Jo Briskey (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

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Every page of writing is a result of a thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will.

This is an except from Australian literary icon and local Maribyrnong resident Helen Gardner, one of Australia's greatest living writers. In her True Stories: Selected Non-Fiction, she wrote this about the craft of writing.

A thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will are what it takes to put words on a page. That is the invisible labour behind every book on every shelf in every library in this country. It is exactly this kind of labour that this bill is seeking to recognise and reward. Before I get into the details, let me ask you something. Think about the last book you really loved. Maybe it was something you stayed up late finishing. Maybe it was a picture book that you've read to your kids so many times that you can recite it from memory. Maybe it's an audiobook that kept you company on a long-haul flight. Whatever it was, someone wrote it. In many cases, they were an Australian author: someone who sat at a kitchen table after the kids were in bed, squeezed an hour in before work, or spent months—sometimes years—making those thousand tiny decisions until the words were exactly right.

Here's the thing that was arguably unfair. Every time that book was borrowed from a public library, the author got nothing. Zero. The library bought one copy, maybe two, and then it went out the door hundreds of times, and the person who wrote it never saw a cent from all of those borrowings. That changed in 1974, when the Whitlam Labor government established the public lending right. The idea was beautifully simple. If your book is being borrowed from libraries across this country, you should be compensated for it. It was a straightforward act of fairness to Australian creators, and it's one of the things Labor has always sought to get right when it comes to supporting Australian culture. More than 50 years on, the Albanese Labor government is proud to carry that legacy forward—and today, with these bills, it is doing so in a way that is more modern and more comprehensive than ever before.

The public lending right has quietly done extraordinary work for Australian literature since its inception. In 2024-25 alone, more than 17,000 payments totalling over $28 million were made to Australian creators and publishers. These are payments to more than 17,000 individuals, authors in suburban Melbourne and regional communities, illustrators in our cities and editors and translators whose skilled contributions make Australian publishing possible. The scheme distributes payments across two streams: the public lending right, which in 2024-25 delivered just under $15 million to over 7,000 individual creators and publishers for books held in public lending libraries; and the educational lending right, which provided just over $13 million to over 10,500 recipients for books in educational libraries. Together, these programs form the financial backbone that helps Australian literary culture survive and flourish.

But, if we're being honest, for all its achievements this scheme has grown over the decades in amendments layered upon amendments—administrative arrangements delegated by practice rather than formalised in law. The educational lending right, introduced in 2000, has never had a proper legislative basis of its own. It has operated effectively on goodwill and administrative convention. That is not good enough for a program that delivers tens of millions of dollars annually to Australian creators. They deserve security, not the fragility of convention. These bills seek to provide that security.

The bills before us today consolidate both schemes into a single modern legislative framework. For the first time, the educational lending right will have a formal statutory basis—a foundation in law that gives creators, publishers and administrators the certainty and stability they need. The bills modernise governance arrangements, establishing a new public and educational lending rights committee with contemporary appointment processes and appropriate disclosure requirements. They transfer decision-making and operational oversight for certain processes from the committee to the secretary, in line with how these functions have been carried out in practice for many years but now formalised properly in legislation. They also clarify that the committee has an advisory function on matters relating to the operation of the act, bringing transparency and accountability to the scheme's administration.

The Public and Educational Lending Rights (Better Income for Authors) Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions Bill 2026 ensures seamless continuity between existing and new arrangements. Creators and publishers currently receiving payments will not face any disruption. The transition will be smooth, clear and fair. These are important technical improvements, but the most significant reform contained in this legislation is the formal extension of the scheme to cover ebooks and audiobooks.

Australians have changed the way they read. You just have to walk onto any train or aeroplane today and you'll see people with their earphones in, oftentimes listening to an audiobook. You'll see people scrolling through their ereaders and you'll see families borrowing digital picture books for their children from the local library app without ever setting foot in a physical library. This should not be seen as a threat to Australian literature because it is an opportunity, and so many Australian creators know this. They know this shift to online reading means more Australians are engaging with more books than ever before. It means our libraries are reaching people in new ways in regional areas and outer suburbs, where a physical library may be an hour's drive away.

Until recently, when an Australian borrowed a digital book from a public library the author received nothing. The scheme that was designed to compensate creators for library borrowings simply did not cover the formats in which millions of Australians are now reading. In 2023 the Albanese Labor government took the first step to address this, expanding eligibility to ebooks and audiobooks through a modification instrument under Revive, our National Cultural Policy. These bills now cement that expansion firmly in legislation, ensuring it can't be unwound by a future government without an act of parliament. It is a lasting commitment to the new way Australians consume Aussie literature.

For Australian authors, this is a game changer. A novelist whose work is available as an ebook and as an audiobook, as well as in print, will now be compensated for library borrowings across all formats. That is a much fairer system, and we must also remember that this is a profession where median earnings remain stubbornly low. Every additional revenue stream is important.

I want to step back from the specifics of this bill for a moment and place it in its broader context, because legislation doesn't stand alone. It is part of a sustained, considered Labor commitment to supporting Australian creative workers and Australian storytelling. Our revived national cultural policy was the first national cultural policy in a decade. It recognised, with ambition, that Australian culture is worth investing in. It is how we understand ourselves, how we pass our values and our histories to the next generation and how we make sense of who we are as a nation.

At the heart of Revive is a commitment to the people who make culture—the writers, the illustrators, the musicians, the performers—people who work without income certainty and without the safety nets that workers in other industries take for granted. Revive committed to modernising lending rights, and this bill delivers on that commitment. It sits alongside our investment in Writing Australia, established within Creative Australia to become a genuine hub for the sector. It seeks to build expertise, foster partnerships, grow the industry and support writers and publishers to do what they do best.

If we do not support Australian writers, we will not have Australian stories—it's that simple. In reality, if we don't invest in local content we will have a market flooded with content from overseas. This content is fine—it's good; it's often fantastic—but it does not reflect our landscape, our history, our humour, our grief or our way of life. The Australian child who grows up without an Australian picture book is a child who grows up without seeing their world reflected back at them. The Australian teenager who never reads an Australian novel is a teenager who must enter a world through an American or European lens. We can't accept that.

This Labor government does not accept that. Australian stories deserve the same platform, and the Australians who tell them deserve a government that backs them and that invests in their work. This legislation modernises a scheme that has served Australian literature well for more than 50 years. It gives Educational Lending Right the legislative foundation it has long deserved. It covers ebooks and audiobooks for the first time in primary legislation. It improves governance and accountability, and it sends a clear signal that this Labor government will always stand with those who tell Australian stories.

Gough Whitlam understood in 1974 that a great nation is one that values its artists. My own community in Maribyrnong knows this better than most. It's home not only to Helen Garner but to Jenny Hocking, the acclaimed biographer who has devoted much of her career to documenting Whitlam's legacy and fighting to bring its hidden history into light. The work of writers like Jenny reminds us that Australian stories are not just novels and picture books; they are a record of who we are and how we got here.

In his memoir, Island Home, Tim Winton wrote about what it means to belong to this country. He said:

This country leans in on you. Like family. To my way of thinking, it is family.

This country is family, and the writers who give voice to it—who find the words for its landscape, its humour and its particular way of being—are doing something that no-one else can do. They are keeping that family story alive. In doing so, they deserve our support and they deserve to be paid for their work. This bill invests in that. It invests in those thousand tiny decisions, it invests in the courage of those willing to document our hidden history and, importantly, it invests in Australia. I commend the bill to the House.

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