View From The Couch - 27/Mar/2016

Propaganda And Nothing But Propaganda

Some days you just don't know what to make of the government's views on the arts and entertainment industry. Other days, it's pretty damn clear what they want from its workers. And so today we find that the immigration department dropped $6million to make a Telemovie about what a bad idea it is to be an asylum seeker from Afghanistan or Pakistan, hoping to trek to Australia by water.

Government tender documents reveal the Department of Immigration and Border protection paid the Sydney-based Put It Out There Pictures $4.34 million to produce the movie. It paid a company called Lapis Communications a further $1.63 million for to promote and advertise it, bringing the total to $5.97 million. 

By contrast, Priscilla cost less than $2 million, Wolf Creek about $1 million and The Castle just $750,000. Even adjusted for inflation, the total budget of all three films works out at about $5.8 million in today's terms. 

Filmed across three countries, the ninety-minute drama tells the story of a small group of Afghan asylum seekers trying to get to Australia by boat. A trailer available on YouTube – which has about 1000 views – shows scenes of asylum seekers talking, arguing and crying in Afghanistan, Malaysia and Indonesia.

I guess the obvious thing about this is that this government views propaganda films as being more important than any film that gets made with government assistance through Screen Australia. When the government has a point to put across through film, it actually has a bit of financial wherewithal to make its point forcefully. 

I know it wasn't intended but there probably isn't a bigger insult to the film makers of this country than a production where the budget provided by the government is bigger than anything it would normally hand out to a local production; where the content is purely political; the funding came out of a department that has zero involvement with the arts and entertainment sector, and the production money went out to a foreign production entity. 

One would think - rather cheekily - that the department of Immigration should have been forced to go through the process every other producer has to go through to secure government funding, and tried to set up its own distribution deals overseas. 

The production also brings up some interesting issue like, who in Australia might have undertaken such a project. I'd imagine the vast majority of film makers are pinkos. Some are even heavily Regressive Left types. There would be a lot of people who would object to this project for being propaganda and for such nefarious intent. All you have to remind people is 'Leni Riefenstahl', and they would've run screaming. As such, the government would have had immense trouble getting any kind of creatives going on in Australia. It kind of illustrates just why it was made out in Afghanistan:

Put It Out There company director Trudi-Ann Tierney declined to be interviewed. However she has in the past had some interesting things to say about her own work, describing her films as "propaganda". 

The former Australian TV executive and actress moved to Kabul to manage a bar but fell into the local TV industry and found herself producing a highly popular soapie, which she wrote about in her book Making Soapies in Kabul. 

In the book she said she was ostensibly head of drama "but in truth I was nothing more than a propaganda merchant". She also says her work was part of the "psychological operations" NATO and its allies used to influence the values and behaviour of its Afghan audience in a way that supported the war effort.

It's all about the war effort boys and girls! There's always more money for that. 

Rejoice, It's Joyce Season

The interesting news is that the "vengeful micro parties" are going after Barnaby Joyce. 

The Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce is to be targeted by "far right wing" micro parties directing preferences against him in the seat of New England, according to the preference expert Glenn Druery. 

Mr Joyce holds the seat by 19.6 per cent but the micro parties revenge for being bundled out of the Senate is expected to greatly enhance independent Tony Windsor's campaign to retake New England. 

Mr Druery said on Friday the right wing micro party candidates would also direct preference against sitting Coalition members in at least 10 marginal seats.

The fun part of the news is that these are "far right wing" micro parties. These micro-parties are presumably for people to whom the current Coalition is not right wing enough. That's right, more right wing than the climate-change-denying', Coal-seam-gassin', asylum-seeker-hatin', gay-marriage-equality-resistin', Johnny-Depp-baitin', cockamamie Barnaby Joyce.

You wonder what the world has come to when a right ole rightwing nut like Barnaby can't rely on the far right wing nut vote.

A House For This Sinodinos

It's truly strange how political operators go about doing things and how money seems to swirl around the things they do.

Key Liberal fundraisers sounded out major donors to the party about chipping in to buy a house for Senator Arthur Sinodinos after the collapse of a potentially lucrative money-making venture. 

The audacious plan originated in early 2013 after Senator Sinodinos relinquished a 5 per cent stake in Australian Water Holdings, a company that later became the focus of a landmark corruption inquiry. 

Fairfax Media had earlier revealed Senator Sinodinos' shareholding in a company that employed Eddie Obeid jnr, the son of controversial Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid.
At the time Senator Sinodonis said that although his shareholding was recorded on his parliamentary pecuniary interest declaration it was not publicly registered with the corporate regulator "because it was on a gentleman's agreement".

How does that even work? Could, say, Terri Butler the current ALP shadow cabinet secretary go to the unions and ask for them to find money to buy her a house? Wouldn't Malcolm Turnbull and his ABCC bill jump up and down and point to such shenanigans as exactly how the unions and the ALP were corrupt? Isn't that what Sinodinos is being accused at this moment? This is some really weird stuff - especially because you see names like Obeid thrown in there, and we know "Obeid" can only mean "corruption" in this part of the English speaking world.

At some point they have to just 'fess up and admit that corruption is corruption is corruption.
And then there's this:

How Deep Does This Rabbit Hole Go?

Here's a doozy. The same ICAC inquiry that dug up the dirt on Sinodinos has also dug up the name of Peta Credlin. Yes, they tried to suppress that name, but it's out in the open now.

The documents were suppressed last week by the head of the Independent Commission Against Corruption after lawyers acting for Liberal Senator Arthur Sinodinos raised concerns they could be subject to parliamentary privilege. 

But the suppression order was lifted on Monday after the speaker of the House of Representatives, Bronwyn Bishop, advised the commission that no claim for privilege would be made. 

The emails reveal that, in March 2011, while the Coalition was in opposition, Ms Credlin used a major donor to the Liberal Party, Brickworks, as part of Tony Abbott's campaign against the carbon tax.

Oh doesn't that look like a bucket of writhing corrupt worms right there? Turns out Lindsay Partridge of Brickworks - who classifies as a Developer - was donating "illicit money" (The Sydney Morning Herald's words not mine BTW) to the NSW Liberals and Federal Liberal Party through back channels. The emails leave a trail of totally awful illustration of how money buys you so much access you get to put words into the mouth of a Prime Minister. 

Frankly, it's ugly and despicable that this is politics in this country, and how we in the electorate simply have to take it. All we do get is to vote for some person who may or may not get into Parliament, and may or may not represent our interests in that Parliament.It's really vague what the vote gets the ordinary citizen. 

The rich on the other hand, clearly get to dictate terms on a daily basis. 

Budget Fallout 2015

When The SMH Calls You Stupid, You Just Might Be

The Wow-Just-Wow moment arrived in the Herald this evening, and it goes like this:

You would have thought Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey had learnt their lesson – after all, it had very nearly cost them their political lives.
But no. 

The paid parental leave debacle now consuming an otherwise soft and friction-free budget, is testament to the stubbornness of ageing white men and to the durability of their ideas, even really bad ones.

When the all-male Expenditure Review Committee members huffed their scornful reproach and conspired to nail greedy mothers involved in welfare "fraud", as Hockey readily agreed it was, it eluded their lofty wisdom that (a) this was egregious nonsense (b) their policy shift contradicted a core value to which the Prime Minister - no less - was thoroughly welded, and (c) some of their own wives had taken maternity leave from their employers, and the basic federal government scheme of $11,500 over 18 weeks. Oops. 

The stupidity of Abbott and Hockey now paring back entitlements are too numerous to list, but include that right up until months ago, they had wanted to pay $75,000 for six months to wealthier mothers – non means-tested. It was Abbott's "signature" policy remember – specifically confected to fix his "women problem". How's that looking now? Hockey had been its next most enthusiastic proponent. Both had argued it was an employment entitlement akin to annual leave and thus an inalienable right. Once a bitter opponent of paid parental leave (over my dead body) Abbott became unstoppable - a born-again zealot intent on staring down colleagues after foisting it on them without consultation.

Look, there are days where I think I might be the only person banging on about just how stupid WTE Joe and Phoney Rabbit can be, but amazingly, this is not the case. The mainstream journalists picked up on this thing and are writing it. I can't recall Peter Smark ever writing Bob Hawke was stupid, or Alan Ramsay writing Paul Keating was stupid, or for that matter John Howard who might have deserved it more than Hawke or Keating.

I mean, the logic is without flaw; these guys went out and shot themselves in the foot, in broad daylight. What are we to make of this? That it's a part of a some greater cunning plan? Words escape me. And so we're here today with the spectacle of a journalist of a major newspaper in Australia calling out our Prime Minister and WTE as stupid people. And here I was thinking that day would never come!

