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Guidelines
Assessing balance: Australian spend

Once the financial contributions of each co-producer are identified, you need to demonstrate to Screen Australia that your creative contribution is reasonably equivalent to your financial contribution.

Australian spend is one of the ways Screen Australia assesses the creative contribution of the Australian co-producer (the other way is Australian points – testing the proportion of Australian nationals in key roles through a points test).

As an indicator of Australian creative contribution, ‘Australian spend’ refers to the proportion of the budget which is spent on Australians and Australian service providers.

Australian spend includes expenditure on goods provided by Australians, Australian service providers and the use of Australian locations such as the Australian producer’s fee, the preparation of a budget by an Australian line producer and production catering services in Australia. We will look at the Australian spend in comparison to expenditure on services provided by the other co-producer(s).

Note: Australian expenditure does not necessarily equate to Qualifying Australian Production Expenditure (QAPE) for the Producer Offset, but is likely to be similar. For example, the cost of an Australian editor working on post-production in the UK counts as Australian spend for the purposes of the co-production equivalence test, but it would not be QAPE. Our fact sheet Producer Offset and Co-productions, available at right, provides more information.