The below is a response to this post on Bob Carr’s blog Thoughtlines.
Dear Bob
You were wrong then, and you're wrong now. You were tendentious then, and you're tendentious now.
The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) report is a serious, thoughtful, and informed attempt to deal with the challenges and problems facing the book industry. I don't agree with all of its recommendations, but it is a much more impressive report than either one produced by the Productivity Commission in 2009. It contains original research and fresh thinking, and your glib dismissal of it does you no credit.
And will you please refrain from misrepresenting me? I did not say that the book industry is in a profound slump solely because of non-GST-paying online competition. If you really want to know what I think about this, the problems also stem from a variety of other sources, including the high Australian dollar, high interest rates, the loss of the RedGroup chain with its 20+% of the market, and the general consumer caution that has been decimating retailers of most goods around the country. It is not the result of the maintenance of parallel-import restrictions.
Your talk of 'liberating' local bookshops is scary. Even after all the detailed explanations and arguments of people who understand the industry and care about it, you either don't realise or don't care that the end-result of your economically rationalist position is a publishing wasteland. Australia would go backwards 70 years or more, to the era of the Traditional Publishing Agreement, and would resume its position of very limited local publishing and colonial dependency. Ironically -- or perhaps not -- your argument, if accepted, would play into the hands of the biggest and nastiest corporations, both overseas and here, and the people it would hurt most would be local authors, independent booksellers, and independent publishers.
The current 30/90 day rule, or the proposed 14/14 revision of it, is not 'internationally and locally uncompetitive'. Parallel imports are banned in the US and the UK, and the UK often publishes books several months after they come out in the US. Our peculiar problem is that we are a small English-language market, exposed by the above factors in an economy that can never produce the economies of scale enjoyed by our larger competitors. And yet all this would be ameliorated with the dollar at its long-term average levels and a government that did its duty.
In the meantime, maybe what's right and obvious to you stems from your lack of engagement with the fine detail and the underlying principles of what's going on and what's at stake. Even Laurie Oakes thinks that the government should remove the GST from books, and he's as much of a hardhead as you.
One last point: you write scathingly of the report offering local printers 'even more subsidy'. Even more than what? I'm unaware of any special subsidy that book printers get, but I am aware that they're getting hammered by all of the above, as well as by some UK publishers paying them in pounds. Incidentally, I understand that some UK publishers may be avoiding GST through the use of sham offshore entities. But that would all be in the spirit of free-market competition with Australian independent publishers, wouldn't it, Bob?
Henry Rosenbloom