The link below is to a book review of ‘Church Elders – How To Shepherd God’s People Like Jesus,’ by Jeramie Rinne.
For more visit:
http://matt-mitchell.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/review-church-elders-how-to-shepherd.html
Google Books Project Legal
The links below are to articles reporting on the latest news concerning the Google Book’s scanning project.
For more visit:
– http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/16/us-google-books-idUSKCN0SA1S020151016
– http://www.detroitnews.com/story/tech/2015/10/16/google-book-battle/74044360/
Life plus 70: who really benefits from copyright’s long life?
Catherine Bond, UNSW Australia
Few of us wish to disclose our age. But, for the purposes of this article, I am willing to do so: in 2012, I turned 30.
According to data generated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, a woman in Australia aged 30 in 2012 will likely live for another 54.90 years. If this figure is correct in my case, then copyright will protect this article for nearly 125 years. It will officially enter the public domain on 1 January, 2141.
Is what I say in this article so significant that I, and many generations of Bonds to come, should enjoy a right to control who copies this piece for the course of the next century and beyond?
Probably not. However, that is how copyright applies in Australia. So why do we protect copyright for the life of the creator plus 70 years?
Term of his natual life
The length of copyright protection has been in the news recently following the leaking of the Intellectual Property Chapter of the forthcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Under the TPP, Australia won’t be required to make any changes to our term of copyright for works (such as this article). We already introduced the TPP-mandated period of protection for published works – life of the author plus 70 years – when we signed the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement in 2004.
Before this, Australia’s term of protection was life of the author plus 50 years, which is the minimum standard required by the Berne Convention, our main international copyright agreement. However, other countries in the TPP, such as Canada and New Zealand, will need to extend copyright in works to life plus 70 years if the TPP proceeds.
For as long as there has been statutory copyright protection, there has been a stated term of protection for published works. That duration is seen as part of what is described as the “copyright balance”.
When the High Court of Australia considered in 2009 whether copyright should protect a TV guide created by Channel Nine in IceTV v Nine Network Australia, the judges stated that:
[…] the purpose of a copyright law respecting original works is to balance the public interest in promoting the encouragement of “literary”, “dramatic”, “musical” and “artistic works”, as defined, by providing a just reward for the creator, with the public interest in maintaining a robust public domain in which further works are produced.
Copyright provides authors with an incentive to create works and release these to the public, by rewarding that author with a number of rights for a limited period of time.
These rights include control over who can copy it or make it available online. In turn, during the term of copyright, the public can use the work as allowed under law, but after copyright expires, any person may copy the work in part or in whole in a variety of ways.
Out of public domain
Over the years, that period of protection has been extended a number of times to take account of factors, including the impact of war, although today copyright protects works for far longer than a patent might protect an invention (20 years) or a design (two terms of five years).
Jane Austen’s books, for example, have been in the public domain for more than 150 years. As a result, anyone can publish and sell their own edition of Emma or Sense and Sensibility, or use Austen’s characters in another story, as happened in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and its forthcoming film adaptation.
Robert Burdock/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND
When Austen died in 1817, copyright in her works passed to family members, as was intended under copyright law. A posthumous term of copyright was to ensure that heirs of the copyright owner could benefit from what his or her family member created, and to continue to enjoy some financial benefit after the death of the original author.
However, this does not always happen. Austen’s relatives sold the copyright in her works to an English book publisher in the 1830s, and it often happens that a publisher or another third party will own copyright.
When Men at Work were famously sued for copying the children’s song Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, the owner of the copyright was not Marian Sinclair, the writer of the song, or her direct heirs. Instead, it was a music publishing company, Larrikin, which purchased copyright in the song from the Public Trustee.
Today, we have empirical evidence that a strong public domain provides significant economic benefits.
Often these benefits are overlooked when we are negotiating trade agreements like the TPP, which may have broader strengths and consequences beyond those that affect IP. However, when the duration of copyright in an online article starts to sound like science fiction, it may be time to limit the time of copyright.
