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Is Australian literature about to be handed a death sentence?

The question has been raised after the release of a report from the Productivity Commission, the government's economic think-tank, which has recommended the abolition of restrictions on importing books, which have driven up prices but helped nurture local authors.

Under the existing law, Australian publishers are given a 30-day period to release a local version of a book that could be imported more cheaply from Britain or America. Aussie bookshops are then compelled to sell the Aussie version of the book, even though they could source the same books more inexpensively abroad.

The idea is that Australian authors, like Tim Winton and Kate Grenville, are protected for 30 days and get paid decent royalties for internationally-acclaimed books. After that grace period is up, foreign-made imports pay a much lower royalty.

The argument is that the next wave of Tim Wintons - literary pun unintended - would not emerge if the present system was scrapped.

The big bookshops and supermarkets claim it places them at a competitive disadvantage, because consumers can now import cheaper books themselves through online stores.

They also argue that the Aussie consumer is subsidising the whole scheme through inflated prices. The Productivity Commission report basically agrees.

In language that seems to borrow heavily from the Kevin Rudd phrasebook, the report notes: "Reform of the current arrangements is necessary, to place downward pressure on book prices, remove constraints on the commercial activities of booksellers and overcome the poor targeting of assistance to the cultural externalities".

Consider that last sentence again: "overcome the poor targeting of assistance to the cultural externalities".

Deciphered, this means that the Productivity Commission believes that local authors would be better and more efficiently supported by direct grants rather than the present system.

Having come under attack, some of the country's leading literary lights have deployed the most powerful weapon at their disposal: words.

The Tasmania-based author Richard Flanagan has been typically vivid: 'It is inconceivable that a national Labor Government would so casually destroy Australian culture in support of the free-trade zealotry that gave the world the global financial crisis.'

'Yet it is that which the Australian people must now conceive of as possible. If Kevin Rudd adopts this report he will go to his grave as the man who made a bonfire of Australian writing, and hailed the ash as reform.'

In a submission to the Productivity Commission, Tim Winton wrote: 'Copyright recognises and enshrines the value of original work. Copyright is the single most important industrial fact in a writer's life, the civilising influence of a culture upon a market.'

All this puts Kevin Rudd in an awkward position, as he weighs whether or not to accept the commission's findings. Since entering The Lodge, the Prime Minister has instituted two literary prizes - one for fiction, one for non-fiction - which are among the richest in the world. He has also written a number of lengthy essays for The Monthly, the Australian equivalent of the New Yorker.

Yet there are also times when he likes to parade his anti-intellectualism - critics would say his philistinism - with his strange use of language, and phrases like 'Fair shake of the sauce bottle, mate'.

As a self-proclaimed economic conservative, he may warm to the market-based economic arguments laid out by the Productivity Commission. But as an Australian nationalist and part-time public intellectual he may be persuaded by the need to protect some of the country's most premium cultural exports: its writers.

This is also an issue with worldwide resonance: how do small- to medium-sized countries protect their culture in this age of rampant globalisation?

PS. Ironically, It has been a very strong year for Aussie literature, what with Tim Winton's enchanting paean to the sea, Breath, and Steve Toltz's riotous Fraction of the Whole, which was short-listed for the Booker. I suppose you could also argue that Aravind Adiga's sharp-eyed take on modern-day Delhi, White Tiger, which won the Booker, had a faint 'Made in Australia' stamp, since he was educated here.

For weeks, I've been meaning to blog on the book of the moment, The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas. Trouble is, I went to buy it at the airport before leaving the country, and it was sold out. So, I'm going to read it over the next month, and will blog on it four weeks from today. If you want to weigh in on a book that is supposed to offer an especially acute take on the Howard years, and haven't read it already, you have 28 days to do so.......

PPS Strangely, I'd written this before Whitlamite's tirade, but it got superseded by the Ashes. This irrational hatred of cricket? You are starting to sound like my wife.......

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