Victoria, NSW, and Queensland all fund film differently and the results prove it

The three largest state screen agencies in Australia operate from the same broad mandate (grow the local screen industry) and arrive at three different conclusions about what that means in practice. Screen Victoria prioritises development. Screen NSW prioritises production. Screen Queensland prioritises location incentives. Each model produces a different kind of industry, attracts a different kind of project, and leaves a different kind of gap. None of them is wrong, exactly, but the differences matter, and the lack of coordination between them matters more.

Victoria: the development model

Screen Victoria has, for the past decade, positioned itself as the agency most interested in the early stages of a project’s life. Its development funding is comparatively generous: writers and producers can access multiple rounds of support to move a project from concept to script to package. The agency funds labs, attachments, and mentorships. It runs initiatives aimed at first- and second-time feature filmmakers. The cultural mandate is explicit: Screen Victoria wants to fund Australian stories, and it defines “Australian” broadly enough to include diasporic and migrant narratives that other agencies have historically been slower to support.

The result is a strong development pipeline and a weaker production pipeline. Victoria produces more scripts and more packaged projects per capita than any other state, but a significant percentage of those projects are ultimately produced elsewhere, often in NSW or Queensland, where the production incentives are larger. The frustration for Victorian filmmakers is real: the state invests in the creative work and another state captures the production spend. Screen Victoria’s response has been to increase its production attraction funding, but it remains outbid by NSW and Queensland on large-scale projects.

What Victoria does well is the sub-$5 million feature. Films like The Nightingale, Babyteeth, and The Dry were developed and produced with Screen Victoria support, and they represent the kind of culturally specific, mid-budget work that the agency’s model is designed to produce. The question is whether that category of film has a sustainable future as theatrical distribution contracts and streaming acquisition prices decline.

NSW: the production model

Screen NSW operates with a more explicitly economic mandate. The agency’s flagship program, the Made in NSW fund, is a production incentive that offers rebates of up to 10 per cent of qualifying expenditure for projects that shoot in the state. The emphasis is on production volume: how many shooting days, how much local spend, how many local crew employed. The fund is competitive and tends to favour projects with confirmed financing, distribution, and cast, which means it disproportionately supports projects that are already well advanced in their development.

This model attracts large-scale productions, including international projects that choose NSW for its combination of incentives, infrastructure (Fox Studios, various sound stages), and crew base. It also means that the agency’s portfolio skews toward bigger-budget work and away from the early-career and low-budget projects that Screen Victoria supports more actively.

The gap in the NSW model is development. Screen NSW does fund development, but the amounts are smaller and the programs are fewer. A NSW-based filmmaker developing a first feature has less state support available than a Victorian counterpart, and the production incentives are structured in a way that favours projects with existing momentum. The result is an industry that is strong at the top (large productions, established filmmakers, international co-productions) and thinner at the base (emerging voices, experimental work, low-budget features).

Queensland: the location model

Screen Queensland has leaned furthest into the location-incentive model, positioning the state as a destination for productions that want tropical, subtropical, or regional landscapes, studio space at the Village Roadshow Studios on the Gold Coast, and a cost of living that is lower than Sydney or Melbourne. The agency’s Production Attraction Strategy offers incentives that are explicitly tied to location: shoot in regional Queensland and the rebate increases. Use the Gold Coast studios and additional support is available.

This model has been effective at attracting large international productions. The Thor franchise, Aquaman, and various Netflix and Amazon series have used Queensland facilities and locations. The economic impact is significant: these productions employ hundreds of local crew and spend millions in the local economy. The cultural impact is less clear. A Marvel film shot on the Gold Coast is a Queensland production in the economic sense but not in any narrative sense. The stories being told in Queensland’s studios are rarely about Queensland.

The gap in the Queensland model is local content. Screen Queensland does fund local projects, but the agency’s public profile and its largest expenditures are oriented toward attraction rather than origination. Queensland-originated features and series exist, but they compete for attention and resources with the international productions that the agency’s model prioritises.

The mid-budget problem

The project that falls through the cracks in all three models is the mid-budget Australian feature: the $3 million to $8 million film with an Australian cast, an Australian story, and no international pre-sales. This film needs development support (which Victoria provides), production incentives (which NSW provides), and affordable locations (which Queensland provides), but it cannot access all three simultaneously because the state agencies operate independently and their programs are not designed to complement each other.

A national coordination mechanism, something that allowed a project to access development funding from one state and production incentives from another without penalty, would address this. Screen Australia operates at the federal level but does not coordinate state funding in this way. The result is a system where each state optimises for its own priorities, and the projects that do not fit neatly into any single state’s model are the ones that struggle most to get made.

Competition or coordination

The argument for state competition is that it drives efficiency: each agency sharpens its offering to attract projects, and the market sorts itself out. The argument for national coordination is that the Australian screen industry is too small to sustain three competing models, and that the competition produces waste (multiple agencies bidding for the same international production) and gaps (mid-budget local work that no single agency is structured to support).

Both arguments have merit. Neither has won. The three agencies continue to operate independently, each funding film differently, each producing different results, and each leaving a different category of work underfunded. The system works well enough that it persists, and poorly enough that the same complaints recur at every industry conference, every funding round, and every post-mortem for the Australian film that almost got made but did not.