Managing Director’s keynote address at FECCA National Biennial Conference
James Taylor
Managing Director, SBS
Keynote address at the dinner of the FECCA National Biennial Conference, Hobart
Thursday 10 October 2019
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Good evening. It’s a pleasure to be here with you all.
Firstly, I’d like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land we are meeting upon this evening, and pay respects to Elders past, present and emerging.
I’d also like to recognise the many dignitaries and special guests, and acknowledge Mary Patetsos, Chair of FECCA, and CEO, Mohammad Al-Khafaji – thank you both for the opportunity to speak this evening.
SBS is once again proud to be a primary media partner of FECCA’s National Biennial Conference, especially in this, FECCA’s 40th year. SBS television turns 40 next year and both FECCA and SBS, despite being middle aged, remain as vital and relevant as they were in their twenties.
This is my first time presenting here and I feel honoured to be speaking with you as the Managing Director of SBS, an organisation with such an important purpose and vital to Australia’s future as a successful multicultural nation.
I am here before you today, a white, middle-aged, able-bodied man who, because of those characteristics has enjoyed relative advantage in this country. I recognise that I’ve been able to open the many doors I’ve walked through in my personal and professional life with little more than a gentle push.
My efforts are no greater than many others, who because of the simple matter of who they are, how they look, where they were born, how they identify or what they believe, have faced barriers to their participation. My lived experience is not that of many Australians.
Let’s be in no doubt. Australia is a tremendous multicultural nation. However, I believe we still have a way to go to ensure there is equal opportunity for all. SBS is well placed and fully committed to pursuing this outcome.
My mother’s experience in coming to this country was vastly different to my own growing up here.
My mother arrived in Brisbane as a young child in the 1950s, migrating from her birthplace in Northern Italy with the surname Zanuttini. She didn’t speak English, and to this day tells stories of the discomfort of separation and exclusion. But despite a rough start, her passion and love of Australia is palpable. It is perhaps my mother’s experience that is one of the most influential in informing my own views about the power and importance of inclusion.
Today, our nation is multicultural and diverse. We are wonderfully different. These differences are at the heart of who we are, and when we champion our differences, we realise their true benefits.
SBS has been doing this for many years – inspiring Australians to understand each other better, and respect each other more, with the goal of contributing to a more inclusive society.
We’re proudly one of Australia’s most trusted media organisations. The trust we enjoy is central to who we are, and the unrivalled connections we have with Australia’s diverse communities – the communities you all represent – that enable us to tell impactful stories unlike any other media organisation. SBS explores multicultural and Indigenous stories otherwise untold, and gives a voice to communities often unheard.
At SBS, we have always believed that an inclusive society – one in which we all belong, are all able to contribute, and that doesn’t leave anyone behind – is a good thing.
It’s a good thing because it feels good – but it also makes good economic sense.
I recently announced the findings of a report we commissioned from Deloitte Access Economics which quantifies, for the first time in this way, the clear economic imperative for improving social inclusion in Australia.
Australia has a well-earned reputation as an inclusive society across a range of measures, but we can do better, and if we can emulate countries that do better than us, we all benefit.
Through becoming a more inclusive society, the report outlines that an annual 12.7 billion dollar economic dividend could be generated from areas including improved employment and health outcomes, increased workplace productivity, and reduced costs of social services.
By this we mean better inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, of the almost seven million migrants from 270 ancestries who have migrated to Australia since 1945, the 50,000 households that have same sex couples and the one in five Australians who have a disability. We mean more women in senior leadership roles.
Greater inclusion not only avoids the costs incurred when people are excluded, it harnesses our diversity, providing fuel for innovation in our economy.
Creativity, tenacity, vision and leadership are critical drivers of innovation and unsurprisingly these are not characteristics unique to any one community, they are not determined by where you were born, your family ancestry, the language you speak, your gender, sexual orientation or faith.
The more we embrace difference – in our teams, workplaces, and in our communities the greater the economic dividends for all, and not just those being included.
As Australia becomes increasingly diverse, the importance of fostering social inclusion continues to grow – socially and economically.