Catherine Bond, Senior Lecturer in Law, UNSW Australia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
How to read the Australian book industry in a time of change
Jan Zwar; David Throsby, and Thomas Longden
In 2014, the Department of Economics at Macquarie University began a three-year study to examine the responses of Australian authors, publishers and readers to global changes in the current publishing environment.
Last week we released the first stage of the study, based on a survey of more than 1,000 Australian book authors. Our findings show that while book authors are innovators in their professional practices, the financial rewards for initiative and experimentation are unevenly distributed.
Authors’ income
The average income of Australian authors is A$12,900. Although a fifth of authors write as their full-time occupation, only 5% earn the average annual income from their creative practice (which we calculate using ABS data as A$61,485 for the 2013-14 financial year). Most authors rely on other paid work and their partner’s income to make ends meet.
Compounding this is the recent fall in the average selling price of trade books. According to Beth Drumm, Sales and Marketing Manager in the Asia/Pacific division of Phoenix International Publications, the standard price of small-format publications has fallen from A$24.99 – A$29.99 to A$19.99 within the last five years. Highly discounted books sold by discount department stores (such as Kmart, Target and Big W) also impact on an author’s income.
Nearly a fifth of all authors earned over A$101,000 in the period of the survey, and a small proportion of authors (nearly 3%) earned more than A$101,000 from their creative practice alone.
An author’s capacity to earn income from other paid work is boosted by high levels of education. They also possess technical skills (the ability to compose, write and edit) that lead to work that does not produce creative output.
One of the greatest limiting factors for authors is finding time to write. Table 1 (below) shows the proportion of authors for whom insufficient income prevents them from writing further. Domestic responsibilities and the need to earn income from other sources affect more than half of authors.
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Another pressure on trade authors’ time is their increased role in promoting their books. With the rise of social and online media as important channels for promotion, more than half of all trade authors spend more time promoting their work than they did five years ago – and the rise of social media hasn’t negated the importance of in-person bookstore appearances.
Although we examine how changes are affecting all types of authors, in the remainder of this article we focus on the challenges facing literary fiction authors and poets in particular (while we use “literary” fiction, we are aware of the debates around the use of the term).
Literary fiction authors
Changes in the industry are increasing opportunities for authors to publish their work using cost-effective digital technologies and small print runs. Even so, nearly a third of these authors report being worse off financially compared to five years ago.
One factor for this may be the shift of a considerable amount of literary publishing in Australia from larger publishers to small, independent presses – very small presses may have more constraints on the size of advances, if any, they can offer authors, for example.
The top-earning quarter of literary authors earn on average A$9,000 a year from their writing. Literary fiction authors are the most likely to report that insufficient income from their writing prevents them from spending more time on writing (70%). Although the top-earning quarter of literary authors earn on average A$85,000, the majority of their income comes from other types of paid work.
Poets
The situation for poets is even more challenging. Nearly three quarters of Australian poets have changed the way they publish, distribute or promote their work. Poets are particularly innovative in finding new avenues for paid work and are also experimenting with self-publishing – but the average income earned from their creative practice by those in Australia’s top-earning quartile of poets is only A$4,900, the lowest average across any of the different types of authors.
Over half of poets reported no discernible change in their financial position over the past five years. Even though they are innovating and experimenting in their professional practices as well as stylistically (see, for example, the work of self-published performance and multimedia poet Candy Royalle) those changes are not leading to increased incomes.
At the launch of our research findings, Australian poet and author Steven Herrick encouraged poets to write in other genres to increase their incomes.
Herrick self-published a series of cycling memoirs set in Europe through Amazon, starting as an experiment. He quickly established a readership in the UK and he is about to release his fifth title in the series.
