Australians Against Parallel Importation expresses our opposition to the Australian government's Productivity Commission's recommendation to remove parallel importation restrictions from the publishing industry.

We are writing to ask you to oppose the Productivity Commissions proposals to scrap PIRs in Australia.

The central argument of the Coalition for Cheaper Books is fundamentally undermined by the very nature of the companies comprising the group: they are Big Business; it is likely that they are not interested in benefiting Australian citizens by increasing their access to literature, by lowering the price of the books that they sell. They could have done so already, and haven’t
You have announced the start of Australia's largest ever Books Alive campaign, so I trust that you understand the importance of books to our national identity and culture.

The PC recommendations may not reduce the price of books, but they certainly threaten to homogenise Australian literature, in two ways: by facillitating the rapid, en masse importation of overseas titles; and by increasing Australian literature’s dependence on grant bodies, which already constitute a concentrated group of arbiters in control of the finances supporting the industry.

There are alternatives to the PC’s recommendations: re-introducing the subsidisation of printing costs would enable publishers to produce books at a reduced cost; reintroducing retail price maintenance legislation would ensure that these lower costs were passed on to consumers; reintroducing Australia Post concessions would mean that those small publishers struggling for representation in bookstores could viably carry out their own distribution, again passing on the savings to consumers.

We understand that legislative amendments need to be made in order to keep abreast of industry progress, but urge you to consider alternatives before supporting the wholesale scraping of parallel importation restrictions.