Cheaper content, but not just yet. That’s the message in the federal government’s response to the parallel import recommendations by the Harper Review on competition policy.
Australians have long sought quick and cheap access to intellectual property, particularly copyright works such as books and recordings, by importing that content from legitimate sources located overseas. Copyright law has a territorial basis, potentially restricting cross-border movement of commercial quantities of books, videos, sound recordings, computer software, maps and other works. Licensing regimes give copyright owners exclusive rights in a particular territory such as Australia.
One result, highlighted by the Productivity Commission, Parliament and scholars such as Matthew Rimmer, is that copyright owners in the northern hemisphere have been able to charge Australian consumers a premium on products for sale in their own jurisdictions. Think of it as a form of copyright colonialism – the Australian student, mum, dad or academic pays 50% more than their counterparts in the USA. The premium isn’t justified by the cost of shipping the paper and plastic from Los Angeles and London, or from distribution centres in Singapore and Hong Kong.
Australian law currently allows consumers to import “non-commercial” (i.e. personal) copies of books and other content from overseas. The law however restricts importation by retailers. That typically benefits copyright owners and their licensees rather than consumers. That restriction is anti-competitive. It has accordingly been criticised by the Productivity Commission over the past two decades. It is axiomatic that timely and cheap access to content is a social good, irrespective of whether it’s a Justin Bieber clip or the latest tract from Giorgio Agamben.
In conducting a “root & branch” review of competition policy the Harper Committee recommended removal of the parallel import restrictions. By implication, retailers could source legitimate stock of books and other material overseas (i.e. not from pirates) and sell the products in Australia. The expectation is that supply would often be quicker and cheaper than current arrangements. Licensees would have an incentive to get their version of the product into the shops rather than delaying or engaging in egregious rent-seeking.
The Harper recommendations have been criticised by some publishers and authors, typically because changes will affect the profitability of local publishers (either overseas owned or relying on licensed sales of overseas material to fund local creators).
The bigger picture
The recommendations sit alongside ongoing structural change to Australian markets for content, with for example accessing software online and uptake of video services such as Netflix that operate on a global basis.
In responding to Harper the government has indicated it will remove the parallel import restrictions on books … but not just yet.
Removal will be “progressed” once the Productivity Commission’s inquiry into intellectual property is completed and there has been “consultation with the sector on transitional arrangements”. The Commission’s report is due in mid 2016, with action presumably taking place after a general election and potentially accompanied by industry support funding to local publishers.
Overseas car makers and Australian suppliers, pending the imminent demise of Australian production, have been comforted by retention of restrictions on parallel imports of second-hand cars.
The response needs to be read in context, with the government rejecting Harper’s recommendation for a “separate independent review” of “processes for establishing negotiating mandates” to incorporate intellectual property provisions in international trade agreements.
In other words, the government is relying on unsubstantiated claims that there are “robust arrangements in place to ensure appropriate levels of transparency” in agreements such as the TransPacific Partnership Agreement that favour overseas “old industries”.
The claims are deeply problematic. ALP and Coalition ministers have strongly resisted disclosure of information about those agreements. The Productivity Commission has condemned the “black box” approach to negotiation. There are perceptions that Foreign Affairs reads “best outcome” as announcement of a deal rather than lower cost to consumers/taxpayers through a tougher stance on patents, trademarks and copyright.
The parallel import reforms are a good thing for consumers and the overall economy. We need however to move to a more progressive IP regime, one where the temper is democratic and bias is Australian rather than privileging Unilever, Microsoft, Disney and Pfizer. The government’s other responses to Harper’s intellectual property recommendations are weak. That might be through lack of understanding or unwillingness to provoke key stakeholders such as Foxtel.
While cheering the prospect of cheaper books, let’s ask some hard questions about incentives for innovation in key sectors such as biotechnology and software. Are our policy-settings appropriate as we move into a borderless world where people consume bits rather than atoms?