Now, I know that if you’re in this room, you get it. You’ve always intuitively understood that diversity is a fact, and inclusion is a choice, and that when we make that choice, we all benefit. I’m hopeful though that, armed with a solid piece of economic research, we can all prosecute this case with even more conviction. A link to this research has been shared via the SBS Australia Twitter account this evening, and I encourage you to take a look.
Now’s when I take a moment to brag about SBS’s range of services to demonstrate our commitment to reaching communities wherever they are.
Over the last year, we’ve reached more Australians than ever before, including more than 12 million across our TV network each month.
We’ve five free-to-air television channels, including the recently launched SBS World Movies, which features at least 50 per cent of titles in a language other than English.
We commissioned around 450 hours of first-run programming in the last year, in addition to our extensive news and current affairs and sports offering. Speaking of sport, SBS is now the free to air home of basketball in Australia, with full coverage of the NBL and including both the NBA and WNBA leagues. Basketball is a great sport for connecting SBS with younger multicultural Australia and we are proud of that new relationship.
70 per cent of content on SBS and SBS VICELAND is culturally and linguistically diverse, the equivalent of 13,000 hours broadcast over the last 12 months.
We provide radio and digital services in 68 languages, and continue to grow this offer to provide more news and information to multicultural communities in their language. We had 2.4 million unique visitors to our language websites each month last year, an increase of 30 per cent on the year prior.
We have 7 million registered users across our digital platforms – a figure that has grown by 40 per cent in the last year alone – with access to more than 7,000 hours of programming on our distinctive streaming platform SBS On Demand.
Now, you will be relieved to hear that I didn’t come here to spend the next 10 minutes listing our services, but I wanted to take the opportunity to describe how SBS has evolved over the last 40 years to reflect the changing face of modern Australia. And all of the changes listed above have been delivered in the last few years and within our existing funding envelope.
Being the Managing Director of a media organisation today is in equal measure exhilarating and terrifying.
We are operating in a sector that continues to experience unprecedented change.
Not only are new technologies providing opportunities to create content and engage audiences in new and different ways, they are helping SBS to be increasingly efficient and effective. This means we can invest more in unique Australian stories and services that go to the very heart of our Charter.
The media landscape is also welcoming a steady stream of new players, increasing competition for audiences and dramatically changing the way we consume content.
Whilst international competition is undoubtedly good news for audiences, driving the whole local industry on to even greater ambitions, we need to ensure that global formats don’t crowd out and make the production of local stories, for local audiences, untenable.
Any society’s culture is enhanced and nurtured by its capacity to tell stories about itself; to describe local fears, aspirations and truths. To see itself reflected and for there to be a space for discussion and deliberation. We need a regulatory environment that values the local industry, local stories and in particular that allows public broadcasting to thrive.
And in a social-media facilitated world of increasingly polarised views, many of them unencumbered by fact, we need a regulatory construct which affords people access to independent, trusted and impartial news and current affairs.
Storytelling is a powerful vehicle with which to make people feel included, connected and empowered.
Australia today is not homogenous, and neither are the many communities that make up our rich diversity. Too often, when it comes to reporting and representation in the media, the nuances of communities are not reflected, and stereotypes prevail.
Every community is made up of individual experiences. The personal story of someone from outside of your world has the power to challenge perceptions and break down barriers.
Using human stories as a way of approaching big and often confronting subjects can also help to create empathy and lead to understanding and inclusion.
Stories like that of Jasmine Baker, the daughter of Lebanese parents who migrated to Australia in 1970, and who as a child struggled with her nationality being seen as a stigma.
Now, at 29, Jasmine is a bilingual storyteller in Arabic and English, she has been empowered to celebrate her language and share it with children of all backgrounds. She currently works with social enterprise Lost in Books in Sydney’s Fairfield, a suburb where more than 180 languages are spoken.
The bookshop offers titles in more than 40 languages and caters for young children up to teenagers, with a space for families to read and play together.
It’s a truly uplifting story that showcases the efforts of communities to preserve their languages, whilst helping new arrivals to settle in the multicultural suburb.