The market for literary fiction and poetry in Australia
At the moment, the market size for most Australian-authored literary works is modest. Most literary titles – apart from those by high-profile authors – have print runs of 2,000–4,000 copies.
Print runs for single volumes of poetry for adult readerships are even lower – often between 300 and 1,000 copies. In keeping with a centuries-old tradition, authors are creating their own publishing opportunities such as Kill Your Darlings, a literary journal founded in 2010, taking advantage of digital technology to keep costs down.
The actual size of the market for literary works in Australia, particularly for Australian-authored work, is unclear. There are no reliable statistics about the sales of literary books as a proportion of total trade sales, but during 2015 one member of our research team estimated that literary books comprise roughly 5% of trade sales, and less than half of these comprise Australian-authored literary works (onshore trade sales are worth approximately A$900 million).
A related question then arises as to whether it is possible to grow the size of readerships for literary works, and if so, how could that be done? Literary publishers around Australia are endeavouring to increase the size of their readerships but there are no short-cuts.
That’s because the pleasures and rewards of reading literary works are an acquired taste which develops over time. Further, Jim Demetriou, Sales and Marketing Director of Allen and Unwin, commented:
With literature each one of the author’s books is a totally different “animal” to the previous book, so you have to sell the concept and the idea behind each individual title. It’s generally a slower build unless it’s a big-name author who people recognise and understand.
The way forward
Studies of the book industry often refer to the tension between creative and commercial imperatives (see Merchants of Culture,2012, Words & Money, 2010, and Reluctant Capitalists, 2006).
There are no easy answers but the survey findings – and the initial discussion around them – suggest that Australian authors are engaging with changes in the industry and exploring new opportunities.
One feature of the Australian book industry is that authors, publishers and booksellers share a collaborative commitment to its cultural and commercial success. That’s something the new Book Council can bank on, with confidence.
For further information about the research, visit here.
Jan Zwar, Postdoctoral Research Fellow; David Throsby, Distinguished Professor of Economics, and Thomas Longden, Postdoctoral Research Fellow
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
An introduction to the literature of Indonesia, 2015 Frankfurt Book Fair’s Guest of Honour
Manneke Budiman, University of Indonesia
Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country and among the most culturally diverse. Yet not many people are familiar with literary works by Indonesian writers. Why is that? Well …
Indonesian literature plunged into obscurity following an anti-communist massacre in 1965-1966 that brought Suharto’s repressive New Order regime to power.
As we enter the 50th year of the communist purge, this is about to change. Indonesia is the Guest of Honour in this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, taking place from October 14 to 16.
That means, for the first time, Indonesian literature is in the global spotlight at the world’s largest book festival.
Below, Manneke Budiman, of the University of Indonesia’s literature department, gives an introduction to Indonesian literature and explains how colonial legacy plays a part in determining “Third World” authors’ place on the international literary stage.
What is the state of Indonesian literature in translation globally?
Indonesian literature is not widely known compared to works from other countries. Writings of Indonesian authors do not get translated as much as works by other authors of “Third World” countries. Colonial legacy plays a part in this.
Penguin
Authors from the former colonies of France and England have the attention of French or British publishers that own a large international market share. Big publishing houses such as Heinemann and Penguin have translated and published authors from India, Kenya, Senegal, Egypt, and Morocco.
In contrast, Dutch publishers rarely publish literary works from their former colonies, which includes Indonesia. Except for academic publishers, there are only few, if any, Dutch publishers with international access to global market.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet, published by Penguin, are the rare works that got translated into foreign languages during Suharto’s rule. His tetralogy eventually caught the attention of the Noble Prize Committee, which nominated him several times for the Noble Prize in Literature.
The Nobel Prize nominations show that Indonesian literature is not inferior to the literature of other countries. But there are questions as to whether it was his works or his status as political prisoner that made the Nobel Committee nominated Pramoedya. Some wondered whether the Committee nominated Pramoedya to pressure the Indonesian government to release him from prison.