UPDATE: It's Idiot Season, Open For The Hunt

Today it's Peter Martin starting out with "Idiot":

What kind of idiot labels mothers "rorters"? 

It's the same kind of idiot who thinks it's a good idea to draw a line in the sand between the Coalition and Labor over super. Tony Abbott told Parliament last week there would be "no changes to super, no adverse changes to super in this term of Parliament, and we have no plans to make adverse changes to super in the future".
It was remarkable coming from a government whose Treasurer only six weeks ago reached out to Labor for a "bipartisan" approach on super, saying he had measures "under very active consideration". 

Labor took him at his word, announced its own very mild position, and had the door slammed in its face. 

Everyone knows something will have to be done soon about super tax concessions. The Henry tax review said so, the Murray financial system inquiry said so, and the government's tax discussion paper as good as said so. The cost of the concessions rivals that of the pension, and it is growing more quickly. To say that isn't so, after saying it was so, is to redefine reality. 

On mothers, Abbott took to the election a proposal for six months' paid maternity leave. He picked the period of 26 weeks rather than Labor's 18 weeks "to support women to have the best chance to breastfeed and bond with their infant for the six-month period recommended by international and Australian health experts". The Coalition's policy still available on its website cites the National Health and Medical Research Council and the World Health Organisation as experts finding that the minimum recommended period of exclusive care and breastfeeding is six months. 

In the meantime, Labor's paid parental leave scheme was ensuring that some women had more than 18 weeks. That was its aim. Its explanatory memorandum said the scheme would "complement" existing entitlements, being paid "before, after, or at the same time". Never intended as a substitute for employer-provided leave, it was an add-on that would bring some women close to six months. 

The Fair Work Ombudsman puts the intention beyond doubt. "Employer-funded paid parental leave doesn't affect an employee's eligibility for the Australian government's paid parental leave scheme," it says on its website. "An employee can be paid both."
So it's hard to know what to make of the sudden quasi-criminalisation of mothers who do as the law intended to get paid leave approaching the six months that Abbott insisted was the minimum needed for breastfeeding and exclusive care. 

Labelling them "double dippers" on Mother's Day and announcing that from next year they would be denied access to the government's scheme, Joe Hockey was invited by Laurie Oakes to agree that accessing both was "basically fraud". He replied: "Well, it is.

An object lesson in how to win enemies and influence nobody. I'm glad the press is finally seeing what I saw a long time ago. All it takes is track record of contradictory statements and obvious lack of reasoning by this government to demonstrate just how stupid are these people.

They Cut Screen Australia! What Sadistic Joy It Gives Me!

I don't know how to put this nicely, but the film bureaucrats of this land give me the shits. As a class of citizens intent upon improving our lives though propagandistic (and bad) entertainment, they are all George Brandises of the movie biz without the actual "I-got-elected-you-mofos" bit going for them. They are what you might call unrepresentative swill who have spent decades keeping the pool small, the water shallow, and mostly poisonous. So oddly enough, when their budget gets cut, I have no choice but to rejoice. So hooray motherfuckers, they fucked over the other motherfuckers. Really, I hope somebody loses their fucking job. I don't know who exactly that's going to be, or how it will be broached - I don't give a flying-fuckety-fuck - I hope it's somebody whose career in film-bureaucracy is brought to a fucking miserable end.

The cuts to Screen Australia have been denounced by Screen Producers Australia, which claimed they "will seriously impact the industry", and the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, which said "the cuts will undoubtedly impact the thousands of MEAA members who rely on these arts and cultural programs for work, training and development". 

The production designer of Mad Max: Fury Road, Colin Gibson, said though the cut was almost expected, he was sure it would have an impact on the industry.
"It's not really a government we were expecting too much largesse in the way of art or beauty to be coming from anyway," he said at the movie's vehicle show at the Sydney Opera House, ahead of the Australian premiere on Wednesday. 

However, Gibson added that he was "not necessarily convinced" that Screen Australia has the best system for supporting the industry anyway.
"So let's see if we can use the agony to our advantage," he said.

Cut it all, I say. Cut the fucking lot of them and throw them in the harbour to be eaten by sharks.

News That's Fit To Punt - 09/Mar/2015

He Said WHAT!?

There are days where you simply don't have words to describe the acute surprise, the acute embarrassment, and the acute pain of having this idiot:

...as our Prime Minister. Today is one of those days.

In extraordinary comments on Monday afternoon, Mr Abbott attacked the UN and said its representatives would "have a lot more credibility if they were to give some credit to the Australian government" for stopping boat arrivals.

"I really think Australians are sick of being lectured to by the United Nations, particularly, particularly given that we have stopped the boats, and by stopping the boats, we have ended the deaths at sea," Mr Abbott said. 

"The most humanitarian, the most decent, the most compassionate thing you can do is stop these boats because hundreds, we think about 1200 in fact, drowned at sea during the flourishing of the people smuggling trade under the former government."

The un-ironic stupidity is breathtaking. The boats being "stopped" only happened because of the deterrence offered by the Manus Island detention centre being a terrible place to end up. So even the "stopping the boats" he wants credit for, rests on the fruits of what the UN would term torture. Which means he can't get credit for that.

Worse still, the asylum seekers are being sent to Manus Island because the ALP choice of Malaysia was disqualified because Malaysia wasn't a signatory to the UN convention on refugees. And thanks to Tony Abbott's own drama-queen efforts as the opposition leader, they could not be brought to Australia, and had to be sent to Manus Island as a last resort. There's nothing in this that isn't somehow Tony Abbott's own damn fault.

As Paul Keating said, "God help us all, God help us all."

The Mental Health System Is About To Break

"Big" works in Mental Health and he is always full of stories about how the system is stretched to breaking point, and then they halve the resources. Or stop replacing broken fluoro tubes in the building. Or stop fixing broken toilets. And stop cleaners' contracts. Alas, making the situation even more miserable to the outside eyes, the mental health workers are with the HSU. Yes, that same union that had that Craig Thomson guy spend fantastic plastic money on hookers and had Kathy Jackson and Michael Williamson and all kinds of characters that had the smack of corruption about them. Having ended up in court in the wake of the Craig Thomson affair (and never was the use of the word 'affair' been more accurate as double entendre), ensnared by their own bizarre politics and rorting, the HSU became the least effective representation for its union members. 

Worse still, the mental health workers have had a gag order placed upon them as a term of their employment. Not only are they sewn up with medical confidentiality, they're specifically not allowed to talk about their conditions at work to the media lest they get terminated. When you consider there aren't may private sector posts for mental health workers, you can see the New South Wales government has been gagging an entire sector of workers. 

Finally, the Sydney Morning Herald has put a slit into the curtain of silence. But they're only getting the doctors' side of the story. 

For years doctors have complained about the serious underfunding of mental health services. The reason? Most people think it's because performing more surgeries and cutting waiting times in emergency departments wins elections, while making sure someone with schizophrenia is properly supported and medicated in the community doesn't. 

Today Fairfax Media revealed that the situation is reaching crisis point. 

Doctors around the state cheered when the government, just after it was elected, allowed local health authorities more control over health services in their area. But the downside of the decision was that some areas with particularly stretched budgets have looked to mental health services to find savings. It's almost impossible to close a hospital bed without serious political ramifications, doctors say. But leaving a community health worker position unfilled? That's much easier to get away with.

All of the charts might be correct but it's only scratching the surface of the problems in funding, and worse still, it hasn't even gotten down to the day-to-day people who handle all the mentally ill people who live out in the community. There are horror stories to tell there. 

Consider this fact. When Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan were making cuts in their last budget, one of the two places to get an increase in funding was Mental Health. It hasn't been nearly enough to cover for the shortfall in funding; and WTE Joe Hockey has been trying to cut even that funding. 

Politicians are really fucking this up badly. There simply is no other interpretation. 

Screen Australia - Abnormal Business Practices

Pleiades sent in this link.

Companies associated with actor and film producer Claudia Karvan were paid $10.5 million by Screen Australia last year. Karvan is on the board of Screen Australia. 

Companies associated with fellow director Joan Peters, a media and entertainment lawyer, received just under $14.8 million in production grants, consultancy fees, travel grants and assorted transactions with Screen Australia.

Companies associated with actor and film producer Claudia Karvan were paid $10.5 million by Screen Australia last year. Karvan is on the board of Screen Australia. 

Companies associated with fellow director Joan Peters, a media and entertainment lawyer, received just under $14.8 million in production grants, consultancy fees, travel grants and assorted transactions with Screen Australia.

Companies associated with fellow director Joan Peters, a media and entertainment lawyer, received just under $14.8 Companies associated with director and film producer Rosemary Blight picked up $2.2 million in production grants and travel to the Toronto Film Festival. 