In September 2005, Melbourne University Press (MUP) published former Labor opposition leader Mark Latham’s personal diaries, covering the 11-year period he served in parliament. The book turned Latham, who resigned as leader and from parliament in January that year, into a pariah in the ALP’s eyes.
In the book, Latham does not hold back on his opinions of caucus colleagues, factional leaders, union heavyweights, business elites and journalists. The book caused a sensation. It not only included Latham’s own views, but recounted comments from other Labor caucus members and party figures, many of which were scathing.
Sales-wise, The Latham Diaries was a huge success. MUP ordered a second print run before the book had even been released.
I first read the book in 2005. The book does contain vitriolic insults about political figures of the day. But what struck me then and has remained with me was that The Latham Diaries provided an excellent discussion of the parliamentary Labor Party in the wilderness years post-Paul Keating.
Given that the book was released so soon after Latham quit parliament, I decided a re-reading was warranted in order to determine how well the book had aged and if there were larger lessons that could be taken from it a decade on.
An outsider within caucus
From the time he was a backbencher in the Keating government through to his stint as leader, entries in the book often end with Latham declaring himself the outsider. Latham views himself as a lone operator who often finds only Keating and Gough Whitlam agreeing with his position and encouraging him to keep up “the good fight”.
Within the book Latham is a “true believer”, battling against the ALP’s machine men. But his view of Labor and what it stands for is a romanticised one.
Latham looks back with rose-coloured glasses to mythical glory days, when a purer ALP was committed to improving the lives of working-class Australians. He forgets the splits and factionalism that are just as much a part of ALP history as the campaigns for a minimum wage and universal health care.
Former prime minister Gough Whitlam was a mentor to Mark Latham during his time in Parliament. AAP/Mick Tsikas
Rejection of the old
Latham despairs at Labor’s rejection of the legacy of the Hawke-Keating economic reforms. He claims that the ALP under Kim Beazley’s leadership was so eager to distance itself from the Hawke-Keating era that no-one – including Beazley – seemed to know what the party stood for.
For Latham, the wilderness years of opposition were unbearable. He is utterly contemptuous of Beazley’s attempts to gain government:
After six years of Beazley’s small-target strategy, we face an identity crisis. The True Believers don’t know what we stand for and the swinging voters have stopped trying to find out.
Latham’s view was that the ALP should gain government because of the appeal of its policies, rather than strategic targeting and poll-driven responses to issues of the day.
Out of step with his party
One of the most interesting things about Latham is that his passion for economic reform – including reduction of tariffs, fiscal accountability, winding up generational reliance on welfare – and his belief in social capital was at the forefront of social democratic thinking in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
While the ALP was busy distancing itself from the economic reforms of the Hawke-Keating era, many social democrats in Europe and the US were using the reforms as a successful example of “Third Way” thinking. Latham was one of the leading advocates of Third Way politics in Australia during this period and published on the topic.
The Latham Diaries provides an insight into Latham’s views on where the ALP should be heading. While interested in the stories and lessons told by Keating and Whitlam, for Latham the real excitement is always in the future:
That’s the difference between us. I see a problem in the public arena and think: how do I solve it and explain the solution to people? Beazley sees a problem and thinks: how do I analyse it and exploit it?
Latham’s other area of concern focuses on his view that there is a social capital deficit in Australia which not only has a negative impact on political engagement, but also on the way in which we all live our lives. Latham regrets the lack of community that seems to pervade the sprawling Australian suburbs.
ALP factionalism
Throughout the book, it is clear that Latham understands how the factional system of the ALP works:
My belief in adventurism means that I will always have an uneasy relationship with the NSW Right … I joined the Right in the mid-1980s for pragmatic reasons: in a two-faction state you had to join one of them to have any hope of preselection.
The faction, however, is based on a culture of anti-intellectualism. Policy is made through a series of deals rather than the public interest.
