Authors condemn book copyright and import proposal as 'massive own goal'

The Australian book industry awards night heard changes would reduce authors’ control of copyright and flood market with cheap overseas editions

Magda Szubanski said she would consider leaving the country and called for writers to go on strike. Richard Flanagan called for the resignation of arts minister, Mitch Fifield. Tim Winton said the Turnbull government was about to kick a “massive own goal”.

On a night designed to celebrate the triumphs of Australian literary culture, there was no escaping the overriding message of doom: that the Australian book industry is in peril because of proposed changes to copyright law and import restrictions.

My message is really simple: if this comes in, I will not write another book and I will really start thinking about leaving the country. Because the financial cost of being here is becoming ridiculous. I’ve stayed in this country because I love it. I feel I’ve made quite a contribution to the arts and culture here, and we should be recompensed properly. In order to write my book it took me eight years. I took time off from work, I took out a loan. I’ll be lucky if I break even.

To actually stand by while sanctioned theft takes place? Do you think I’m a complete fool? It just can’t be allowed to happen.

Related: Be under no illusion: Malcolm Turnbull wants to destroy Australian literature | Richard Flanagan

Think: books like Possum Magic, The Book Thief, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, The True History of the Kelly Gang, The Slap, The Secret River – all these are the fruits of a publishing culture that allowed its writers to speak to their own, a culture that nurtured these writers long enough for them to break out and of course to publish from home to the world on just and logical terms.

So it distresses me to see how anxious our technocrats are to piss all this good work up against the wall. What makes our industry viable and our literary output distinctive is the concept of territorial copyright, and once again it’s under threat.

What we’re really protecting is the life of the mind; the creative core of what we are. If you attack creativity what you’re saying is that it doesn’t matter that we’re human beings, because very human being ever born across this planet, across time, is part of the creative continuum.

We’re protecting something which is so valuable. This is more than an industry. This is the heart of humanity ... We need to protect this ecosystem. Writers are cottage industries: we go into a little room by ourselves and we write. We can do that! We don’t need anything. But then we need you guys to get out there and make it possible for us to do our work and to get it out into the world. And that is so necessary.

The federal government proposes to do something neither the Brits nor Americans propose to do their writers: to slice Australian authors’ copyright to 15-25 years after publication. These are just some of the books of mine published more than 15 years after their first appearance (he gestures to a pile of his bestselling books). Under the new proposal, these would no longer belong to me.

I appeal to my old republican movement friend Malcolm Turnbull. Is this fair? ... I know you are a highly cultivated man and I cannot believe your government will begin its program of innovation by obliterating an industry you need for that visionary task.

In the last 25 years I have seen the industry grow and do extraordinary things in Australia and internationally. We are the people of the books. A book can change a child’s life. I book can change the future. And yet today the un-productivity commission says a book can lose its copyright under only five years [sic]. That under so-called five years with so-called ‘fair use’ it can compensate even years of work or decades of research, based on the ludicrous proposition that few writers write for money.

Actually, we don’t. But we do need to eat as well.

I want to be direct: nothing I’ve seen ... has in any way persuaded me of the need for change. To the contrary, we’ve seen directly the New Zealand experience of what follows from the removal of PIR, and I don’t think I have to remind anyone in this room of what that experience has been.

I’ve got to say that obviously the productivity commission’s report is still in draft. I and my colleagues will still have to consider the final report carefully, but I want to give you an assurance that Labor understands the importance of our publishing industry in cultural terms, as well as in economic terms.

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