Our recent series, The Hunting, was our most successful original drama in the history of SBS, and an exemplar of SBS’s increasingly nuanced exploration of cultures and diversity.
The series took a universal and confronting theme – online safety and behaviour – and allowed the exploration of multicultural Australia to live through the characters, providing a more authentic reflection of our society without being contrived. The series was also accompanied by educational resources, produced in partnership with the e-Safety Commissioner and launched through the SBS Learn portal, and distributed to tens of thousands of parents and teachers to assist constructive conversations about an issue that affects so many of us.
We’re particularly proud of NITV’s award-winning, Little J and Big Cuz, a contemporary children’s animation series which provides Indigenous children the far too seldom opportunity to see themselves portrayed positively in mainstream media, and also engages non-Indigenous Australians with positive First Nations storytelling.
As a media industry, we need to move away from a tick box approach of inserting diversity into stories, and instead focus on sharing more nuanced stories that simply reflect the diversity we experience in our lives every day. It will naturally lead to more authentic storytelling and provide role models for future generations. As the old saying goes, “If you can’t see it, you can’t be it.”
This requires greater commitment from many in the in the media industry.
Whilst I applaud the recent awakening at other media operators that diversity is in equal measure important and lacking, for SBS this has long been a hygiene factor. It is just simply the way we operate.
Our staff makeup has long reflected the society from which it is drawn. 36 per cent of SBS team members were born overseas; almost 42 per cent speak a language other than English at home. 52 per cent of staff and 51 per cent of people leaders and 60 per cent of the senior leadership team is female. 3.4 per cent of staff identify as Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander. Each of these figures paint SBS as an exemplar.
Our focus at SBS goes beyond diversity. Diversity unharnessed is just a bunch of people who are different. But diversity harnessed delivers inclusion. And inclusion can – and should be – the spark that fires Australia to greater heights.
And now I’d like to talk to you about something that I am particularly passionate about. As those of you here tonight know better than I, language is intertwined and deeply connected to culture.
We are seeing greater recognition of the importance of language in our communities, and a growing understanding of the power of communicating with people in their first language.
This is not just about helping new migrants settle into a new life in a new country – that is of course important. It’s also about helping people to maintain their culture through their language, and pass it on to future generations.
That’s why we are investing more than ever before in our multilingual services.
Earlier this year, we announced a stronger focus on subtitling – so that multicultural communities can enjoy programs in their first language, with a focus on Australian stories made by SBS.
The Chinese Collection on SBS On Demand offers Mandarin speaking audiences a growing selection of SBS original television documentaries, dramas and current affairs shows with Chinese subtitles, and similarly, a collection in Arabic is giving Arabic-speaking communities the chance to engage with television content in their first language.
As we continue to roll out this offer, we plan to expand to more languages.
Tonight, I’m pleased to announce that to support this investment in more in language content, next year we will launch in-language login and navigation for SBS On Demand. A first for any media operator in Australia, this new feature will significantly extend the utility of our SBS in language capabilities beyond our traditional radio offering. For the first time, audiences will be able to create an SBS On Demand user account in a language other than
English, and enjoy all our of our video content in that language in one spot.
These services are undoubtedly of benefit to new Australians, but will also support the needs of a rapidly ageing population. We know that as people get older, they tend to revert to their first language. It’s important that we ensure everyone remains connected to Australian society, and continues to have a valued place within it.
Before I close, I’d like to thank you for your ongoing support. All of the communities represented in the room are important to us, and we continue to look for ways to connect, consult and engage with you.
Our hope for the country is to have a deeper understanding of Indigenous and multicultural Australia, and a greater reckoning with the possibilities of a more inclusive society.
We remain committed to providing the very important services we deliver to Australia’s communities, while at the same time helping all Australians better understand the complexity, nuance, joy and opportunity of a diverse Australia,
You all have an influential voice and I hope that in discussions about SBS and our contribution, you will continue to be powerful supporters of the important role we play for all Australians.
Thank you.
ENDS