Writers paid as much as politicians? Once upon a time, it was a possibility

“Pay writers like politicians” says the essay title. We know that’s not going to happen, at least not in Australia. But not so very long ago it was a serious proposition.

Back in 1973, members of the Literature Board were talking about a guaranteed minimum income for writers. They canvassed an increased grant program for selected writers worth $9000 a year, about the same as was then paid to federal backbenchers. Board member Thomas Shapcott wrote: “We proposed that our writers were worth at least as much as a parliamentary drone.”

That sentence made Catriona Menzies-Pike gasp when she was researching her essay for the current Griffith Review. The editor and literary critic writes that she’s become so used to “abysmally low rates of pay” for writers that she wouldn’t dare to suggest matching politicians’ salaries today.

The Literature Board proposal wasn’t taken up. But as Menzies-Pike demonstrates, both the expectations and the reality of writers’ incomes have been on a long downward slide with no end in sight. She says the base salary for a federal backbencher is now $239,270. A 2022 survey found that Australian writers earn an average of $18,200 each year from their creative work. I suspect that figure is now lower.

The present economic climate and changing reading habits are making things increasingly tough for the publishing industry. We talk about money all the time, writes Menzies-Pike: broke writers, publishers and editors; the cost of books and paper; who can’t afford to write, and so on. “At our most ambitious, we talk about a living wage.”

The market can’t be trusted to fund our national literature, so there’s long been an expectation that governments should help out. Yet that’s done nothing to stop the trend. One estimate is that in the past decade, federal funding for writers has dropped 43 per cent in real terms. A grant of $50,000, say, sounds quite generous. But it may be to support a project that will take several years and incur heavy expenses, so the government’s contribution works out as way below a living wage.

There is hope on the horizon in the shape of Labor’s Writing Australia, with its pledge of $26 million in new funding over three years. But where exactly will that money go? And is it enough? Menzies-Pike doesn’t think so. And new challenges are bobbing up, particularly the rapid rise of AI and its threat to writers’ copyright and livelihoods.

So writers are never going to get a living wage, right? Some countries have been much more realistic about the difficulties writers face in contributing to their national literature. Ireland is installing a permanent basic income support for artists, from this year onwards. The Norwegian government buys 1000 copies of every new title to give to public libraries. In Australia, as Menzies-Pike points out, “a writer is understood to have hit the big time if they sell a thousand copies of their book”.

When I Google “pay for writers”, just about everything that comes up is side hustles: freelance journalism, festival appearances, teaching and judging gigs. Very little of it pays well and all of it takes authors away from their main task: writing books. When I talk to writers about this, they get grumpy or wistful, and none can see any solution.

Menzies-Pike may not literally mean the title of her essay, but it’s still a rallying call. “Once upon a time,” she concludes, “just for a flicker of history, policymakers talked about paying writers like parliamentarians. That won’t happen again. But we must set our sights higher than scraping by.”

Janesullivan.sullivan9@gmail.com

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