on the commercial stations.
Chris Smith: They need to keep their cotton picking hands off all of this now John Howard's latest book lands on Wednesday been very critical of the Morrison Government. He says Scott Morrison mishandled issues, didn’t take the right position on integrity women and has poisoned the party via the acceptance of factions. Do you firstly accept what he says as factual?
Paul Fletcher: Look, John Howard's had some pretty frank comments to offer and it is important that we recognise we had a bad defeat and we need to understand, we need to carefully examine what happened and why. We've got to be honest with ourselves. That's why Bryan Loughnane and Senator Jane Hume are leading a review. John Howard's views of course, are given respect by Liberals, many others around Australia, I do think that the Morrison Government achieved a significant amount. Let's forget we were dealing with a very challenging pandemic and the results both in public health terms and in economic terms, a few countries can match what was achieved of course you can look at achievements in the national security field such as AUKUS, very important that we're getting access to that US nuclear technology and it is pleasing I must say that the present government is proposing continue with that. That's absolutely the right thing to do.
Chris Smith: It is.
Paul Fletcher: But look, we have to have an honest conversation about what went wrong because we had a bad result. No sugar-coating.
Chris Smith: And with the success of the teals, do you think that meant that you didn't get integrity right? You didn't get women right. And maybe you didn't get climate change right? I don't know.
Paul Fletcher: Well, the clear fact is on integrity. We had a 300 plus page bill. We've done the detailed work and we stood ready to introduce it. At the moment, the Labor Party that they would provide support for it. So we had a clear position on it. Obviously, John Howard's views have to be respected and taken seriously. But to put the other side of the picture, we did have a clear plan to manage it. Nobody could say that we weren't dealing with the integrity issue. Now, there were plenty of people who had criticisms of the particular model that we had, but we've done a lot of detailed work.
Chris Smith: One quick one before I let you go. The argument over the Indigenous voice. Parliament really heated up last week and will probably heat up again. Where do you stand on it? Do we need more detail and do you agree with what I think that it's hideous to think that we cannot have a debate about this, that people are being called racist because they want more detail and they're not convinced that this should get over the line.
Paul Fletcher: Well, look, as Peter Dutton, our leader, has said, we want to engage respectfully on this important issue. But the history of referendums in Australia is very clear. You do need to give people the clear detail and it's a high bar to over to get that majority and the majority of jurisdictions, it's a high bar to get over. So it's really not a sort of it's not a political talking point. If the government is serious about getting this through, they will need to share the detail with the Australian people because the Australian people will say we need to have the detail if we are going to agree to a change to the Constitution.
Chris Smith: Thank you very much for coming in Paul Fletcher.
