The Vincent Committee

This is the Senate Select Committee on the Encouragement of Australian Productions for Television. 

Part One is here.

From a biography of Senator Vincent:

The committee’s report, released on 29 October 1963, was broad in scope and far-reaching in its effect on the future of the performing arts in Australia. It was chaired by Senator Vincent who would die in 1964.

 The report saw television and film as interrelated but dependent on live theatre, ‘the real home of the actor and the producer’. 

It recommended that Australian theatre productions should be shown on television; that actors’ pay and conditions should be improved; that young actors and producers of high promise and ability be given scholarships for overseas training (on condition that they return to Australia); and that a comprehensive policy be adopted on assistance to reputable and competent theatrical groups. 

The committee’s labours received little public acknowledgment. The report ‘was presented in the dying hours of the last Parliament and … in the midst of election fever’. No Cabinet ministers spoke during the debate on the report, and the Government was reluctant to spend any money on implementing the report’s recommendations. The major newspaper groups, who were also owners of commercial television channels likely to be affected by demands to show more local productions, greeted the report ‘with a thunderous silence’. 

Although the Vincent Report had no initial impact, its long-term influence on national arts policy was seminal. The report arguably influenced those calling for a direct government role in policymaking, especially Vincent’s Liberal Senate colleague and close friend John Gorton who, on becoming Prime Minister in 1968, began the process of establishing the Australian Film and Television School, and made the Australian Council of the Arts operational.