We acknowledge and respect the Traditional Owners of lands across Australia, their Elders, Ancestors, cultures and heritage, and recognise the continuing sovereignties of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nations.

We respectfully acknowledge the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation, who are the Traditional Owners of the land on which the ACTF is based and pay our respect to their Elders past and present.

We are honoured to have the opportunity to learn from the oldest cultural storytellers in the world and seek to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander practitioners to share their rich culture and perspectives with children in Australia and around the world via stories on screen.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this website may contain images, voices or names of deceased persons in photographs, film, audio recordings or text.

ACTF Welcomes Government Review

Australian children’s television has an amazing story to tell and a community which genuinely loves and supports it. But the children’s television sector is facing huge challenges.

Commercial broadcasters, who have never been happy with regulations that require them to transmit children’s programs, are calling for these regulations to be scrapped. Leading up to that call, they’ve spent the last decade reducing the licence fees they pay for this content to such an extent that it is now almost impossible to finance a live action children’s drama through a commercial broadcaster, and very difficult to finance anything at all.

At the same time, the public broadcaster, ABC, which back in 2009 had a big injection of extra funds to establish ABC3 (now ABC ME), has reduced the amount of funding it allocates to children’s programming, and appears to be spending a lot less on commissioning local content than it was 5 or 6 years ago.

Meanwhile, Screen Australia, which is a major government funded investor in children’s programs, is asking whether or not the audiences for kids’ television are big enough to justify their investments.

The wheels are looking very shaky and in danger of falling off one by one, so the Commonwealth intervention is timely.

The ACTF looks forward to contributing to the Review.

We believe that we need a new policy framework which includes:

- Adequate funding and specific requirements to ensure that the public broadcasters provide appropriate levels of Australian children’s content;

- A new regulatory framework to be applied to all the major content service providers in Australia which ensures that they either commission and screen appropriate levels of Australian children’s content OR contribute to a contestable content fund; and

- The creation of a contestable content fund to support distinctively Australian children’s content.

The following guest blogs by Michael Carrington and Kim Dalton consider why the role of the ABC is central to any review:

Kim Dalton: The ABC of Trust
Michael Carrington: The Future of Australian Children's Media