Tag #SaveOzStories
Save Oz Stories is a collection of responses from some of the country’s most highly regarded writers, including David Malouf and Geraldine Brooks, to an Australian Productivity Commission Report which recommends changes to copyright and importation rules which will effectively destroy the $2.2 billion Australian book industry. It adds to a long list of attacks by the Abbott/Turnbull conservative governments on journalism, whistle blowers, actors, artists and writers; essentially on all independent thought and creativity in a once proud, freedom loving country. The totalitarian instincts of the current Australian government defy belief. Esteemed Australian writer Richard Flanagan, who won the Mann Booker Prize Winner for his powerful book Narrow Road to the Deep North, writes: The Abbott and now Turnbull Government’s record drips with a contempt for writers and writing that leaves me in despair. They want to thieve our past work, and, by ending parallel importation restrictions and territorial copyright, destroy any future for Australian writers. You have to ask if, at heart, this is not profoundly political, because the disenfranchisement of the imagination is ever the disempowerment of the individual. There is, after all, both a bitter irony and a profound connection in a government that would condemn the wretched of the earth as illiterate, while hard at work to rob its own people of their culture of words. This is a government that despises books and views with hostility the civilisation they represent. This government, which again, and again, has brought Australia only global shame with its follies of cowardice and cruelty has no right now to destroy such a good in our nation as this: the voice of our experience, the words of our people, the tongue of our hope—our culture of writing. The Australian book industry has united to make digital copies available for free download and paperback copies available for free at Australian bookshops.