How was the production of literature like following the communist purge?
Equinox Publishing Indonesia
Literary production remained consistently high even during the repressive era of Suharto.
In the 1970s and 1980s, works by women authors – such as Mira W., Marga T., La Rose, Ike Supomo, Titi Said, Nh. Dini, and Marianne Katoppo – dominated the scene. But many male critics tended to brush them aside as “women’s fiction”, which carries a negative connotation of having low literary quality.
After Suharto’s regime collapsed, the atmosphere changed dramatically. More women began to write. Very soon there was an “explosion” of titles by a new generation of female authors such as Ayu Utami, Linda Christanty, Nukila Amal, Fira Basuki, and Dewi Lestari. Ayu Utami’s Saman, for instance, has been translated into several Asian and European languages.
What are the characteristics of Indonesian literature?
The styles and characteristics of Indonesian literature change from time to time. They sometimes follow the political dynamics of the country and the region.
In the colonial era, local authors were heavily inspired by Western novels and poetry. Many writers produced adaptations of Western fiction in their local setting or even “plagiarised” works produced by their Western counterparts. Popular works such as Robinson Crusoe, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Sherlock Holmes were translated and adapted in Malay, Sundanese and Javanese languages in the late 19th century in the Netherlands Indies by Dutch, Chinese and indigenous translators.
In the 1920s and 1930s authors were preoccupied in finding the “right” language. Writers such as Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana and Sanusi Pane debated whether Indonesia had to abandon its traditional values and fully embraced Western modernity or vice versa.
Dalang Publishing
In the 1940s, as the nation struggled to free itself from colonial rule, authors became more straightforward and blunt. As the Japanese invaded and defeated the Dutch, a spirit of nationalism and militancy grew among authors. They also experimented with forms that were “borrowed” from the West – such as English war poems and works of fiction by European writers. Chairil Anwar and Idrus are examples par excellence of this instance.
Chairil’s poem, Antara Kerawang dan Bekasi (Between Kerawang and Bekasi) is suspected to be an adaptation of Sir Archibald Clark Kerr’s poem, whereas Idrus’ short-stories show striking similarities with works written by European writers in terms of the modernist ideas in his works, as discussed by Indonesian studies expert Keith Foulcher.
The Golden Age of Indonesian literature, according to many scholars, was the period between the 1950s and 1960s. Authors were working out how to connect traditions and local flavors with modern trends in literature.
In that period, the Cold War was raging. Many authors were fiercely involved in ideological tug of wars among themselves. Authors also began to seriously search for a distinct Indonesian identity through their works that could become part of the world culture. Unfortunately, that vibrancy had to abruptly end with the take over of power from Sukarno to Suharto.
After Suharto stepped down in 1998, there was a brief moment of euphoria among authors as freedom of speech and democratisation began to flourish. But the 32-year authoritarian rule seemed to have taught them not to be too optimistic. This is clearly reflected in the works of the post-Suharto writers, which are strongly marked by doubt and ambiguity about the future.
In those works, readers may sense a yearning for freedom from the haunting legacy of Suharto’s rule.
What are the main styles and themes?
Realism remains to be the dominant style, although sometimes it also blends with some kind of romanticism – a nostalgia for the lost past – and a sense of disillusionment that replaces it.
Dalang Publishing
There is also a trend of looking outward to what happens in other parts of the globe. Contemporary Indonesian writers are curious and adventurous in embracing cosmopolitanism and transcending national boundaries.
That’s particularly visible in the works of many current women authors. At the same time, their works also rebel against customary laws and traditions that marginalise women.
Young authors are not oblivious to the conditions of their country. They show genuine concern about what has happened in outer islands outside the primary island of Java.
Are there efforts to publish Indonesian literature in translation?
Amid the relatively meagre attention from big international publishers to Indonesian authors, a foundation and a small publishing house in the US are working to bring more English translations of Indonesian literature to international readers.