Latham’s own behaviour is at times partly driven as a response to the factional system:
Simon Crean’s leadership came under pressure from the factional and union interests opposed to organisational reform … I resolved to remain loyal to his leadership, mainly on principle but also out of self-interest, as this assisted my rehabilitation in caucus after three years on the backbench.
Like many former members of caucus, upon leaving parliament Latham reveals a hatred of the factional system and the rise of machine men controlling the party. His disdain for the “three roosters” – Stephen Smith, Wayne Swan and Stephen Conroy – is evident in many of the entries:
These roosters have not learned anything from the leadership debacle. They are small-minded troublemakers and white-anters who would love to see me fall over to hurt Crean – two for the price of one.
Mark Latham made clear his disdain for the ALP’s factional system, run by the likes of Stephen Conroy. AAP/Alan Porritt
The relationship between the press and caucus
The contempt Latham has for the press gains momentum throughout the book. In particular, Latham targets:
… the three gallery journalists who have run a ten-year critique on me are Oakes (Jabba), Grattan and Milne (the Dwarf).
Latham despises the culture of leaking among his colleagues. He quotes a June 2003 speech he gave supporting Simon Crean’s leadership:
If the push against our leader were to succeed, it would set a shocking precedent. This long campaign of leaking, backgrounding and sabotage would be legitimised within the ALP.
Following Crean’s departure as opposition leader, Latham assumes the role and tries to deal with the leaking within caucus:
I’ve had my suspicions for some time now that Rudd has been feeding material to Oakes. Decided to set him up, telling Kevvie about our focus groups on Iraq. No such research exists … Today right on cue Jabba has written in The Bulletin.
Post-2004 election fallout
Latham’s angst at the sacrifice of time with his family for his political career is genuine. He and his second wife, Janine, discussed whether or not he should continue in the role:
What can I do now? Three more years in this rotten job, three more years staring across the chamber at a Tory government … It’s tempting to pull the pin.
Having decided to remain as opposition leader, at the end of 2004 Latham suffered a second attack of pancreatitis, which he thinks was most likely a result of radiotherapy treatment he received for his cancer:
It’s all turned to seed: pancreatitis, time away from home, loss of privacy, impact on family, so many ficklers in politics, disdain for the media and the whingeing, gossiping, sickening caucus … that thing they call the Labor Party.
The relief Latham feels at his escape from the rigours of political life is evident.
Lasting lessons
While the book ends with Latham happy at being able to spend time with his family and regain his privacy, the reader is left with one over-arching question: how do we fix this problem?
Latham described an Australia where the country’s main reform party rejected its economic credentials, played small-target politics and refused to engage in the major debate on political philosophy of the late 20th century.
Ten years on, many of the complaints Latham made about the workings of Australia’s parliamentary system have moved from the secret inner sanctum of Canberra to everyday news events:
In-depth policy debate appears to be a thing of the past as politicians from both sides simply repeat the slogan of the day at whatever event they happen to be at.
Leaking dominates the political environment. A mixture of disgruntled MPs seeking retribution and the ambitious looking to make friends in the press gallery provides the daily fodder that now dominates political coverage.
The flaws in our political system that Latham highlighted continue to affect us. Australia remains a poorer nation as a result. Ultimately, The Latham Diaries remains a seminal piece – not only having revealed the ALP’s inner workings, but having highlighted policy issues and structural problems that continue to be of concern a decade on.
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?
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.
Innovative works such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies are made possible only once copyright lapses. 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.
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.
Justin Heazlewood’s Funemployed (2014) explores what it’s really like to be a working artist in Australia.
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.
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
Australian poet Rachel Smith participated in the Multipoetry project by the Krakow City of Literature. The Melbourne UNESCO City of Literature Office and Australian Poetry brokered the involvement of Australian 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.
After his first self-publishing experiment proved a success, Steven Herrick wrote a series while continuing to publish books with traditional publishers. Not all self-publishing experiences are so positive.