Payments of $1.5 million were made to companies associated with filmmaker Rachel Perkins and for a project in which a "close family" member of Perkins was involved.
Payments were also made to companies associated with the former chairman of Screen Australia, Glen Boreham, companies associated with deputy chair Deanne Weir and companies associated with another director, Richard Keddie. 

There is no suggestion of anything amiss. The transactions are duly recorded in the notes to Screen Australia's financial statements and the website features a conflict of interest policy. One can't help wondering though – as normal procedure on conflicts is for a director to leave the boardroom when a related party transaction is being discussed – that Screen Australia board meetings must resemble more a game of musical chairs than a traditional, boring old board meeting, as members excuse themselves. 

In two decades of digging around company accounts, this reporter has never seen anything quite like it; no less than five pages of related party transactions. 

"Screen Australia is fortunate to have an expert industry board ensuring decisions are well informed with an industry perspective. The agency adheres to a strict conflict of interest policy that ensures fairness and accountability," a spokeswoman said. 

We had stumbled on this quite by accident, in the process of researching a story on why the Australian film industry was not living up to its potential.

Are we surprised? It's a freaking rort. That it's all nepotism and paying one's spouses out of the public purse is as rife as it is, as costly as it is?

Need I say any more?

Coming Out Of Hibernation

Salman Rushdie Speaks At Opera House

It's not everyday you get to see and hear Salman Rushdie speak live, so I went along to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. I'm not so convinced these ideas at the festival are so dangerous - they seem more like ideas that would make great clickbait on Facebook, but I'm not really certain they're so damn dangerous. Mr. Rushdie was speaking to the notion whether Television was the New Novel. He spoke at great length of his experience in development hell for 18months but said "No, it's not."

The conversation could have been more interesting but the panel seemed to favour talking about the process whereby television writers are commissioned to write scripts and whether novelists were good at adapting to that challenge or not. Mr. Rushdie indicated he was surprised to find he was more resistant to it than he initially thought. Hardly earth-shattering. I could've told him that at the front end before he went into development hell.

He did say a couple of interesting things. One of them was that the bigger a TV series gets, the less likely it would end on a satisfying note. All such series should be finished with a comma and not a full stop, was his observation. The other notable tidbit was that novel writing is entirely processed internally, but script writing for television drags that process out into the open so that it can be shared with other parties. That much is true.

He also told a joke featuring two goats.

Short Film Screening

I attended the screening of a short film up at the Chauvel tonight. My good friend Guillermo managed to finish the film we shot last year. All I did was sound record it, but it was kind of gratifying to see my name in the credits. I hadn't seen that in a few years.

Anyway, the DOP and I got into a conversation with one of the producers about film funding in this country and I was surprised to find that there is a widespread belief that the funding system in this country is rigged so the same people keep getting grants, and that the better thing would be to stop the government doing direct funding and go back to a 10BA tax driven thing. Everybody's thinking it. The system is rigged, and it's part of the problem and not the solution. The belief is so widespread that nobody trusts the government to do the right thing. Now, this is just film making - not medical or legal policy. However, if the government was to screw up the medical and legal industries like they have screwed up the film industry, there would be picket lines and molotov cocktails on our streets. The fact that it doesn't happen is merely a reflection of how dejected the film industry is about how the government keeps working to make the business smaller in this country - even if it is inadvertent - and how small the business has become.

I'm just reporting this here because others in the business would want to know. And yes, it is always a bitch-fest when filmies get together.

The Schadenfreude Budget

Nothing To Delight In But Pain Of Others

This is going to be a mean budget. I was talking about it today with some people and they were saying yes, it's going to hurt but that they hope it hurts other people too. Like Liberal voters who thought voting for Tony Abbott was such a good idea. If you're a left-leaning voter, this budget promises to be a pile of misery heaped upon with fear-and-loathing sauce. The only sweetness will be the bitter-sweet Schadenfreude of seeing others suffer.

In my case, I'm hoping for a big scythe like the one carried by death to hack a swathe through Screen Australia, which may or may not according to leaked information, get rolled into one entity with the Australia Council. That would be cool to seethe perennial same people who always get the funding, go without for once. Screen Australia's a bit of a bug bear because they keep funding the same people and they keep rewriting the rules so nobody else gets a look in for funding. In other words, it's more a rort and a slush fund than a proper funding body these days so... heck Joe Hockey, cut away with impunity. I'd rather see it get the full-arse chop than a half-arsed trim. I really would enjoy those people "having to look for a job in the real world". Screw them.

On a more general scale, you ave to think that Abbott and company are going to make the kinds of cuts that the ALP could not. This would be true, particularly in health and welfare. And while the rhetoric is that this targets the weakest in our society, I think we've all seen a few cases that have made us do a double-take. If you think about it, 6million people are on some kind of Centrelink payment. Then, Julia Gillard's government added Family Tax Benefit B as a bribe to lather through the Carbon Price. It was classic 'Keep it Greasy So It Goes Down Easy'. As a single person who got nada out of that deal because I have a job - even though I'm in the "low income bracket" according to the tax office - it sure wasn't a break that was headed my way.  So, I wouldn't miss Family Tax Benefit B disappearing. heck, cut away, I say.

Be that as it may, there are plenty of things that piss me off  that are mooted in this budget. The wholesale destruction of environmental agencies and science and technology funding seems beyond the pail. I'm just hoping if the cuts hurt everybody enough they'll be motivated at the next election to vote these bums out.

Retiring At Seventy

I didn't know this until the good folks on Insiders pointed it out but 70years old is going to be oldest retirement age in the OECD nations. Most nations are topping out at 67 or 68. The average life expectancy in Australia is currently 81.85 so assuming that goes up a little bit until 2035, one would think the government is hoping to keep the lid on the retirement years at about 15.

The budget is talking about offering $10,000 incentives to hire people over 50. Right now, people over 50 are Baby Boomers. I can't imagine the government could fund such a policy forever into the future, given the logic of how little tax they could get back from such a worker, so once again we see the government trying to feather the nests of the Baby Boomers, just to get this idea over the line.

I keep trying to imagine myself at say, 65 going for a job interview to find work that will take me up to 70. I keep wondering what that job might be and whether there would be a 10k incentive to hire me then (or if that 10k would be worth anything in that future). Having spoken to a number of my fellow Gen-Xers the feeling is "fuck off, we're going for a revolution!" You get the feeling that the inter-generational conflict is going to heat up from here on in. The Treasurer sure lit a fire there.

We're Dumb Ignorant And Uncultured, But We Can Build Roads

The carrot dangled in front of Australia for all this budget pain is that the Federal Government will spend 40 billion on roads for the next 4 years. This is going to be matched by 42 billion from State governments and the private sector. 82billion over 4years is a lot of road building. And the look of smug satisfaction as they've been leaking this bit has been a bit much.

Most countries that try to stimulate their economy by general construction end up building white elephants. This is true of Asian countries and European countries. Bridges to nowhere and ghost cities of apartments with nobody living in them happen exactly because a government thinks a general construction spending spree will stimulate the economy. It would have in the 1950s but clearly in an age when GM, Ford and Toyota are closing up factories, we're entering a post-industrial phase of the economy, like it or not. If you are going to build 82 billion dollars' worth of infrastructure, are roads really where you want to put your money?

Keep in mind that this is the same luddite government that wants to dumb down and dismantle the NBN, another infrastructure project that might be more appropriate for our stage of development.

It's also 82 billion that's not going into education and training because this government wants to get out of tertiary education altogether and make it completely user-pay. It's 82billion that's not going towards building a metro in our major cities, and it's definitely not going towards an inter-city bullet train. What it is, is a decidedly backward looking commitment to build more of the same on the assumption that Australia's economic needs are going to be roughly the same as they were in the 1950s and1960s under Menzies. It's willfully stupid because clearly "more roads" is not what Australian needs more of over the other options that do not even get a look in.

And this is before we even look at the problems of petroleum as fuel for cars, and the economics of crude oil going into the future where we're spending increasingly greater amounts of money to extract the same amount of crude oil. When we cease to be able to afford the oil, we'll cease driving our petroleum-engined cars. When that happens you wonder what good these 82billion dollars' worth of roads are going to be for an economy moving away from moving things around on the back of the petrochemical industry. Nobody in government has even looked at the ramification of higher energy costs on this economy and whether it is a smart move to put all our baskets into roads in anticipation of even greater road transportation. Even with a multiplier effect, this 82billion is going to be money badly spent.

Body Without Organs Part 2

Thunderous Objections Continue

You know a document has hit some kind of mark if the people against it are lining up to make their views heard. One gets the feeling the journalists covering this document were all pretty aghast at what was being presented, straight-faced and brazen, to a greatly sceptical audience.