Lontar Foundation, founded by American John McGlynn, has done extraordinary work translating and publishing Indonesian literature in English. Lontar regularly publishes the Menageries Series containing translated works by Indonesian authors. It also published a collection of poems written by Indonesians about their American experience (On Foreign Shore) and a series of Indonesian classics.
Lontar
California-based Dalang Publisher, owned by Lian Gouw, a Chinese-American who spent her childhood in Indonesia before her family migrated to the US, has published several works of contemporary Indonesian writers in high-quality translation.
Some of the works that have been published by Dalang in translation are Remy Silado’s My Name Is Mata Hari (Namaku Mata Hari), Lan Fang’s novel Potions and Paper Cranes (Perempuan Kembang Jepun), Erni Aladjai’s Kei, Anindita S. Thayf’s Daughters of Papua (Tanah Tabu), Ahmad Tohari’s The Red Bekisar (Bekisar Merah), and Hana Rambe’s Cloves for Kolosia (Aimuna dan Sobori).
That list is by no means exhaustive, and it keeps on growing. Gouw seems to have a sharp sense of knowing which works may appeal to non-Indonesian audience. Her choices include works that are concerned with pluralism, ethnic and religious conflicts, colonialism, and injustice.
McGlynn, meanwhile, prefers choosing works of established or well-known authors, such as the poet Sapardi Djoko Damono, short-story writer Seno Gumira Ajidarma, and novelist Oka Rusmini.
There are other small-scale publishers that have published Indonesian works in German, Dutch, and French. But in general those publishers do not have the requisite international stature to draw a significant attention.
For newcomers to Indonesian literature, what are the titles to start with?
Lontar
Pramoedya’s tetralogy – The Earth of Mankind, The Child of All Nations, Glass House, and Footsteps – remain the most important books for foreign readership. Mangunwijaya’s The Weaverbirds is another classic that has become a must-read. These two senior authors are the best introduction to the dynamics and complexities of Indonesian society.
Oka Rusmini (Earth Dance), Seno Gumira Ajidarma (Jazz, Perfume & the Incident), Nukila Amal (Cala Ibi), Ayu Utami (Saman), belong to the generation that follows; and then young writers such as Erni Aladjai (Kei), Lan Fang (Potions and Paper Cranes), Anindita Thayf (Daughters of Papua), and Okky Madasari (Maryam).
The works of the new generation of writers works contain rich panorama of Indonesian social, cultural, and political dynamics viewed from different generational lenses.
The Frankfurt Book Fair runs until October 16. Details here.
Manneke Budiman, Lecturer at the Literature Department, University of Indonesia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Overcoming Reading Slumps
Book Deals
The link below is to an article that takes a look at book deals.
For more visit:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-p-david/whats-the-deal-with-book-_b_8263394.html
Some Creepy Book Trivia
The link below is to an article that takes a look at some creepy book trivia.
For more visit:
http://bookriot.com/2015/10/12/13-creepy-bits-bookish-trivia/
Svetlana Alexievich exposes the deep contradictions of the literature Nobel
Peter Boxall, University of Sussex
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2015 has been awarded to the Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich. Her writing, until now not well known in the Anglophone world, is difficult to categorise. In works such as Voices from Chernobyl and War’s Unwomanly Face, Alexievich develops a distinctive kind of documentary writing, drawn from large numbers of interviews, which gives an intimate picture of what it is like to be the victim of war, of state negligence, brutality or totalitarianism.
Neither fiction nor non-fiction, the work develops what the secretary to the Swedish Academy Sara Danius calls a “new literary genre”, which gives us “a history of human beings about whom we didn’t know that much”.
This is surely a welcome and brave award, for at least two reasons. The statement from the academy announces that the prize was awarded “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”.
Voices heard
The stress on the “polyphony” of her writing is significant; if it is the case that Alexievich is little known in the English-speaking world, this is partly because the financial pressures on contemporary publishers make it very difficult to publish work that does not conform to a very narrow set of generic and formal norms.
