‘We want our stories to be told’: NSW Labor pledges $3.2m to support writing and literature amid AI onslaught | New South Wales politics
It is a sector that delivers $1.3bn annually to the New South Wales economy and supports up to 22,000 jobs, yet the average writer earns just $18,200 a year from their creative practice. To counter this stark disparity, the NSW government is launching the state’s first ever writing and literature strategy, and has committed $3.2m…
It is a sector that delivers $1.3bn annually to the New South Wales economy and supports up to 22,000 jobs, yet the average writer earns just $18,200 a year from their creative practice.
To counter this stark disparity, the NSW government is launching the state’s first ever writing and literature strategy, and has committed $3.2m to support and grow the sector.
The NSW arts minister, John Graham, said it was a response to urgent pressures, including low incomes, declining reading rates, and the growing impact of digital media and artificial intelligence on publishing.
“This requires direct action, because there is too much to lose and so much to gain from a strong literary sector in NSW,” he said in a statement launching the Stories Matter strategy on Friday.
“We want our stories to be told, we want to be part of the global literary conversation, and we rely on the social cohesion that comes from the nuance and empathy that books build.”
Stories Matter reflects similar programs operating in Canada, Germany, France and Scandinavian countries.
The NSW model will include $630,000 to support a public library membership campaign, including a pilot program to encourage women, girls and LGBTQ+ communities to take advantage of the free services and facilities offered by more than 360 public libraries across the state.
A $200,000 development fund for First Nations writers and publishing professionals was also announced as part of the strategy, along with the establishment of up to four temporary and 12 to 24-month affordable housing residencies for artists, writers, playwrights and illustrators.
The government will establish a $500,000 Literary Fellowships Fund to support authors, playwrights and illustrators, and a further $225,000 will fund three co-funded Writing Australia collaborations – including a program to develop an international marketing arm to promote sales of Australian writing abroad and financially support writers who are touring internationally.
A further $100,000 will go to western Sydney literature organisations, including the delivery of a school-focused program and an emerging writers academy.
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The multi-award-winning writer Charlotte Wood was used as a case study by the NSW government’s advisory panel working on the strategy.
“I’m hopeful the strategy will recognise that Australian literature is not merely decorative, a nice thing somehow separate from the rest of life,” Wood said in a statement on Thursday.
“Literature is absolutely central to the intellectual life and psychology of any nation. Australian books and writers are a dynamic contributor to the cultural, economic and political thinking that shapes our society. And unless governments begin to take reading and literary contribution seriously, that flourishing intellectual life is doomed to evaporate.”
The novelist and critic James Bradley, whose work Deep Water was shortlisted for the 2025 Prime Minister’s Literary award for nonfiction, was on the advisory panel.
“The NSW government’s new literature strategy will make a material difference to the lives of the state’s writers by investing in creators, strengthening the literary ecosystem, and fostering a range of new partnerships with universities, cultural institutions and other organisations,” he said.
“But it also helps ensure the benefits of reading and writing are available to everybody by investing in programs to improve literacy and promote reading in schools, supporting First Nations writers and publishing professionals, and allowing readers of all ages to connect with writers through events in libraries and elsewhere.”
The initiative comes in the wake of the Australian Society of Authors launching its latest defence against the onslaught of AI, confirming that Australian writers and illustrators could be eligible for compensation under a landmark US$1.5bn class action settlement against AI company Anthropic in the US.
The lawsuit was brought by American writers who allege the company downloaded copyrighted books from the shadow library LibGen to train its chatbot.
The ASA chief executive, Lucy Hayward, said the association’s searchable list of works would enable Australian writers and illustrators to check whether their creations are among the half a million included in the class action. But Hayward said she feared some Australian authors could miss out, even though their books were included in the pirated books dataset, because of the narrow definition of the case.
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It is believed as many as 7m titles are in the LibGen library, without permission for use from authors or publishers.
“It’s clear that Australian authors cannot rely on expensive and lengthy overseas litigation to see redress for the harm done to them,” Hayward said in a statement.
“We need government intervention. The ASA is calling for the government to introduce a mandatory code of conduct that requires big tech to appropriately license the Australian copyright work they wish to use for AI training, as well as to pay ongoing fair compensation to Australian creators whose works have already been ingested – and from whom it is too late to seek consent – for as long as their work remains ingested in the models.”
The Anthropic case is one of dozens of lawsuits currently before US courts addressing the use of copyrighted books by AI companies.
As two neuroscientists filed a lawsuit last week in California against Apple, claiming the company used shadow libraries to illegally access thousands of pirated books to train its AI model, the Australian Productivity Commission was coming under fire in a parliamentary inquiry hearing for failing to consult anyone in the creative sector about AI’s impact on the arts – an oversight Wood described on Thursday as “an obscenity and a travesty”.
In 2023 the Booker prize winner Richard Flanagan discovered his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North was one of as many as 18,000 fiction and nonfiction titles with Australian ISBNs that had been pirated by the US-based Books3 dataset and used to train generative AI for corporations such as Meta and Bloomberg.
“I felt as if my soul had been strip-mined and I was powerless to stop it,” he said at the time.
“This is the biggest act of copyright theft in history.”
The head of policy at the Australian Publishers Association, Stuart Glover, said the Books3 case was ongoing.
“Tech needs to stop pretending this is ‘fair use’ of authors’ and publishers’ work,” he said.
“We hope future settlements at least meet the benchmarks set by the Anthropic case.”