Peter Martin slammed it saying the underlying assumption is that the only way Australia can get back to surplus was through cuts while leaving the current tax system untouched, while it even answered questions it was not asked like drastically cutting the minimum wage.

Michael Pascoe was just as pointed describing its approach as "casual brutality". He also pointed out the notion that if the states ought to compete with one another, it would result in putting the states falling behind now in a worse position, not better; and that those states would end up having to pay more. Australia is - last we checked - still a 'commonwealth' and not a 'competition of states'.

Steve Keen was more in a demolition derby mood as he pointed out the fundamental stupidity of Australia worrying about getting back to a surplus now, given the context of the world economy. The fundamental assumptions underlying the very exercise seems to be dodgy, while the preconceptions going in were just as misguided.

I know from Pleiades that the AFR s not happy either calling it 'illogical hostility' and decidedly critical of the notion of abolishing key industry support programs. The AFR is also reporting that customers are taking action, protesting the four major banks for their support of fossil fuel investments. Some of these are major funds looking to allocate funds to companies and projects that are genuinely eco friendly. The Federal Government is flying into a storm with its contrarian position on Climate Change, and its stated desire to shut down all these green initiatives.

Basically there has been a loud chorus of boos from the press gallery, which probably doesn't mean much to the man in the high office.  But it's interesting to note some of this is spreading out to the world and will have consequences for Australia's economy. If you look at the document it appears it is not that different to the sort of position statement that might come from the US Tea Party, and it would certainly be interesting to see how this document looks when lined up with the Tea Party's position statement. After all, as Michael Pascoe points out, it appears Tony Abbott really wants to turn Australia in to a facsimile of America.

Gen-X Will Retire At 70

In amidst all the brouhaha about the Commission of Audit and its audaciously hostile report, was the gem that Joe Hockey announced that the pension eligibility will be raised to 70.

The line he drew in the sand?People born after 1965. That's pretty much saying Gen-X onwards. I was going to lambast him for being born in 1964, but it turns out he was born 1965. So if you're an old school mate of Joe's you can thank him for that gift. He'll be drawing on his generous Parliamentarian superannuation as soon as he leaves Parliament while some of his mates might never reach the age of drawing a pension. If there is such a thing as poetic injustice, it might just be in there somewhere.

If you thought demographics was crap, and that distinctions like Baby Boomers and Generation X and Generation Y and Millennials were just marketing brackets then the line in the sand drawn by the Treasurer might just give you pause. I've pointed out before that Generation-X were the first to get hit with HECS after the Baby Boomer generation went by on free Tertiary Education. It's really no mistake that the boom is falling on the queue just in front of Generation X, because the Baby Boomers are fitting up the social cost of their lives and their education and their retirement on to Generation X.

I don't know if this is going to work. 2035 is 21 years away, and there's a lot of politics to be played out between then and now. It's long enough for another generation to grow into maturity and look at all the social costs being passed on to the latter generations and tip the balance the other way. I've pointed this out before but the ALP is already coming into the next Federal election with a front bench dominated by Generation X, headed up by Bill Shorten. The script might be written, but this movie is far from shot, cut and mixed. :)

Oh, Let's Cut All of It!

One of things that got put on the table for cuts was Screen Australia. Naturally there was an outcry from the usual voices.

"Culturally it would put us back in the stone age," said John L Simpson, producer and founder of the film distribution company Titan View of the Commission of Audit's recommendation. "I thought that Australians had got over the cultural cringe, the idea that the only culture engaging with is the culture imported into this country, but that's what's going to happen. We'll be a cultural backwater if we don't invest."

"It would have a devastating effect on the Australian film industry," said film producer and director Sophie Hyde. "It's already a very underfunded industry. We do so much with the small amount that we get, but I think that would effectively decapitate it."

Robert Connolly, a filmmaker and former board member of Screen Australia described the recommendation as "catastrophic". He said that Screen Australia receives around $100m a year and has funded some of the most successful homegrown television of recent times. On 9 February, he said, "there was the INXS biopic and the Schappelle Corby one and there were almost five million Australians watching drama that Screen Australia had invested in.

You mean it would upset your gravy train perhaps?.

The people most vocal about it are the people who have received the most support from the funding bodies over their careers. Honestly I'd like to see all of it abolished just to see what would happen. I've got no love for film making in Australia any more, so I really don't care if it goes to the dogs. Heck, if I can't have it, let them not have it, is how I feel. Screw the bastards with their mouths firmly attached to the government teat and above all, screw the film bureaucrats. They can go find a job in another industry and work until they're 70.

Yeah, don't cut it in half, cut the whole damn lot.

News That's Fit To Punt - 28/Oct/2013

Foreign Misadventures

The worst aspect of Tony Abbott might not be his stupidity but his inability to represent all of Australia. You expect the Prime Minister of Australia to front for the whole nation when he speaks to foreign media, but not Tony Abbott. He can't resist the urge to put the boot in to his domestic opposition. Here's the offending bit in the Washington Post:

Labor wanted a national broadband network?

It’s a government-owned telecommunications infrastructure monopoly, which was proceeding at a scandalous rate without producing any commensurate outcomes. We are changing the objective from fiber to every premise in the country to fiber to distribution points, and then we will use the existing infrastructure to take the broadband to individual premises.

Is that cheaper and more efficient?

Vastly.

But Labor wanted to extend fiber to every household?

Welcome to the wonderful, wacko world of the former government.

So you believe the former government was doing a lot of things that were bad for the country?

I thought it was the most incompetent and untrustworthy government in modern Australian history.

Be more specific.

They made a whole lot of commitments, which they scandalously failed to honor. They did a lot of things that were scandalously wasteful and the actual conduct of government was a circus. They were untrustworthy in terms of the carbon tax. They were incompetent in terms of the national broadband network. They were a scandal when it came to their own internal disunity. They made a whole lot of grubby deals in order to try and perpetuate themselves in power.  It was an embarrassing spectacle, and I think Australians are relieved they are gone.

Where does one begin with how this interview exchange is so wrong-headed. You all know how I feel about the NBN, so it surprises me none that Tony Abbott is trying to paint the NBN as evidence of how the ALP were "wacko". No evidence, just a straight up assertion as if its some kind of self-evident thing when the opposite is clearly true. This is followed up with this sloganeering assertion that the former ALP government were somehow lying incompetents. No evidence. So when he gets pressed on the points, he makes a whole bunch of blank assertions - none of which are factual - and finishes off with another crappy assertion that I'd like to see tested at the ballot soon.

I don't know about you, but I don't think this "throw the other party under the bus at every opportunity" style of conduct really is becoming of a Prime Minister. It's the dead opposite of what he's supposed to be doing when he is representing our polity. Regardless of our differences in our nation, when he's talking representing Australia, he's supposed to have the common decency to be speaking for the whole nation. Not just for the people that voted for him.

That Tony Abbott was given to talking out of his hat was a known quotient. What was not really understood was how he would use such an interview to keep playing these domestic politics. This has surprised quite a number of people.

Norman Ornstein, an author and political scientist with the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said he ''winced'' when he read the interview in which Mr Abbott put the boot into the Rudd-Gillard government in unusually strong language for a foreign interview.

''It really does violate a basic principle of diplomacy to drag in your domestic politics when you go abroad,'' Dr Ornstein said. ''It certainly can't help in building a bond of any sort with President Obama to rip into a party, government and - at least implicitly - leader, with whom Obama has worked so closely.

''Perhaps you can chalk it up to a rookie mistake. But it is a pretty big one.''

Politicians around the world typically refrain from engaging in fierce domestic political argument when they are speaking to an overseas audience.

It's a worry he's gallavanting around the globe like this. Which reminds me of something I learnt way back when: The number one rule after a bad shoot is that you never bad mouth your own production. It might have been hell to work with so-and-so, but if you ever find yourself in front of a camera or a ape recorder, you're supposed to say, "It was great. It was fantastic working with So-and-so."

Grin and bear it for the production so that it has some shot of surviving the market place.That's the golden rule.

Tony Abbott should have grinned and beared it and said, "Hey, the NBN was an adventurous idea in its time but we're trying to be more pragmatic."  Instead he threw the ALP under the bus and made Australia look foolish. I guess you send an idiot to to do a job, you get idiotic results.

While I'm on this one, Pleiades sent me an article, presumably from Crikey which went through the ways in which Tony Abbott flubbed Australia's position with Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in Indonesia:

According to sources close to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) is less than impressed with Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. It is said this view was formed before the election, when Abbott, Bishop and now Immigration Minister Scott Morrison talked loud and long about turning around refugee boats and sending them back to Indonesia.

The rumour was confirmed when Abbott turned up late for two important gatherings at APEC where SBY was in the chair, and in case there are some who would to contest this, when the egos of heads of state are on the line the attendance at all meetings of conferences such as APEC are important.