Alexievich’s work is difficult to categorise, and hence difficult to sell, and so nearly invisible. The prize will change this, and will at the same time do much to alert us to the growing importance of documentary writing elsewhere in Europe.
Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters
Equally significant is the assertion that Alexievich’s work represents a monument to a kind of experience – a kind of suffering – that ordinarily goes undocumented. In awarding Alexievich the prize, the academy has helped to ensure that the voices she records are heard on a much bigger stage.
With the award of this prize, the Academy is likely to bring an important body of writing to new audiences – something that is much harder to achieve with the better known contenders for the prize, such as Haruki Murakami or the perennial outsider Philip Roth.
Ideal directions
So this is a progressive and exciting choice. But it is also one that is mired in the contradictions that surround the prize – contradictions that are perhaps inherent in the concept of literary prizes in general, but which are sharpened by the terms of Alfred Nobel’s original bequest.
Nobel specified in his will that all five prizes were to be awarded to those who, in a given year, “have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind”. The prize for literature, he goes on, is to be awarded to “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”.
The history of the prize has been the history of attempts to interpret this stipulation. How are we to quantify or to characterise the benefit that art confers on mankind, and what does it mean for literature to take an “ideal direction”? There has been a long tradition of awarding the prize to writers, such as Alexievich, whose work “benefits” us by drawing attention to the injustices which are perpetrated against the weak, the powerless or the dispossessed.
We might think that the award of the prize to Samuel Beckett in 1969 and to J M Coetzee in 2003 belongs to that tradition. These writers, like Alexievich, might be seen to erect a “monument to suffering”.
But in awarding the prize to writers who give us such naked and powerful accounts of the privations of human beings, the academy might appear to be in breach of that second stipulation: that recipients should travel in an “ideal direction”. In awarding the prize to Coetzee, the academy wrote that the value of his work lay in part in his principled refusal of ideals, his absolute commitment to depicting suffering as it is, rather than as we would like it to be.
“His intellectual honesty”, the academy wrote, “erodes the basis of all consolation, and distances itself from the tawdry drama of remorse and confession”. This is work that resists the consolations or ornament of lyricism; but in recognising the power of this kind of vision, the academy is led to betray its spirit, to transform a difficult, bleak vision, into a redemptive one, one which leads in an “ideal direction”.
Cui bono?
In honouring Alexievich, the academy has done a great service to literature, giving new audiences to a writer who has dedicated her life to speaking for those who have few means of articulating their own experiences. But it has done so in a way that exposes, again, the contradictions in Nobel’s bequest – contradictions that are absolutely central to the idea that we should think of art as conferring a benefit to mankind.
The Nobel Prize seeks to weaponise art, to deploy it in a battle against social injustice. This is a noble aim, but it leads us again and again to make something consoling out of a picture of suffering, or to imagine that art is a kind of alchemy that can make of the terrors it witnesses something restorative, or palliative.
The impossible demand that art makes of us is perhaps to recognise that its benefits are not measurable by existing instruments, and are not “conferred” upon mankind by any reliable mechanism. But in the absence of any readily available means of meeting that demand, the Nobel’s recognition of Alexievich’s courageous work is welcome indeed.
Peter Boxall, Professor of English, University of Sussex
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Book review: Takeover – Foreign Investment and the Australian Psyche
Mark Beeson, University of Western Australia
Some things never change. One of the perennial features of Australia’s economic and political discourse is how to deal with foreign investment and ownership. Given Australia’s historical reliance on foreign capital to fund national development, this is more surprising than it might seem.
David Uren is one of Australia’s best economic commentators. His excellent analysis of Australian attitudes toward foreign investment in Takeover – Foreign Investment and the Australian Psyche explains how the frequently conflicting views of free traders and protectionists – whether on the political left or right – have shaped public policy.