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 poetCandy 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.
Kill Your Darlings was founded by authors Rebecca Starford and Hannah Kent.
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.
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
Australian Michael Robotham has taken home one of the most prestigious crime fiction awards around, the British Crime Writers’ Association Golden Dagger with Life or Death, beating out an impressive international field.
Predictably, much has been made of Robotham’s nationality. The Guardian’s headline reads “Australian ghostwriter beats Stephen King and J.K. Rowling to top UK crime writing award” .
The Age’s Literary Editor Jason Steger notes that Robotham “is only the second Australian to win after Peter Temple in 2007 for The Broken Shore” .
While these writers take Robotham’s nationality for granted, I wonder whether
this is the best way to describe him or his fiction. As the winning novel is set in Texas and his earlier psychological thriller/crime fiction takes place in England, an interesting question is raised about the identity of his books.
Born and raised in country New South Wales, Robotham, spent a decade in England and returned in 2002. His literary peers consider him an Australian crime
writer, electing him chairman of the Australian Crime Writers’ Association.
He’s also won three Ned Kelly awards, a prize limited to Australians by birth, citizenship or long-term residency.
Robotham then is clearly Australian and he writes crime stories. So, what’s the problem with calling him an Australian crime writer? The answer depends on
whether we attribute nationality to the author or his work. In other words, does
Robotham write Australian crime fiction?
Locale and crime fiction
The crime genre is one of the most widespread literary genres. It has crossed
borders and languages to become a form of world literature. Its mobility and its
popularity are due to a combination of universal themes, portable conventions
and local settings.
Everywhere it has settled, writers have adapted it to reflect on
local issues. To some degree the local has become so important that it is
suggested that nationality be ascribed not to the author, but to the locus criminis of the novel itself.
Eva Erdmann argues that in the later half of the twentieth century, crime fiction has been used to interrogate increasingly specific national or regional identities:
Surprisingly, the crime novel of the last decades is distinguished by
the fact that the main focus is not on the crime itself, but on the
setting, the place where the detective and the victims live and to which
they are bound by ties of attachment.
Understood in this way, Robotham writes English and now American crime fiction. The late American author Alan Cheuse certainly embraced Robotham as one of his own, writing that Life or Death reads like a native Texan had written it.
Assigning nationality to where novels are set raises all sorts of complications,
however. Is Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) an example of French crime fiction because the story is set in Paris and features a French detective? Erdmann would say yes, but this is perhaps more due to his influence on French fiction through the translations of poet Charles Baudelaire.
Robotham is clearly good at offering readers convincing settings. His highly successful career as a ghost writer has perhaps prepared him to adopt alternative points of view with compelling strength. Not every writer has this talent. Returning to Australia, in Continent of Mystery (1997), Stephen Knight takes issue with:
English visitors who glimpsed a capital city, took a compulsory trip to the bush, and then dashed off a shallow thriller with sturdy stiff-jawed bush heroes and bush heroines as warm-hearted as the sun was hot.
If an author’s nationality or a novel’s setting are not satisfactory markers of
identity, then perhaps we should look at the author’s intended readership.
Although set in Texas, Life or Death has an Australian origin. It owes its existence to the true story of a career criminal who escaped from Sydney’s Long Bay jail the day before he was due to be released.
Robotham took the story and transposed it to Texas.
There is a long tradition of this in crime writing. In The Mystery of Marie Rogêt
Poe took a famous New York murder case and set it in Paris. Given Life or Death’s Australian origins, it’s fair to say Robotham had the opportunity to set the novel here, but he chose not to do so.
I don’t want to suggest that Australian crime writers have to write about
Australia, set their novels in Australia, treat Australian issues or have Australian characters.