Politicians and other public figures do not live in a vacuum; whatever is said domestically about another government will be reported, with comment, to that government by its embassy, and additionally its foreign ministry will pick up the remarks from wire service reports.

It is a measure of the lack of sophistication and parochial outlook of Abbott and the government he leads that there is an apparent failure to understand the way the world works.

So far, he's been quite adept at making an ass out of himself on the international stage. In that way he is exactly like his mentor John Howard, a man you'd be embarrassed to show anywhere on the planet.

Screen Australia Still Sucks

This one comes from Monologan.

I must confess, I’ve been feeling uneasy about Screen Australia for some time now.

I’ve never been able to shake the impression that the whole thing is something of a club. When announcements come through of the latest beneficiaries of the millions of taxpayer dollars that go into feature and television production, the same names tend to pop up again and again. Even if their films lose money at the box office again and again.

And in part, I’m uneasy because I feel conflicted about whether those millions of dollars should be spent at all, when they as often as not appear to be used to prop up a local film industry incapable of standing on its own feet, rather than in primarily funding the telling Australian stories. The decision to pour millions of dollars into the quintessentially American story The Great Gatsby is a good recent example. If the car industry no longer needs propping up, why should the production sector? But that’s a debate for another day.

The reason for writing this now though is the fact that it emerged last week that Screen Australia had ponied up $50k to get The Conversation writing about the screen industry more regularly.

I say emerged, because normally, Screen Australia holds a board meeting, then issues press releases about the projects it intends to fund.

The trick is that the guy writing this runs Encore magazine:

I’m heartened that Screen Australia now recognises that “arts journalism is under pressure”. Based on our previous experience, Screen Australia doesn’t spend its “sponsorship” money easily. In the four years or so we’ve owned Encore – which is the oldest title of its type with a three decade heritage in the production sector – our sales team have never been successful in persuading them to spend a single dollar on sponsorship or marketing – and indeed they never once put out a brief. A cynic might say that they don’t like some of the things we’ve written so it was never going to happen anyway. But there again, perhaps our sales director, otherwise excellent at his job, just had a series of off days on the five or six occasions he went in to see them. Either way, having closed the loss making print edition last year, I can’t help ruminate on what a difference $50k would have made to the title.

But I can’t help thinking that the explanation is more likely to be that Screen Australia took a liking to the cut of The Conversation’s jib, and decided to find a way of helping it out. If you’re wealthy like Global Mail’s funder Graeme Woods or are a business with a budget for this sort of thing like CommBank, that’s fair enough. But if you’re a public body, you have a duty to do these things in a fair and above board way, no matter how worthy the recipient.

I think The Conversation deserves the money. I just don’t think that Screen Australia can justify how it made the decision.

If you don’t want people to think you’re a club, then don’t act like one.

So, yes. It does look like a club, and it's pretty friggin' awful.

I Get Asked What I Think Sometimes...

12.8 million For Hugh, Nothing For You

The news this week for film industry types is that Hugh Jackman is going to bring his next Wolverine production back to Sydney. Because the degree of my jadedness - my ad-jade-ment if you will - is at such proportions, I thought I'd just not comment on it until Pleiades brought this little thing to my attention:

You’d have thought that riches to rags story had taught Australian politicians that dumb subsidies don’t work and may have actually damaged the local film industry more than it helped.

Unfortunately not.

Last week the Australian federal government announced $13 million in support for production of Wolverine. The prime minister’s office gushed:

"To attract The Wolverine to Australia, the Gillard government granted the producers a one-off payment of $12.8 million which will result in over $80 million of investment in Australia and create more than 2000 jobs.

"The payment effectively provided The Wolverine a one-off investment package equivalent to an increase in the existing location offset to 30 per cent.

"Without this effective tax offset incentive, the producers of The Wolverine would not have chosen Australia as the location."

"That's just the nature of this government," thundered Pleiades. "It's all about bribing people. It's corruption and bribery that's marked this government."

I'm inclined to believe it's true. What's truly spectacular about this account is that 12.8million can buy you a lot of things in the film industry: development, advertising support, distribution support, publicity. Instead, Julia Gillard's government has chosen to hand this over to a Hollywood production on the grounds that it's going to be shot in Australia. Heck, there are any number of good film scripts out there to be made for a flat 12.8million. When you consider that the annual budget at AFTRS used to be 9million p.a. (I think it might even be less now), you think "wow, they really don't care about the front end of the industry, they only care about the rear end."

They could have done a lot more things with that money that actually helped.

All this is to say that it is incredibly dubious as to what merit there is in throwing this money at Hugh Jackman's production which is already funded out of the Hollywood machine. Now, I'm not taking anything away from Hugh Jackman who is able to do so, but you have to seriously question the ALP government where they really stand with regards to the rest of the Australian film industry. It's nice that some of the crew and special effects houses and post-production houses will get some business coming through, but when it's done, it's going to be the breadline for most of those people again. The ALP government can't be buying temporary jobs like that, they should be trying to re-establish the industry as a industry instead of this public-money-consuming sheltered workshop - assuming they're serious.

Which, they're not. So why am I bothering with this today? Oh yes, I got asked what I thought.

More On The Sheltered Workshop Thing

Here's a more detailed account of what they think they're doing.

Hugh Jackman is returning to Australia to make The Wolverine, his sixth outing as the Marvel character, thanks to a $12.8 million federal government subsidy.

And while billed as a “one-off”, the local film industry has its fingers crossed that the near-doubling of the standard assistance for a big-budget foreign production is a sign of things to come in next month’s budget.

The Wolverine is set in Japan but will be shot at Fox Studios in Sydney between July and December. Hugh Jackman will star and produce. “It’s so great to bring these big movies down there, to keep people working,” Jackman told the Today program from London, where he is filming Les Miserables for Oscar-winning director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech). “I just have to say thanks to Prime Minister Gillard, she was instrumental with this.”

Yikes. Sounds awful already. Set in Japan but shot in Sydney sounds a bit like the Last Samurai which was set in Japan but shot in NZ. Nothing wrong with that, just that it looked really weird in many parts. I'm resigned to there being an alternative universe where there is a Japan that is totally on another planet with totally weird things going on. Even so... let that slide for now.

The patent myth - and outright wishful thinking on the part of SPAA - is that this is going to lead to there being more direct input from the Federal government to lure productions to Australia so that they hire Australian crew and talent. The other patent myth is that once this Wolverine Production starts or finishes in Australia that it's going to open the flood gates for more productions to come back through the Fox lot that is mostly sitting dormant right now, thanks to the high Aussie Dollar. When you choose to look at the funding through these two rose tinted glasses, then sure, this $12.8million seems like chump change. But as with the generous amount of government money dropped on Baz Luhrman's 'Australia' , there's nothing that strengthens the industry, nothing that gives it an ongoing mechanism for growth, nothing that allows for the Australian industry itself to grow unless you define the Australian Film Industry as a service industry for Hollywood in which case why are we doing this?

Haven't we been here before with Baz Luhrman's number?

The point is, it's not even good policy to be throwing money at a Hollywood production, just so it comes here to shoot. If they don't come of their own accord, it's proof positive that our service part of the film industry isn't competitive enough. We're either going to be competitive on the world market on our own merits or not. The producers hoping the government's going to make a habit of funding these things are uncompetitive swill, sucking on the government teat wanting more. I'm sorry but years and years of public funding has reduced our film industry to these kinds of producers getting the loudest voices.

On a personal note, I struggled greatly to convince the production for Kamui Gaiden to come here when their main objection was cost - and that was when the Australian Dollar was only 70yen. Had somebody handed even 5million on a platter, it probably would have happened here or NZ instead of Okinawa; but nobody was there to do it because it was during the time the FFC was being rolled into Screen Australia, just before the GFC hit. (And really, it was probably the natural course of things that it didn't happen that way, which was not only my loss but arguably Australia's film industry's lost opportunity.) Still, that was the last straw for me.

It goes back to the problem that the people who want the industry don't know what they're getting; the people in the industry don't know what market they're operating in; and the world really doesn't like in-between-ers, which is exactly what our film industry is.

Sleeping Audience, Angry Critics

A Typical Australian Film

I won't judge the film sight-unseen, but 'Sleeping Beauty' beauty sounds like it's quite a difficult film to watch.

Here's an early report from Cannes.

Watched by a capacity audience on the opening night, the work of first-time director and novelist Julia Leigh left some viewers speechless with its graphic look at the sordid sex life of young high-class escort, Sara, played by Australian Emily Browning.

Between her university studies, various casual jobs and bizarre friendship with a suicidal drug addict, Sara, the working name of the ice-cold Lucy, is put to sleep for "erotic" sessions with wealthy old men.