The “national interest”, at least as far as economic policy is concerned, has always been a contested compromise and a consequence of the relative political influence of these domestic forces. This is an important conclusion that emerges from Uren’s detailed exploration of Australia’s economic history.
If there is one criticism to be made about the book it is that Uren is at times surprisingly reserved about spelling out the implications of his own analysis. Dispassionate disinterest has its merits, but it is somewhat surprising that someone whose day job is writing for The Australian is not more forceful in spelling out the book’s central argument about a liberal investment regime’s possible merits.
As it is, the book has a rather “academic” feel, at least as far as the content is concerned. One of its strengths is in making clear just what a long-standing part of Australia’s economic and political history anxiety about foreign investment actually is, and how this has shaped domestic political debates and attitudes.
As Uren points out, when Joe Hockey blocked the takeover of GrainCorp by the US multinational Archer Daniels Midland in 2013, he employed precisely the same sorts of arguments that were made to justify protectionism in the 1850s.
That the Abbott government could snub a company from the US – Australia’s closest strategic ally – is indicative of the domestic political sensitivity of foreign investment. It’s also a reminder of the Nationals’ enduring influence on trade and investment issues. The rise of China as Australia’s most important trading partner and a growing source of investment adds an additional layer of complexity to the task of deciding what’s in Australia’s supposed national interest.
In this context, at least, Uren is unambiguous. The way questions about the national interest are decided in relation to investment is “a travesty”, he argues, and “lacks transparency, predictability and accountability”. He is especially scathing about the way policy toward Chinese investment has been handled.
And yet, concerns about the nature of China’s form of “state capitalism” are not without foundation. Market forces and a concern about short-term profitability are not the sole determinant of investment decisions by state-owned enterprises. Even if such policies are ultimately misguided and destined to fail, it is important that other governments recognise their potential impact on economic and even strategic outcomes.
Black Inc
Uren gives this possibility short shrift. But even if he’s right about the largely beneficial impact of foreign investment, it might have been useful to give more consideration to the origins of inward capital flows.
It often does make a difference where it comes from, how foreign multinationals operate, and what their relationship is with their countries of origin. Japanese multinationals really did try to shape the resource trade in the 1980s and the possible implications of that experience have not been lost on China’s policymakers.
The key question Australian policymakers have to consider is about the long-term impact of investment decisions that are made elsewhere, but which ultimately help to determine the structure of the national economy. This is no easy task. Some observers think the national economy no longer actually exists as a discrete entity over which policymakers can exercise control.
But even if “globalisation” has transformed an increasingly integrated international economy, politics remains relentlessly local – and so do most people’s jobs.
So while Uren might be right to highlight the rent-seeking behaviour of foreign multinationals in the car industry, for example, the reality is that they provided relatively high-skill, well-paid jobs for many Australians – not to mention the backbone of a national manufacturing capacity.
The problem with letting footloose multinational capital make all the decisions about where investment occurs is that Australia may end up with an economy that is narrowly focused and overly reliant on activities that are prone to cyclical booms and busts. That is precisely where Australia finds itself.
If the national economic interest means anything, it must surely refer to policies and outcomes that benefit the majority of the population who live in a particular place.
It is already clear that the vast wealth generated by the resource boom was squandered. It is also evident that the effort to tax the primarily foreign companies that were the resource boom’s principal beneficiaries was, according to Uren:
… one of the greatest failures of public policy in the history of Australian government.
It is not necessary to agree with Uren’s concerns about the possibly negative impact of nationalist sentiment on investment policy and decisions to recognise that this book is a significant contribution to our understanding of why foreign investment remains a contentious area of public policy.
As no less a figure than Malcolm Turnbull declares on the back cover, the book:
… explains the lay of the land today.
Indeed it does, prime minister – even if the author could have been a bit more forthright about his conclusions.
Mark Beeson, Professor of International Politics, University of Western Australia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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