An example of the pitfalls of strict definitions of “Australian” is the exclusion of JM Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (2013) from the Miles Franklin 2013 shortlist. This has been attributed to its imaginary Spanish-language setting, although the book was received as, among other things, an allegory for Australian attitudes to “boat-people”.
However, unlike Coetzee, Robotham does not engage with Australian national imaginary, its issues and identity. They address a different – international – audience.
If Robotham is an Australian writer who doesn’t write Australian crime fiction,
then how do we situate him and his novels? Google perhaps provides us with an
answer. Search “Michael Robotham” and Google adds “International Crime
Writer” to his name before taking you to his home page. In this globalised world,
that’s not such a bad category to belong to.
Late last week, in what turned out to be the dying days of the Abbott administration, and perhaps the last sands of George Brandis’s time in the arts portfolio, the government’s new Book Council of Australia (BCA) finally arrived. Trailing behind it were some controversies about its structure and membership – controversies seemingly as small as its A$6 million (over three years) budget, but in fact real thorns for the literary sector.
A suffering publishing industry first mooted the idea of a book council with the Labor government in 2010. The industry was gulping air in turbulent seas as waves of globalisation and digitisation crashed. New business paradigms were attacking the old; traditional bookstores, publishers, and authors were at risk – with potential downstream costs for the rest of us in the form of damage to our literary and reading culture.
Most of the industry was on board – in fact the Council is made up of representatives of the industry associations. But its limited aims and role, its modest funds, the source of these funds, the Chair who has been appointed, and the absence of Indigenous voices and voices from the emerging writer and emerging digital literary sector have tainted the initiative for some.
Without surprise, the President of the Australian Publishers Association, Louise Adler, has been invited by Minister Brandis to chair the new council. Adler, whose day job is as CEO of Melbourne University Press, was the key player in the chain of reports and working parties that led to the BCA’s establishment. And usually, while Adler is seen as a figure of the left (ex-Radio National, ex-The Age, ex-Australian Book Review, once student of Edward Said), she also seems to have the confidence of the right.
Australian prime minister Julia Gillard with former prime minister Bob Hawke and publisher Louise Adler at the launch of the biography Hawke: The Prime Minister by his wife Blanche D’Alpuget (centre right) in 2010. AAP ONE
Mostly this reflects Adler’s standing within the publishing industry and her persuasiveness on committees (see disclosure), but it may have helped in this instance that she is Tony Abbott’s publisher. Indeed, Adler even seems to have a soft spot for Abbott personally or politically (see Q&A footage from 47:45), which I presume Abbott reciprocates, perhaps making it easy enough for him, at the time, to give her the gig.
Ms Adler will be joined on the Council by representatives appointed from a wide range of literary and industry organisations including the Australian Society of Authors, the Australian Publishers Association, the Australian Booksellers Association, the Australian Literary Agents’ Association and the Australian Library and Information Association.
In fact they are not all: The National Library, the Copyright Agency, the Small Press Network, and the Children’s Book Council also get guernseys.
The BCA drew fire a week before it was announced, with an open letter from 39 organisations concerned at the delay at its arrival and a lack of clarity about its purpose and operations. There was particular concern about whether the BCA would recognise “the breadth of Australia’s literary sector”:
The National Writers’ Centre Network, writers’ festivals across the country, prize-giving organisations, bookstores, critics, schools and universities, literary journals, libraries, digital-only initiatives et al – and that many of these organisations and publications not only feed directly into the wider publishing industry, but are critical to sustaining it for both creators and consumers: developing the capacity of writers, publishers and readers; offering skills and professional development programs; and many publication and employment opportunities.
The small and the new players were pitching themselves against the top-end of town (the old model of publishing).
Two related issues seemed to be at stake. The first question is around the purpose of the BCA and the second around the question of how representative the BCA is of new forms of literary activity and new voices.
Elsewhere, I have written on the question of whether the BCA is about industry or about culture. Inevitably books, writers, our literary culture, and the publishing industry come as a matched set. It is hard to have a literary culture without an industry – even if that sometimes means sharing turf with a globalised publishing industry whose goals are as much financial as cultural.