The audience hurried out of Wednesday's screening, many lost for words.

"It's Eyes Wide Shut without the engagement," one woman said as she left.

The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney was among the first to post a review of the film, labelling it "psychosexual twaddle".

"[It] will no doubt have its admirers, [but] it seems a long shot to attract a significant following or herald the arrival of a director to watch," he writes.

Awards Daily's Sasha Stone said the film was dull and anything but erotic. "The best thing about the film is how disturbing it is. The film's biggest problem is how boring it is," she writes on The Wrap website.

"Yes, even with a pretty, naked girl, full-frontal male nudity, prostitution, drugs and casual sex, Sleeping Beauty turns out to be very slow and a little dull."

I don't know what it's about. I don't really want to know now that I've read the article. It's just a little too predictable that Julia Leigh, novelist and first time director, turned in a film that really doesn't work for the audience. We've been getting PR spills for weeks now on this film, as if it was going to be the next great thing; that it's going to Cannes, that it's going to put a new exciting director on the map of Australian cinema; but really, the cat is out of the bag.

It's not winning audiences, it's alienating them.

Screen Australia is going to wash their hands and run like hell as it always does. People will be asking how come this film got made on public monies? They'd be right to ask; and the answer is because it's exactly the kind of film Screen Australia are looking for. Yep, you go, guys, you winners, you. LOL. Fuck me dead.

I feel like David St Hubbins in 'This is Spinal Tap' yelling during a performance of 'Jazz Odyssey' - to the crowd who presumably came to see a puppet show - "On bass, Derek Smalls. He wrote this."

Australian Content

No Explaining This One Away

Baz Luhrmann's going to bring his Great Gatsby production to Sydney. Strikes me that he's missed the point already, but be that as it may he's bringing it down under, and he's going to qualify for the 40% producer's off-set. Predictably, this has set off a bit of a row.

The Warner Bros-backed film is believed to be eligible for a producer offset allowing filmmakers to claim back 40 per cent of qualifying expenditure from the Tax Office. Neither Luhrmann nor Screen Australia would confirm the film had the offset, which would mean Warner Bros would get a $120 million movie for less than $80 million.

Australian producers say they are not angry about Gatsby; they are angry that other films that met similar criteria had been rejected.

There have been claims of inconsistent decisions by Screen Australia on television projects, and several companies have or are planning to appeal.

Beyond International's fifth series of the documentary Taboo, about faith healing, was produced and filmed in Australia and employed Australian producers, directors and writers, with most of budget spent here, said its chief executive, Mikael Borglund. But it failed to get the offset, partly because it had little Australian content. An appeal to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal failed.

Mr Borglund said that made no sense in light of the other Beyond projects that had received the offset.

''We just think that the same assessment tests and criteria should be applied by Screen Australia to our projects as those films that are produced with Warner Bros, Universal or Fox,'' he said. ''With Gatsby, it is set in New York in the 1920s. So how could you argue it has significant Australian content?''

Indeed-a-mundo. Pray tell, right?

Anyway, the same article goes on to report Screen Australia's response as:

Some applications might be rejected because they are more suited to the 15 per cent location offset, said Screen Australia's chief operating officer, Fiona Cameron. ''Our role is to differentiate between the location offset and the producer offset.''

Which is a total non-sequitur response to the question at hand: how can Screen Australia reject other Australian productions, only to hand out the welcome mat and the 40% off-set to a Warner Brothers picture just because it's Baz Luhrmann's production? And the answer is of course, it can't explain how that happened - hence the very strange, borderline idiotic non-sequitur.

I dunno. Sometimes the emperor has no clothes and knows it, and still just doesn't give a shit. I was talking to some people just today, and came up with the metaphor that the Australian arts industries as a whole is a flee on the back of a dog, riding a ute called the mining industry. That's us.

Spin Control

Meet The F*ckers

Pleiades convinced me to go and see what the top Film Bureaucrats had to say for themselves at a function at Trackdown, at an ad hoc event organised by Tristan Milani. Fronting up for their policies were Screen Australia boss Dr. Ruth Harley, Screen NSW boss Tania Chambers and Ausfilm boss Jackie O'Sullivan.

The gist of the presentation was that the numbers are up and so far everything is much better than 5 years ago. The bad news is that the Australian Dollar is playing havoc with the part of the industry that subsists on American productions. The banality of the presentation was breathtaking and Dr Ruth Harley closed off her segment with a couple of trailers for films to come.

Maybe the numbers that were read out by both Dr. Harley and Ms Chambers bear out a recovery in the film industry in general, but it struck me more as spin. They were all busy predicting a trough to come, as if to forewarn and foreshadow bad news ahead. An unkind mind might suggest that if they're willing to take the credit for the peaks, perhaps they should take the rap for the troughs, but these bureaucrats were so wily, there's a reason they've got their cushy fat jobs and chumps like us are looking in.

There is a lot of angst in the wider film making community at various levels and in various sectors of the business. The gathered faces were surprisingly older faces. Some of whom were my instructors at AFTRS way back when, which while it is encouraging to see, was also depressing in that it showed the industry had let them down as well.

James Ricketson got up and in their faces about the 'anonymous assessor' process that has been put into place. Clearly this is is an abominable procedure but the top bureaucrats expressed the strong opinion that the anonymous nature of the assessment allows the assessors to be more frank.  Well, let *me* be frank - I think these film bureaucrats are full of themselves if they think this process is in any way helping the film maker. Yet, there they were, defending the process on the basis of numbers. Numbers of projects submitted, number of projects funded and number of projects that eventually went into production. And when you stop to think about it, you think, what if they just changed the rules so they *didn't* have to be accountable to the submissions?

Inquiring minds wanted to know, but these film bureaucrats were decidedly defensive on this point, saying it was a good thing. Clearly they have no idea what it is like to submit a project to these bodies. I started to laugh - I couldn't stifle my giggle response when Dr. Harley said with a straight face for the third time that they got better information through the frankness of anonymous assessors. Well of course you would. Much like NAZIs would from secret informants - but they just didn't seem to care that they came across as really hostile.

Some e-mailer made the charge that Screen Australia were only interested in genre pictures, to which Dr. Harley trotted out some statistical breakdown to show it was not, but in so doing, she entirely ducked the issue of accountability raised in the question. As in, "why do film bureaucrats get to keep their cushy jobs when they pick losers to develop and lose money?" No answer was forthcoming.

At one point Tom Jeffrey got up in support of a North American dude who complained about the intractability of the process and the procedures. Both men were politely told that they should get with the times and simply navigate the website and put in some study hours dealing with forms because the bureaucracy simply didn't have the man-hours to deal with all the inquiries.

And if you thought that was a bit rude - and let's face it Tom Jeffrey's an old bull of the business who deserves respect - these people were quite snide about it. The North American Dude made a metaphor that he wanted to  discuss Alaska, but the process involving forms always tried to reduce the discourse to a shoe box. The snarky remark from Dr. Harley was that they couldn't help him because nobody at Screen Australia knew how to reduce Alaska to a shoe box either - which ignores the fundamental question being asked. Why are these forms so difficult and contrary to the creative process, and why do they keep insisting on these mountain of forms?

Tom Jeffrey also got the short shrift by both Tania Chambers and Dr. Ruth Harley when they suggested it was all available online and it was his own fault or being so old so as not to be up to the times. How insulting was that? Pretty extreme in its insult, I thought. And Tom's not somebody I would consider a friend. Tania Chambers said that they simply didn't have enough people to talk through each project, so it had to be through forms. It seems they use forms and e-mails and bureaucratese to distance themselves from having any moral responsibilities.

Some of the ex-NSWFTO people made the point of saying that they would never try to go through these bodies for development. You could see why. The whole event was an interesting exercise in bureaucrats trying to substitute discussions of quantities in place of discussions about qualities, and thus try and avoid any moral responsibilities. All in all, it was a very poor showing.

Dr. George Miller Says...

He Says We're LAZY

Went to the doc today to get loaded up on cough mixture and antibiotics. I'm a little cranky about it all. So I come home and find that I've received my weekly ScreenHub newsletter.

Well what do you know? Dr. George Miller thinks we're lazy. This was in the ScreenHub newsletter:

George Miller popped up to promote the sequel to Happy Feet and share his unique interpretation of the history of Australian cinema.As the ABC noted, he said, "In NSW, in Australia, I do believe we've been too lazy. We've let others steal the march and now it's changing... "

Hollywood Reporter added an international edge: "Now we have the most advanced motion capture studio in the world down at CarriageWorks -- it is huge. There will be a huge amount of production going through there, if we can keep it in this country."

Dr Miller admits he was inspired by WETA and Peter Jackson in New Zealand.

