Veteran actress Noni Hazelhurst has launched a stinging attack on the lack of quality film and television productions in Australia, saying the "cultural drought" is a form of child abuse.
A former Play School presenter, the 54-year-old Hazelhurst used her speech at the Screen Producers Association of Australia annual conference on the Gold Coast today to deliver a brutal assessment of the mass media in the country.
Hazelhurst told the audience at the Sheraton Mirage that young children were being fed an imbalanced diet of information, images and concepts that overloaded their brains and caused their imaginations to atrophy.
"In my view, it constitutes nothing less than child abuse," said Hazelhurst, an Ambassador for Children's Week since 1991.
"Why is it that we seem to be concerned about regulating the food available through tuckshops or advertised on TV, but unwilling or unable to tackle the lack of quality sustenance for their minds and spirits?
"We are suffering a cultural drought and when you're parched, when you're desperate for a drink and you have no options, you take whatever you can get."
Hazelhurst, who began her acting career in television serials produced by Crawford Productions, bemoaned the lack of creativity and originality in the film and TV industry.
"I believe our children's imaginations are dying too, and it scares the hell out of me," she said in her Hector Crawford Memorial Lecture.
"They are growing up in the age of terrorism and fatuousness - the images that will be their earliest memories are the images of 9/11 and Britney Spears.
"And no one's doing anything about it."
An actor in Australian crime drama City Homicide, Hazelhurst said she was furious about the dumbing-down of audiences and "the constant call for clones of previous successes".
"The lunatics are truly in charge of the asylum," she said.
"Millions of dollars are poured into making junk palatable.
"Bells and whistles, garish sets, flashy cutting, wobbly cameras ... try to disguise the fact that the emperor's got no clothes."
Hazelhurst noted that the mainstream media fixated "on the worst, the most violent, the most dysfunctional and the stupidest", leading to depression, anxiety, addictions and personality disorders affecting people at a younger age.
"Kids are suffering mid-life crises in their teen years, because they're being forced to cope with too much, too soon," she said.
"We are failing our children and ourselves on a grand scale."
Hazelhurst said it was "incomprehensible" that in 2007 the film and TV industry was still fighting to achieve decent Australian content standards and funding levels.
She believed commercial values and market forces had replaced creativity and quality, resulting in TV and film productions that were a "mish-mash of recycled and watered-down insulting dross".
"It doesn't amuse or entertain, because it's all the same and because it bears no relationship to life as most of us experience it," said Hazelhurst.
"Most of what's on offer is completely out of touch, while pretending, or possibly believing itself to be the only game in town."
