Parallel Importation Restrictions: Intellectual Onanism at its most Abhorrent
Firstly a quick explanation of the current situation:
If I want to buy a book that is being published in Australia (regardless of whether the author is Australian), then I have to buy it from an Australian bookseller who sources it from an Australian publisher. It doesn't matter that it costs twice as much to purchase a book in this manner compared to importation. It doesn't matter that it may not currently be stocked anywhere in Australia, and may take a month to be ordered in. We even have to wait for 30 days after a new book is first published overseas to import it even if no Australia publishers are fucking interested.
Ostensibly, these restrictions on importing books by foreign authors exist to protect Australia's "literary culture". Now I know I have all the cultural comprehension of your average member of the NSW Police Force, but I honestly can't see how a conveyor belt which puts letters on a page qualifies in and of itself as culture, and how halving the amount of words I can consume with my meager income is supposed to make me a better person.
Now of course allowing parallel importation would have some effect upon the accessibility of publishing houses to Australian authors, but there's are some pretty good reasons why these guys don't get published overseas. Just for the sake of balance let's consider some arguments against parallel importation, from real authors:
Also chiming in, Tim Winton was slightly less surreal but more poetic, predicting a "great bitterness" would wash through the Australian literary community.
And Matthew Reilly, whose books have sold more than 4 million copies, compared the possible influx of popular books if the ban is lifted to the introduction of McDonald's.
No Matthew Reilly. You're an utter fucking cunt, a talentless hack and nobody, anywhere, finds your books intellectually stimulating. Your books are the fucking pulp which is stunting Australia's intellectual development. You are the cheap takeaway trying to compete with the five-star restaurant which is cleverly written literature, and congratulations, you, with the help of a swathes of government regulation written in polysyllabic words you'll never understand, have strangled it. Fuck off.
The case in favour of parallel importation has not been made more strongly, however, than in the productivity commission submission of Wendy Harmer, who after quitting breakfast radio (and being replaced with the intellectual colossus that is Kyle Sandilands) apparently wrote some terrible books for children.
Wendy Harmer's submission to the productivity commission, annotated for the lulz.
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