"I don't think we would have even attempted this had I not seen what they did in Wellington..

"They've got the best talent pool in the world. Look at what they've done. Avatar, District 9 are two of three films nominated for visual effects.

"Wellington is a tenth of the size of Sydney and that economy has shifted dramatically. We go down there to get work done. That can be done here."

"This is an absolutely wonderful moment to be in the industry. Everyone thought cinema was dead and then we get the kind of movies you're seeing now. And we've got the ability to make them..."

<edit>

But we are left to wonder at that word "lazy". If Miller fronted up to the average Australian screen creator and said "Geez, you're lazy. If you weren't we would have an industry like New Zealand.." he would get a smack on the schnoz.

After which he would be told that the reason why we don't have our own Peter Jackson is not because of the government.

The picture of the New Zealand industry that John Barnett painted for us on Wednesday is rather more acccurate, and a lot less positive.

"In a time of worldwide recession the Box Office has defied the statistics and has grown everywhere, including New Zealand – but the Box Office for NZ films has declined to pitiful levels...."

Maybe NZ filmmakers are just lazy too.

Umm, yeah. Lazy is one good description. Try incompetent. The Government tried its hand at development for a couple of decades that brought about the debacle that was the FFC. They were pretty diligent in picking all those box office losers.

But maybe it is laziness. All that box-ticking application press that is entrenched in the development sector of the industry is just intellectual laziness in the extreme. Had they done their homework, the FFC and the AFI would have uncovered more viable talent. That it didn't, and instead nurtured a generation of box-office-losers speaks volumes. Yes, that would be laziness for sure.

Un-Know1ng Benefits

What Precedent?

During the week, Pleiades sent in this link about Alex Proyas' company getting the Producer off-set for producing 'Know1ng'. :

IF you were giving somebody a gift of $20 million, the recipient may want to know about it. But in a farcical situation last week, the Australian director and producers of the film Knowing, Alex Proyas and Topher Dow, were unaware that their film had finally qualified for the federal government's 40 per cent producer offset, a subsidy that could pay for up to $20m of the $55m film.

The Australian contacted their Sydney production office on Friday to ask why federal agency Screen Australia had included Knowing in its annual analysis of Australian films at the box office. The film had previously been denied the offset, presumably because it wasn't considered Australian enough.

Last year, Proyas had not been quiet about the rejection, saying both publicly and privately he was flummoxed by Screen Australia's decision, given his thriller - starring Nicolas Cage, Rose Byrne and Ben Mendelsohn - was shot in Melbourne and post-produced here by Australians. Proyas and Dow's office could "neither confirm or deny" whether the film received the offset on Friday. The truth is, they didn't know until The Australian called to inform them that Screen Australia had pronounced Knowing the third highest-grossing Australian film of 2009, with takings of $7.6m. It came behind Mao's Last Dancer ($15m) and Baz Luhrmann's Australia ($10m in 2009, after its 2008 release).

Knowing had previously not been considered an Australian film. It did not receive Screen Australia investment and was not submitted for any local film awards.

Matters were further confused by Screen Australia in its explanation. It said statistical definitions were "applied independently of the producer offset unit", and that Knowing qualified as an "unofficial co-production", meaning that it "satisfies the co-production requirements despite not being made under a treaty or memorandum of understanding with one of the 10 countries [with] which we currently have official agreements."

Screen Australia analysis of box-office data from the Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia shows we spent $54.8m on tickets to Australian films last year. The figure represents 5 per cent of the total box office of $1.09 billion.

It was the best domestic share since 2001, a year that produced Moulin Rouge!, Lantana, The Man Who Sued God and Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles.

After Mao's Last Dancer, Australia and Knowing, the next highest-grossing local releases of 2009 were the comedy Charlie & Boots ($3.9m) and Warwick Thornton's acclaimed debut Samson & Delilah ($3.2m).

Without Australia and Knowing, however, the Australian box office would have slumped to $36.6m, or 3.3 per cent of total cinema revenue, down appreciably from the 10-year average of 4.4 per cent. (Happily, new release Bran Nue Dae has already topped $3.6m in receipts in its first two weeks of release.) Proyas was unavailable for comment but said in a statement on Monday: "As producer, co-writer and director of the film, I am extremely pleased at this decision, as the film was made by Australians and shot and post-produced in Australia. The production brought a great deal of work to the local industry and I hope that with this film now qualifying, more projects of its type can be made locally. I feel the Australian film industry will benefit enormously from this decision."

The case raises or highlights many questions about the new federal incentive for film and television production, ahead of an expected discussion paper and departmental review this year.

First, the privacy provisions surrounding the offset - it is administered under tax law - are of no use to anyone other than perhaps Screen Australia. Government subsidies for other industries are transparent; the financial secrecy regarding the administration of the offset only obscures the means of film financing and hurts the industry's desire to be treated seriously. Changes to tax legislation heading to parliament will be of minor consequence.

Second, while Proyas did not know his film had received the offset money, no doubt his US studio, Summit Entertainment, did. In many instances, the offset subsidy provided by Australian taxpayers is being swallowed by international studios and financiers. As Luhrmann told The Australian when asked about the rebate available to his film Australia, "Don't ask me, that's all handled by Fox!" (Twentieth Century Fox is owned by News Corporation, the parent company of News Limited, publisher of The Australian.)

Malcontents have suggested several other theories. Was Knowing granted the offset in order to boost Australian box-office figures at a testy time in screen politics, ahead of the departmental review and as industry distress with Screen Australia's management grows?

Or was approval of Knowing kept quiet so as to distance it from a decision to deny the 40 per cent offset to George Miller's Justice League: Mortal? That film, like Knowing, would have been shot in Australia with a largely Australian cast and crew but had a script written by foreigners.

This leads again to the issue of transparency. Knowing was arguably successful in obtaining the offset because it was developed by Proyas, an Australian director, and - unlike Justice League: Mortal - ownership of intellectual property in the film would be retained in Australia. If the decision becomes a precedent, it will affect international studios and whether they choose to invest in production here. Yet no one knows which criteria Knowing satisfied and what the precedent may be.

At a policy level, transparency is key. Producers are willing to divulge what financing process they use, if not the amount of money raised. If Screen Australia is unwilling to provide clarity on sources and dollar volumes, the public or industry scrutiny of the new incentive scheme is aimless.

Consequently, when Screen Australia announced late last year that the offset had helped screen productions to the tune of $123m since July 2007, there was no way of knowing how much that figure was boosted by the eight-figure sum heading the way of Luhrmann's Australia. One insider suggested the offset is working "as the government expected". Unfortunately, as Proyas discovered, that is as precise as film policy gets.

So let's see now... It's 'Australian' after the fact if it helps boost the bottom line for Screen Australia then? That's just swell. Not only is it policy by Post-hoc, it's Ad-hoc.

Film News That's Fit To Punt - 14/08/09

Conflict Of Interest At The BBC

It seems that there's a certain lady at the BBC handing out development money to her spouse.

A staggering £1.2million has been paid by the BBC in the past year to companies owned by relatives of corporation executives.

Details of the huge pay-outs emerged as another BBC boss came under fire yesterday over her husband's lucrative links with the broadcaster.

Days after the revelation that BBC1 controller Jay Hunt helps run her husband's media training company which coaches BBC staff, the second row involved Jana Bennett, the third highest paid executive at the corporation on a basic salary of £406,000 a year.

The BBC vision director's husband Richard Clemmow is a director and 10 per cent stakeholder in Juniper Communications, which received £715,000 of the £1.2million in the last year.

Altogether the company has raked in more than £2million of licence-payers' cash for making programmes for the BBC.

The chief executive and majority shareholder in Juniper is Samir Shah, a non-executive member on the BBC board, and his wife Belkis is the third shareholder.

The fresh revelations raised new doubts about the BBC's conflict of interest regulations and prompted renewed calls from MPs for a formal investigation by the corporation's governing body.

Sound familiar? Yeah...

I just can't figure out where I've seen this story line elsewhere... Ummm... Argh, I can't... errr... recall... Hmph.

Kit Denton Fellowship shortlist Announced

For some reason the shortlist for the Kit Denton Fellowship was published in the Sydney Morning Herald before I actually got my newsletter from the AWG. It's a bit like the terror raids the other day where The Australian went to the press with the raids before it actually happened. A bit rude, isn't it?

Anyway, this year's shortlist looks like political correctness gone berserk.

The 2009 Kit Denton Fellowship Shortlist:

Robert Reid - The New Black
The New Black was developed in response to the controversy of the 2008 Bill Henson exhibition and the reaction of local communities to the relocation of Dennis Ferguson. The play uses satire to investigate the superficiality of the contemporary Australian cultural response to these events.