Policy responses then become a question of emphasis: will government emphasise industry sustainability (no matter what the cultural utility of the material produced) or will government emphasise literature’s work of telling our stories, debating our issues, helping people form themselves and enrich their lives through it?
Decisions by both the last Labour Government and this current LNP one have impacted on the balance between these not-wholly-opposed goals. As the BCA comes into being it assumes an unexpected role as the apparatus of government with the most magisterial view of policy in the literary domain.
This follows the ALP’s shuttering of the Literature Board of the Australia Council in 2014 – a shuttering that looks increasingly misguided in the wake of Minister Brandis’s raid on the Australia Council budget to form the National Program for Excellence in the Arts (NPEA).
For 40 years the Literature Board provided writing, publishing and other literary grants based on decisions made by a committee and sub-committees of writers and the very occasional publisher. It provided a writer-led view of literary development. It was often finely tuned to aesthetic questions, but less so to industrial ones.
But still, the Board was effective in supplementing writers’ incomes and ensuring the publication of hundreds of new voices, including many of nation’s most famous names. It was remarkably effective on a A$4m or so annual budget, and its 2014 shuttering removed fundamental policy capacity and leadership in the literary and book industry domains – even if its policy focus was perhaps too often just on the writer.
The Book Council was intended to augment the Board’s writerly focus with a industry-wide one. But now, in a real sense, it replaces the Literature Board as the senior policy agency in the literary space. Unfortunately, the BCA’s modest budget of A$2m a year (over three years) (gouged out of the Australia Council last December) means that the resources for literary and book industry development are split between the BCA and the Australia Council (whose own budget has been further depleted by Minister Brandis’s A$104m raid to create his new NPEA).
Because of the BCA’s elevation to policy prominence the question of its industry versus literary or writerly focus has become a hot one. The BCA certainly professes literary aims:
The Council will provide advice to the government on strategies to raise and strengthen the profile of Australian literature and literary non-fiction nationally and internationally, including priorities for funding through targeted initiatives, and to foster a culture of reading among the Australian public.
And so does Ms Adler in an op-ed which can be read an assurance about the ultimately cultural purposes of the BCA and of literature:
If we collectively believe in the principle that telling our stories to ourselves and to the international market matters as much as it ever did, then fresh thinking is required. The Book Council, with representatives from all the lead organisations involved in the business of reading and writing, has a new opportunity to ensure the community’s collective imagination is fuelled by Australian writing … [Australian writers offer us] the chance to contemplate who we are and how we live. Reading, thankfully, is not yet obsolete, nor is it odd or quaint or deviant. There is every reason to ensure it continues to flourish as both a private pleasure and a public good.
Yet many of the smaller literary organisations feel as though, no matter what the stated aims of the BCA, its composition suggests that it is defending an old literary model rather than embracing the new.
And there certainly are “new” forms of literary life following digitisation and the arrival of a Gen-Ys on the literary space. As well as e-books and online bookshops, the capital cities, particularly Melbourne, are awash with new kinds of literary entities and activity: small digital publications, real and virtual festivals, and literary podcasters. These ventures are often helmed by a generation of emerging writers – often creative writing graduates.
This new digital belletrism often forsakes books entirely for smaller and more mobile forms of literary production and consumption. It is the players in this group that seem to feel most at the margins of what has been sketched out by the BCA – and not represented in its membership.
Sam Twyford-Moore, former director of Melbourne’s Emerging Writers’ Festival, and a key drafter of the Open Letter of September 3, has been particularly active in questioning the focus of the BCA and also Ms Adler’s role in it. While the publishing industry happily accepts Ms Adler as its representative – or mostly so (she has enemies as well as supporters) – Twyford-Moore sees Adler as compromised by the broad range of positions she holds, including her propinquity to Tony Abbott.
