Government agency Screen Australia released its annual Drama Report on content spending for 2024/2025 today, and the kids genre did not fare well. 

Just US$22 million was invested in children’s programming, which is down by 41% from the previous year. Only five titles made it into production—local titles Ginger and the Vegesaurs (season four), Knee High Spies (pictured), Whale Shark Jack and official co-pros Flower and Flour and It’s Andrew!—compared to seven in 2023/2024. And the number of hours of content produced shrunk by 38% to 21.

ABC Australia commissioned four of these new shows, with Stan behind the remaining one. And in terms of other funding, four of the projects were supported by Screen Australia and  three by the Australian Children’s Television Foundation. 

Interestingly, the country’s broader production industry appears to be on an upswing. Screen Australia highlighted that expenditure on all programming made in Australia was US$1.7 billion, which is up 43% from 2023/2024. But focusing on that number paints a misleading picture of how the industry is really doing, says trade org Screen Producers Australia, noting in a statement that more international productions are being shot in Australia, but fewer local productions are getting made. 

Expenditure in Australia.  Kids content spend is down for the second consecutive year. The numbers are in AUD. Courtesy of Screen Australia.

Across all content genres, local productions accounted for less than half (40%) of total content spend this year. And the number of Australian projects that started production dropped from 89 to 71. 

Pure expenditure numbers also don’t tell a complete story because they fail to reflect IP rights retention, SPA says. Financing deals with global buyers often require producers to trade away IP ownership to secure production funding, so without data on ownership, there’s no way to tell whether Australia’s producers are actually set up for long-term sustainability. 

“Record expenditure alongside falling local output creates a false sense of stability,” said SPA CEO Matthew Deaner. “If Australia is serious about maintaining a sovereign, resilient screen industry, public policy must look beyond headline spending and address volume, ownership and long-term value for Australian producers.”

But could 2025/2026 be different for children’s content producers who, as this report shows, have a limited number of funding sources to tap and are getting fewer projects into production? It’s possible that the upcoming legislation requiring large global streamers doing business in the country to fund local content—including kids programming—will help reverse this trend. 

Announced last week, those streamer quotas are expected to go into effect January 1. And the government also awarded ABC Australia a surprise US$32.6 million in extra funding to invest specifically in kids content.