Karl Madderom – Face Value
Karl received burns to 50% of his body when at the age of two he was left with two other children in a car which caught fire. He was the only survivor and spent the next five years in hospital. His dream is to have the protagonist of his film played by a real life victim instead of an actor in prosthetics and do away with the notion that people that look like him can only be characters in sci-fi or appear on daytime television.

Lisa Hoppe, Margot O’Neill and Bobbie Waterman – Blind Conscience
Based on Margot O’Neill’s acclaimed book, Blind Conscience is the story of an unlikely coalition of Australians who shake off the easy comfort of political disengagement to defend those who can’t defend themselves and the life-changing, often traumatic and sometimes frightening journey of these advocates.

Back to Back Theatre – Ganesh vs. The 3rd Reich
Ganesh vs. The 3rd Reich is co-authored by members of the Back to Back Theatre, who have developed an original distinctive artistic voice and a working process that supports its Ensemble of actors with intellectual disabilities.

So, there's a guy who's taking on the censorious idiots from the Bill Henson thing, which is hardly a tilt at the windmills; there's a burn victim who wants real burn victims to play him in a movie because that would be politically correct (uh..., Box Office death that one's going to be); A film about the refugee activists (and not the refugees themselves. O, the courage!); and a workshop script wherein retards take on Nazis.

Fuck me dead.

'Stolen' Imbroglio Continues

The Q&A On Audio

Here's the link as provided by artrlight. Thank you.

I'm shocked at the degree of rhetoric coming from both sides. This is not a Q&A that was ever going to yield any answers.

Just as I had anticipated, Tom's interpreter was brought in to rubberstamp the films claims, in absentia of context. They showed him/her the fiLm over a few nights with some extra shots before and after. After which the said interpreter gave his/her seal of approval and then said, they anted to remain anonymous. That's hardly an objective assessment that would stand. Talk about garbage-in-garbage-out.

I'm appalled at how inarticulate Ms Ayala is in this interview. I understand English is not her first language, but she comes over as a petulant child insisting on having things her way. Maybe it works for her to force things through with the force of her pushy persona, but her answers weren't really enlightening of what they were thinking. It struck me that whatever it was they were thinking, it didn't have much to do with responsible reportage.

The questioners also line up their rhetorical ducks in line and Dan refuses to answer the questions. Violeta kind of raves with inarticulate "you knows" punctuating what is essentially a stream of self-justification. The AWSA reps are asking pretty forensic questions about tapes and who asked what questions when which don't really go to the heart of the matter.

I'm aghast at the sense of what Dan thinks is polite, where he's willing to break trust to get the shot, but that's all okay in film making; and what Violeta thinks is human rights being more important than politics. It's as if they've decided they just won't see the problem as a probelm, and therefore it's not a problem. They're like non-contenders in the basic ethics stakes.

Which naturally begs the question, how come these other people are so upset? Dan replies he dosn't want to comment to a pointed question. I'm sure Dan wouldn't because there's not an answer he could give that would make him look good. It's a really ghastly Q&A. Nobody sounds good or decent. None of it is in the least bit edifying. It just makes us confront the obtuseness of Tom, Dan and Violeta and Kemal and Fetim and the privileged-to-be-black dude and the Australian dude.

A Lot Of Fuss For A 1/4Million Bucks

The other thread where we discussed the issue of releases and translations got a little long so I started to add an entry here for the continued joy of gratuitous argument.

To put things into a little perspective, 'Stolen' got less than $250k from Screen Australia which, on one hand is a lot of money but on movie-making stakes, is peanuts. All this arguing over a measly $250k film. I don't think James Cameron would get out of bed in the mornings for a $250k film. Nonetheless we have this incredibly stupid controversy which cannot be resolved because nobody seem to have enough clout or financial wherewithal to sort it all out.

ScreenHub Goes To Bat For Tom

Anyway, here's David Tiley from ScreenHub's account of the Melbourne Film Festival screening, abridged:

The screening itself passed off quietly, to a fascinated audience. The q&a was moderated by Andrew Dodd, and recorded for Radio National, who asked questioners to identify themselves, and their affiliations with Polisario or the filmmakers.

That didn't work for long. A variety of people attempted to cast doubt on the plausibility of the story, with a series of mannered micro-speeches; the film's attackers in Melbourne were clearly disciplined, well-rehearsed and courteous. At least one person supporting the film seemed to share the same passion for planning.

Producer Zubrycki, never relaxed in public, was clearly tense. Fallshaw and Ayala were defensive and hectoring, reflecting their behavior in the second half of the film.

Afterwards, the cinema was abuzz with excited discussion. As I said to one viewer, "I haven't seen something like this for a long time. It feels like the Seventies."

"No", she replied. "The Seventies were much worse."

The extraordinary thing about this film remains its honesty, which has clearly evolved to anticipate and respond to criticism - an evolution which is only possible with easy digital recuts.

Audience members I talked to generally disliked Fallshaw and Ayala, who admit they dealt with the Moroccans, who seem self important and grandiose, who bully interviewees late in the film.

But it remains convincing - there is slavery in the camps, it takes a certain cultural form, it is named as such, and the film provides a fascinating picture of the experience of enslavement in action.

It is also obsessed with its own story, which shifts from slavery to Polisario's attempts to deal with a public relations problem. It doesn't enter the politics of the struggle - we don't even get a map for around an hour, even though the film is crossing borders. While it defines slavery as present across the region, it never provides a wider context.

And so it went. The most telling 2 paragraphs of David Tiley's article is here:

Polisario is clearly attacking details of a film which most of our readers have not seen, in order to question the whole, attacking the motivations of filmmakers, and painting itself as staggeringly benign.

It is possible to smell a number of rats in this situation, but the biggest rodent is being dragged around by Polisario. And the inadequacies of the filmmakers are clearly visible in the film.

So here we are with all this controversy about the film and whether it's accurate or ethically compromised or even down right dodgy. Tiley's being disingenuous himself when he argues that:

• if Polisario is attacking the details in order to question the whole,


• Then this imperfect procedure brings doubt on the Polisario's main point


• and therefore the Polisario cannot be itself staggeringly beign.

EXCEPT the third line also runs the same trope of questioning the detail in order to cast aspersion on the whole. You can't condemn a method and then use it yourself to condemn a party.

It is logically self-defeating. But I guess it looks good on the page - until you put it to proper scrutiny. Not that I give a shit about the Polsiario and their politics. I'm sorry to disappoint some people, but this blog just isn't about that part of the issue.

David Tiley also writes at the end:

Given the pressure that Polisario and its friends in Australia, particularly inside the ALP, have brought to bear on this matter, the statement is unsurprising.

But it does not represent either a shift in policy or a rejection - Screen Australia would never claim that a production it funded reflected any official point of view.

That's a little slippery there. A non-endorsement does not mean a policy shift, true enough. However, a non-endorsement might easily mean it's a rejection under the guise of plausible deniability, which is something you wouldn't put past politicians and bureaucrats. i.e, we ARE rejecting it, but not in a way that says so.

Which happens to be exactly what they're doing, as I've been told by people inside Screen Australia. So David Tiley's assertion is flat out wrong.

The fact that Screen Australia would never claim that a production it funded reflect any official point of view, is not what is being questioned. What is being asked is why would Screen Australia make a point of its non-endorsement if not but to avoid legal ramifications? - Like, the absence of signed releases and that sort of thing, perhaps?

One thing I have noticed with the side of the film makers to date is that logic doesn't seem to be their strong suit and truth claims seem to be too difficult for them to address. Instead, it's the insidious machinations of the Polisario and its long reach across the globe that gets trotted out. Which it might well be, but even then the defenders of the film don't seem to be on top of their philosophical position.

Maybe it's a Post-Modern problem after all, where there is no fixed 'Meaning', only the small-m meaning we draw from the text and the very modality of the various modes of truth claims coalesce into a socially formed *meaning* kind of hyper-real relativist mind space. (Oh, get me my vomit bag!)

I have to confess I'm getting really tired of wrestling with this topic. It's not much fun. And to that extent, I don't take too kindly to the film makers.

For a start, the Gen Y film makers of 'Stolen' probably are generationally (and I do grossly generalise here but...) the sort of people who think nothing of illegally downloading pirate songs onto their iPods and iPhones and not bat an eye-lid at the copyright infraction. Run cracked versions of software on the computers, run pirated videos on their DVDs. Why on earth would they care about truth claims and verification and release forms and legalities? Why bother? Nobody ever knew nothing, right? Make up the meaning as you go along. Shout out long enough that there are slaves in the camps, maybe then the meaning of slavery will warp enough into the image they want? Nothing unethical in that is there? How could there be, when ethics itself can't get established in the motile sea of flexible, ambiguous meaning?

Cue my Vomit bag, please.