Submission for Inquiry Into Creative & Cultural
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SUBMISSION FOR INQUIRY INTO CREATIVE & CULTURAL INDUSTRIES John Edwards AM I’m a television producer with the fortune of experience of having made $600 million worth of content across 30 years, employing a few thousand people per year, and though the multiplier effects of this are debateable, they’re certainly considerable (the best known are Police Rescue, Secrete Life of Us, Love My Way, Offspring, Paper Giants, Howzat!). All this work and economic activity is dependent on writers, and those writers had to start somewhere before they could ram their foot through the television door. It’s not as if people suddenly fall into television writing from the sky. They have to start writing somewhere, and almost always they’re starved for a good while before having enough work to be noticed. Often, they worked in other fields in parallel or previously. On Police Rescue for example there were a couple of novelists, a playwright, and two former journalists; on Secret Life a couple of playwrights, a novelist etc. As a matter of policy aspiration, we try to employ at least one “new chump” on every show, and these are only noticed because they’ve written a book or a play, in one case, a book of poetry, which gives us the capacity to take a risk and bring them into a world where they can make an income. But that first step almost always has been supported by some (usually very small) investment of public funds. The health of an industry like ours is utterly dependent on the nurturing of writing aspiration and writing talent. John Edwards AM .