James Ricketson
58 Braidwood Road
Goulburn 2580
0488543555
The Hon. Tony Burke MP
Minister for the Arts
GPO Box 594
Canberra, ACT 2601 13th February 2026
Dear Minister
re Screen Australia
I am clearly not going to receive a response to any of the letters I have written to you since 2012.
So much for your commitment as Minister for the Arts to transparency and accountability – both of which are also lacking within Screen Australia. Why need senior management and the Board adhere to such principles when their Minister does not?
As I have mentioned before, the fate of one filmmaker at the hands of Screen Australia is of no great consequence in the grand scheme of things. However, the treatment meted out to me this past dozen years does raise questions that should be of concern to you. What else is taking place within Screen Australia that you have little knowledge of or interest in finding out about?
A filmmaker critic of Screen Australia need look no further than my own experience to think twice about saying what she or he thinks; to challenge the peak funding body’s decision-making processes. To put it bluntly: Why do certain filmmakers continue to be successful one application after another regardless of their track record, whilst others cannot even speak with a member of Screen Australia staff?
I am far from being alone in feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong with Screen Australia; that there is a need for an independent review of its relationship with the film and TV community and its funding modus operandi – if only because we are, let’s be frank, not making very many good films that Australian audiences want to see.
Context:
Consider the box office results of the top 126 films released in Australia in 2025.
45 ‘Kangaroo’ $3,870,000
67 ‘Bring Her Back’ $1,748,000
112 ‘Together’ $784,000
126 ‘The Correspondent’ $729,000
These figures need to be read cautiously. Whilst ‘Together’ appears at 112 and took $308,000 in Australia, a figure of $32 million worldwide is to be found online for this American Australian co-production. And another figure for Kangaroo is $5.2 million.
If, as Minister, you are in possession of more accurate figures than I have been able to find online, please do let me and my fellow filmmakers know what these are. Screen Australia, along with other Australian funding bodies are reluctant to release budget and box office figures that might suggest all is not well with the Australian Film Industry.
All up, Australian audiences paid around $6,500,000 at the box office to see Australian films in 2025, out of a box office total of roughly $1 billion.
This is considerably less than 0.1% of box office takings last year earned by Australian films. Again, if my maths here is faulty, please correct me. Do you know? If so, please share the figures with us. If these figures are to remain a secret please explain why this is so.
If the 0.1% figure I have just quoted is accurate, the question arises: Why do we bother to have an Australian Film Industry at all?
Can we, should we, must we, ask this question in 2026, with a view to finding out if our industry is deserving of the Australian tax-payer dollars pumped into it each year?
How many such tax dollars are invested in Australian film production each year?
It is not easy (virtually impossible, actually) to obtain an answer to this question from funding bodies.
Perhaps you can help me here? How many Australian tax-payer dollars were invested in Screen Australia funded films in 2025? For instance, SA provided ‘major production investment’ in THE CORRESPONDENT. How much? Are Australian taxpayers entitled to know this figure? And if not, why not?
Is the purpose of an Australian Film Industry to provide employment for Australian crews working on foreign films produced in Australia? Or is it to produce Australian films, based on Australian stories, told by Australian screenwriters and directors, with (predominantly) Australian actors for Australian audiences?
These two objectives are not mutually exclusive, of course.
It is worthwhile, every now and then, to revisit the past of our ‘industry’ to focus our attention on why we have an ‘industry’ at all:
In 1963 the Senate Select Committee Report on the Encouragement of Australian Productions for television felt that there was:
“a responsibility to protect an industry with a strong cultural element.”
In the late 60’s and early 70’s the various bodies involved in providing the industry with a philosophical base stressed that:
“The industry (should be) pre-eminently Australian in character, not dominated by other cultures; that government sponsorship (should) support ‘film and television projects of quality’ and produce ‘distinctively Australian’ films that would ‘provide the Australian people with a national voice and a record of their way of life.”