Adler certainly plays hardball in most things, but on balance it is much better to have Adler, in all her effectiveness, inside the tent. Twyford-Moore, playing the role of tyro, is keen to challenge Adler to a public debate – which would bring out the younger members of the Melbourne literary community in large numbers.
But the faster way forward here is for the minister and the BCA to recognise the literary sector’s fundamental point that the future of small digital publishing, event and socially based literary activity, and Indigenous literary activity, need to be represented on the BCA – even if they have been outside the discussion until this point.
Until included, the BCA risks being rejected by some of the communities that should welcome it. It will suffer sniping from the very generation that will inherit caretakership of the industry from Adler and others in the coming decade.
In the background to all this is Minister Brandis’s partial reclamation of decision-making about policy and funding from the realm of the Australia Council – where arm’s-length mechanisms have prevailed for four decades.
Brandis has ushered in a new type of ministerial activism or interventionism in the arts space. But having entered a space that was previously the province of the artists and writers themselves, he needs to ensure that there is policy and funding contiguity between the old Australia Council and his new Ministerial mechanisms: the NPEA and BCA.
This is just good government. It will require greater dexterity than has been shown to date.
Or that we’re fascinated by the personalities, policies and procedures that shape our political landscape. But are we really, and if not, why so many books?
The deluge shows no signs of abating, with a similar number of titles expected this year. Already we’ve seen the release of Shadow Minister Chris Bowen’s The Money Men, reflections by Federal Labour members Mark Butler and Andrew Leigh, with former Victorian Labour leader John Brumby’s practical “lessons”, The Long Haul, in press.
Liberals, once laggards in this genre, are stepping up in growing numbers. Federal Minister Christopher Pyne’s “hilarious”A Letter To My Children is out, and Peter Reith’s The Reith Papers is underway. Also in press is the genuinely unauthorised Born to Rule: the Unauthorised Biography of Malcolm Turnbull.
First nurtured by John Iremonger of Hale & Iremonger, Melbourne University Press now leads the way with the genre. MUP Director, Louise Adler, is notorious for her enthusiasm and her efforts to contract politicians of all parties and persuasions. But even Adler has reservations, writing in September’s Meanjin that “the political memoir is unabashedly myopic, subjective and reflexively partisan”.
Tony Abbott, then Federal Oppositon MP, signs copies of his book during the launch Battlelines in Sydney in 2009. Dean Lewins/AAP, CC BY-ND
One argument for the proliferation of political memoirs is that they enable the public to engage with politicians outside the frenzy of the 24/7 news cycle. Certainly the popularity of Annabel Crabb’s ABC show Kitchen Cabinet suggests there’s some weight to this “getting to know the person beyond the sound-bite” theory.
Some argue the 24-hour media cycle has debased politics to such a degree that voters are searching for a depth of focus missing from parliament and mainstream media coverage and finding it through other channels.
Based on the sales figures, a publisher can safely bet that an Australian political memoir or biography is likely to pay its own way, at the very least. Even the slow ones mostly sell more than a few thousand copies.
But do sales say anything meaningful about these books’ impact on our political process or cultural debate? And how to measure the impact of the political memoir on democratic process?
The genre has been trending for a few years now, propelled in no small part by the success of Bob Hawke’s The Hawke Memoirs (1994) which sold 75,000 copies, and John Howard’s Lazarus Rising (2011), which sold upwards of 100,000.
As far back as 2007, David Marr in his analysis of John Howard’s prime ministership, His Master’s Voice: the corruption of public debate under Howard, despaired of the increase in public “chatter” and the sabotage of free speech. Paradoxically, it was during this period, and subsequently, that political memoirs and biographies increased in number.
Thanks to the introduction of Nielsen BookScan in 2002 and its collection of reliable national book sales figures, metrical research into the book industry and reading patterns is now possible.
