‘Crown-of-thorns starfish bleaching Australian content’: Michael Cordell blasts tech giants
Michael Cordell's CJZ is responsible for programs including Gruen, Bondi Rescue and My Life is Murder
Award-winning producer and director Michael Cordell has likened Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google (“the FANGs”) to the crown-of-thorns starfish – coming in and destroying the local content environment – and said the government must act.
“The whole media landscape from print journalism through to television has been completely and utterly reshaped as a result of the FANGS,” he said on ABC Radio National’s Medialand program.
“Commercial television is on its knees. We know all the challenges that print journalism has faced. Netflix kind of rules the roost. But the FANGs don’t pay tax in Australia. They commission very little content. They piggyback on the NBN without paying anything for it.
“And so in my mind, they’re not dissimilar to the crown-of-thorns starfish, where they’re kind of coming in and bleaching Australian content from our screens.”
As a result of the platforms gobbling up local ad dollars and eyeballs, Cordell said it’s difficult for local producers to get local shows made. And because the tech giants are acting legally, he said it’s on the government to step up and take action.
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“I’ve been making films [and] television for 40 years or more. I don’t think there’s been a more difficult time than at the moment… The government has to do something about it. It’s just such an important issue, and the government’s been kind of dilly-dallying around.”
As well as speaking about the wider cultural importance of telling and seeing Australian stories on our screens, Cordell was promoting The People vs Robodebt – a documentary he and his production company CJZ have worked on to tell the story of the “tsunami of pain” which was inflicted on people via the disastrous government scheme.
“I think stories like this are incredibly important and my hat off, our hats off, to SBS for having the kind of courage to do a story like this. And it makes you realise how important our public broadcasters are in the current environment,” he told Medialand.
In a press release about the program, which premieres on Wednesday, he said: “Robodebt inflicted a tsunami of pain on hundreds of thousands of ordinary Australians accused of having fictitious debts. We’re excited to be telling this story with an innovative combination of hard-nosed factual and high-end drama to push the limits of contemporary storytelling.”
Medialand on ABC Radio National is hosted by this writer, alongside Mumbrella co-founder Tim Burrowes.
