What follows is a piece I’ve written that ‘culture’ editors at The Age and The Weekend Australian have rejected. It follows my anger at the prime minister’s recent short speech about artificial intelligence. I think the story needs exposure, that writers deserve more government support, especially when those who lead us annually shower sport and other less-important cultural endeavors with millions.
Time to pay writers a wage
By Stephen Downes
It costs money to be a writer. Thousands of us are out there trying to write fiction. The vast majority of us don’t get our stories published. Time is money, and we use our precious hours in a futile attempt to get our words between covers. For various reasons we are prepared to spend time – and that’s money — to tell tales.
Prime Minister Albanese’s rhetoric on 15 July about protecting writers and our copyright is mostly air. Vaporous and hot at that. His telling us that we shouldn’t regard artificial intelligence as a “threat to good jobs” is vacuous. Disingenuous, too.
Moreover, his new office set up to erect guardrails on AI will have no w-beams and cables. In a capitalist free-market economy money always wins, and the owners of AI have cash by the shipload. That the prime minister used the word “opportunity” or “opportunities” nine times in his nothing-to-see-here speech about AI and data centres, which give it life, suggests that big money has already got at him. Lobbied him in a choke-hold.
Data centres will revel in Albanese’s opportunities. As the great economist J. K. Galbraith (among many others) said decades ago, the flywheel of capitalism is exploitation. Those with the most money and knowledge control what happens, and there is no doubt that AI and data centres that thirst like drunks after our water and electricity will triumph no matter how much governments attempt to curb them.
Why are fiction writers important? Because years from now when historians and archeologists are trying to find out what Australia was like, they will first turn to books, to written records. Sure, there’ll be millions of photos to explore, and music as well, but fiction of the day, in particular, will tell them how we handled the human condition. What stories of ours mattered? Which ones influenced 21st-century Australians’ behaviour? How did we think? What did we do? What were our favorite pastimes? What were we like? What were our deepest thoughts? What was our culture? Fiction gives the best answers to these questions.
Fiction writers profile human behavior. Yet they are worse off financially than Australia’s poor. In last year’s survey, the Australian Council of Social Service and UNSW said the poverty “line” was $584 for a single person and $1226 for a couple with two children. Macquarie University’s 2022 survey of Australian authors had fiction writers’ annual average income at $18,200. Those who write literary fiction – the stuff I pen – make $14,500. Authors of “genre” stories – romance, military, crime – make $23,300. My income works out to be $279 a week, half of the poverty line. The halfway point of Australian salaries is $74,670 a year, and the legislated minimum wage is just over $1000 a week. (Surgeons take home half a million a year.)
The truth is that I make nothing like $279 a week from writing literary fiction. It costs me oodles of unpaid time to write it. I’m in the red all over. Thousands of others who write fiction – most of them producing yarns that will never see hard, or even soft, covers – are in much greater debt. And their stories and literary styles are in many cases worth wide distribution.
What should be done? Ireland leads the world in valuing “artists”, a word Albanese used several times on Wednesday. In October last year, the Irish government ratified its Basic Income for the Arts scheme after a successful three-year pilot. Two thousand arts practitioners are chosen randomly from many applicants to receive €325 or around $532 a week. Australia’s gross domestic product is more than three times Ireland’s, and if Australia can’t find three times the amount Ireland spends on artists (about $55million a year) then it’s shameful and negligent. On a pro rata basis the government should be paying a wage to 6000 of us.
In a thousand years, what Australian fiction writers have published will be more valuable than the combined work today of surgeons, pop singers, anaesthetists, CEOs and the AFL’s top players. A clever government would do its best to value and reward fiction writers, not relegate them to constant poverty.
Most politicians come out of politics, economics and the law. I suspect that their interest in the arts is passing. Pick an Aussie pollie at random and ask him or her to hum a few bars of Beethoven or recite their favorite line from Shakespeare. My guess is that they couldn’t.
Yet they and their artistic funding arm Creative Australia trumpet the few grants and fellowships and subsidies the government doles out to arts practitioners. We are supposed to embellish our poverty with them. Try to win one.
Prizes and fellowships and subsidies are a lottery. Who gets them is a function of judges’ whims and tastes. In recent years half-a-dozen of my short stories have been longlisted and shortlisted in the UK’s most prestigious competitions. One won one. But thousands of writers worldwide compete. Six years ago a tale of mine was among 100 shortlisted for the famous Bridport prize. Out of 4389 entries. No writer can rely on handouts and prizes to make a living.
And perhaps it might be valuable to find out how many Australians write stories. No question in August’s census asks us. Hobbies, personal interests and sports are ignored. Yet an estimation of the number of hopeful fiction writers pounding keyboards in poverty might not just surprise the government but give it reason to act.