And to think I didn’t know what to blog about today!

I returned from a very decadent morning (cough, well into the afternoon) hanging out with the awesome Penni Russon and her very smart little girl Una, chatting about books and publishing and motherhood and education, one of those conversations I rarely get to have in person with other authors – online is a very good substitute, but still completely different.

I come home, get Jem off for a nap with remarkable ease, I’m feeling replensished and enervated and generally good about the world and then I find out that the battle against the proposed changes for the parallel importation of books has been won.

The press release itself makes interesting reading. It seems to focus on the additional spending programme that the Productivity Commission recommended as a (completely inadequate, in my opinion and that of most writers and publishers) compensation for the adverse effect on our careers that removing the restrictions on PIRs would have on our industry. The press release implies by its words that the government don’t want to spend any more on the publishing industry or writers, and thus have rejected the Productivity Commission’s recommendations.

Which is… good, but it’s just weirdly phrased. That isn’t the battle that we were fighting, and it misrepresents what the point of the whole issue was about. The press release, if anything, implies that they are forcing the publishers and the printing industry to stand on their own two feet (when they were already doing just fine, thanks) and makes no mention of the fact that it was booksellers (or to be precise, corporations who have an interest in selling books) who were driving the proposed changes.

Eh, semantics. It’s a win. A really important, awesome win. And besides, writers, publishers and even printers should be used to having their position misrepresented after all this. It’s such a relief that the juggernaut that was the Coalition of Cheaper Books did not prevail in their attempts to gain greater profits at the expense of our industry. I was quite horrified to see some of the ways in which they and others were attempting to present writers and publishers as being somehow greedy and selfish for trying to preserve and protect their industry at the expense of all those poor bookless customers.

Like the writers of Australia don’t all spend most of their income on books anyway.

I am so very glad to see that all the efforts of the campaigners and protesters against the corporations have actually won this one. I honestly didn’t have faith that the right choice would be made, this time around, and I’m glad I was wrong.

When I wrote my letters to the various politicians – as many of us did – the aspect I chose to focus on was not as a writer, or even as a regular (cough, SUBSTANTIAL) consumer of books. My focus was as a mother, because it freaked me out that the other side was pretending their cause would benefit education in this country, when they had no apparent respect for what books actually are.

The thing about books are, they’re all different. They’re not easily-swappable commodities. And my daughters’ education, while I hope it will include learning about many different cultures, countries and genres, needs to be firmly rooted in this country’s literature and language. It’s not mad parochialism, or anything. I want my girls to be able to pick up books they can see themselves in. Funnily enough, this circles back to my writerly playdate this morning – Penni’s Little Bird delighted me because it was a gorgeously packaged, widely distributed, blatantly-for-teen-girls novel which was set in Hobart. As I said to her today, the Allen & Unwin Girlfriend line of books excites me because they are marketed and branded just like the mass-selling teen books of our childhood (cough, Sweet Valley High, cough) only they are Australian, taking in a variety of the different lifestyles and cultures within this country.

These are the kinds of books that would have been lost if the Australian publishing industry was forced to globalise. The ‘great novels’ of ‘Australian literature’ (air quote, air quote) will never be entirely at risk because there are grants and awards and because there’s a certain degree of masculine status and ego wrapped up in them. But the easy-to-read-with-familiar-settings teenage girl books that maybe will be the difference between a 14 year old reading or not reading? Those would have so easily been lost between the cracks. And the Coalition of Cheaper Books would not have minded, as long as they could pump out more and more overseas copies of the latest Twilight trending tome.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go write some more of my Ancient Roman-flapper-shapechanger fantasy novel, which has very little Australian content, but at least has Australian spelling.