The Report of the Interim Board of the Australian Film Commission declared that:
“Australia, as a nation, cannot accept, in this powerful and persuasive medium, the current flood of other nations’ productions on our screens without it constituting a very serious threat to our national identity. The Commission should actively encourage the making of those films of high artistic or conceptual value which may or may not be regarded at the time as conforming to the current criteria of genre, style or taste, but which have cultural, artistic or social relevance.
How many Australian films produced in the last five years, say, fulfil these noble artistic and cultural objectives?
Does Screen Australia consistently produce films of artistic worth that tell Australian stories for Australian audiences?
No.
Do our funding bodies finance projects that consistently do well at the box office?
No
Has Australia become a service industry for overseas producers, subsidised by Australian taxpayers?
Yes.
Should we, as an ‘industry’, as funding bodies such as Screen NSW, be pondering such questions aloud?
I believe that we should; that we are long overdue for public dialogue and debate about such questions. One of the obstacles to such dialoguer and debate is that senior management and the Board of Screen Australia are very thin-skinned when it comes to criticism and, as my own experience makes clear, will go to great lengths to silence critics.
The words ‘film industry’ suggest that we are producing products that will yield for a profit for investors. We are not.
Will ‘Bring Them Back’ and ‘Together’ join ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’, ‘Storm Boy’, ‘The Castle’, Breaker Morant’, ‘Rabbit Proof Fence’, ‘My Brilliant Career’, Sunday Too Far Away’, ‘Kenny’ and others that DO fulfill the creative dreams articulated back in the 196s and 70s?
To pretend that the bulk of truly Australian films will ever generate profits is to delude ourselves. Imagine if we referred to the ‘Australian ballet industry’, the ‘Australian Opera industry’, the ‘Sydney symphony orchestra industry’, ‘the poetry industry’ and so on. As industries they are all abject failures, so why do we bother to subsidize them?
The Report of the Interim Board of the Australian Film Commission’s answer:
Some (films) may not become commercially successful ventures, but these may include films which posterity will regard as some of the most significant films made by and for Australians. Profit and entertainment on the one hand and artistic standards and integrity on the other, are not mutually exclusive. In the long term the establishment of a quality Australian output is more important for a profitable, soundly based industry than the production, exclusively, as what might be regarded as sure-fire box-office formula hits.
If we stop using the word ‘industry’, and think primarily in terms of ‘Australian film’ as a cultural artefact, two questions worthy of discussion in 2026 are:
- In five, ten, twenty years will it matter whether or not Warwick Thornton’s films returned a profit to investors?
- In five, ten, twenty years will our children and our children’s children, our film culture, care that films such as ‘Captain America: Brave New World’ and ‘Bridget Jones: Mad about the Boy’ returned a profit?
It is wonderful, of course, that thousands of Australian film and TV technicians have regular work, but has our becoming a Hollywood backlot helped or hindered our capacity to create the films that our ‘industry’ was set up to produce?
When it comes to drama, be it TV or cinema, we are failing badly. I believe that one of the reasons why Australian audiences stay away from Australian films in droves is that the quality of the screenplays from which they are produced is low, far too often. In other instances, screenplays have been geared into production 2, 3 and 4 drafts before they are ready to be produced. This points to a failure of Screen Australia’s assessment processes. I believe that these need to be reviewed independently with a view to improving the quality of screenplays.
I, and other concerned filmmakers would appreciate an opportunity to meet with you to discuss the role that assessment processes as currently practiced by Screen Australia are contributing to or are an obstacle to the production of high-quality Australian films, Australian stories told by Australians for Australian audiences.
There are many other questions to be discussed within our ‘industry’, of course, exploring a range of issues that concern us all – particularly given that the advent of AI is rapidly changing the nature of the ‘workplace’ as we have come to know it, for better and for worse.
I believe that there needs to be industry-wide public debate focusing on the question of why we have an ‘industry’ at all and who it is serving in the new AI ager that we confronts.
cheers
James Ricketson
cc Dierdre Brennan CEO
Members of the Screen Australia Board
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