But what readers make of the content of these books, and how they contribute to Australian culture, is difficult to accurately discern.
Dr Jan Zwar conducted a close analysis of a range of narrative nonfiction books and their contribution to cultural debate during the Howard years 2003-2008. In an essay for the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature she observed that “experiences of the actual readers remain a mystery behind the wall of data”.
Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard launching her book My Story in Sydney, 2014. Dean Lewins/AAP
Other forms of media mediate the relationship between the memoir, its author and the wider readership. Syndicated publication of extracts, the author’s appearances through radio, television, online and print media to discuss the book, and appearances at writers festivals and festivals of ideas are all channels key to ensuring the possibility of the memoir’s broader ideas being promulgated.
Former PM, Julia Gillard, by way of example, has appeared at half a dozen writers festivals in Australia and New Zealand alongside her memoir, My Story (2015), although no one I spoke to nominated the memoir as being influential or contributing to the debate. Yet, with large live audiences, Gillard clearly is contributing.
The memoir is the prop for the event, and contributes to an already existing discussion of broader “Gillard” topics such as women in politics and education reform.
Similarly, Anna Bligh, former Premier of Queensland, speaking on the ABC program Q&A in August, firmly linked her memoir, Through the Wall: Reflections on Leadership, Love and Survival (2015), to her key message of encouragement to young women to pursue a career in politics, and not to be fearful of the walls “built of the solid bricks of prejudice” (to quote from the book).
The Latham Diaries by former federal opposition leader Mark Latham go on sale in Sydney in 2005. Mick Tsikas/AAP
Mark Latham’s Latham’s Diaries, originally published in 2005, eclipses all other political memoirs and autobiographies in my research for impact, in terms of readers recalling and engaging with its dissection of the Labor Party in the post-Keating years, the Australian political system more broadly, and its insistence that there ought to be serious debate about political philosophy.
Whatever one may think of Latham today, this memoir has contributed to debate and critiques of Australian democratic process in the new century. Natalie Mast recently argued on The Conversation that, ten years on from its publication, “the flaws in our political system that Latham highlighted continue to affect us”.
It is both the specialist and the general reader that the politicians are appealing to, with general readers contributing the bulk of sales, and thus the economic viability of the genre. But it is the political analysts and historians, journalists, lobbyists, festival directors, politicians and would-be politicians who are the most critical readers of these books and who enable a memoir’s impact.
Laura Tingle, the Australian Financial Review’s political editor, has possibly read them all. According to Tingle, the “young things” in the current caucus are “hoovering up” Gareth Evans’ Inside the Hawke–Keating Government: A Cabinet Diary (2014) to gain an understanding of how the government worked.
Knowing what happened is not of course equivalent to energetic debate and discourse, but it is a starting point.
Ex-Foreign Minister Bob Carr signs his Diary of a Foreign Minister in Sydney in 2014. Jesse Matheson/AAP
Tingle nominated three other books of influence from recent years. Tony Abbott’s Battlelines (2013) continues to “reverberate” as readers realise it has not clarified Abbott’s beliefs, but just added to the mix. Malcolm Fraser’s Dangerous Allies (2014), which followed on from his Political Memoirs, is having impact because of the quality of its insights and argument, though strictly speaking it is not a memoir.
Tingle also nominates Bob Carr’s Diary of a Foreign Minister (2014), despite it blowing up across social media over Carr’s love of activated almonds and other personal nonsense about his abs and pyjamas. But from Tingle’s perspective, Carr’s diary holds value for its uniquely positioned observations of the Gillard cabinet.
You effectively had an outsider/ journalist reporting on what he saw in a government that was crumbling. For that reason, I think it is going to be an on-going source for many years on what happened in the Gillard period.
Margaret Simons, Director of the Centre for Advanced Journalism and co-author of Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs, pointed to other works as influential, but again, they’re not wholly memoirs, nor all recent: suggesting the genre does indeed have limitations.
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