Protectionism is bad. It’s hard to find anyone who would argue otherwise. Subsidies for unprofitable crops are met with cries of “unsustainable farming”. Tariffs for imported vehicles are charged with “propping up local industry”. It’s also credited with extending and intensifying the Great Depression when global trade collapsed following the introduction of the Smoot-Hawley Act, which was ostensibly designed to protect jobs in the US.

So it is with a considerable degree of skepticism that one must view the government’s recent decision to ignore the recommendations of the Productivity Commission and leave in place book import restrictions that ensure that consumers are worse off and that domestic book publishing remains a sheltered industry.

Firstly, I must reveal my own hand. As an author I stand to be affected by the removal of the existing law, which prevents the parallel importing of books within a month of its local release. Logic decrees that more competition from overseas means less domestic publishers. Less domestic publishers means less Australian authors. I guess that means the great Australian novel I’m working on is never going to find a home.

But that doesn’t bother me so much. Nor does the PR machine that rounded the handful of soft left Australian celebrities to dutifully trot out their well read lines about the struggle for diversity and the evils of chain bookstores. Nor does the fact that Rudd abstained because his daughter has a three book deal with Text Publishing. Well okay that one does kinda bother me a bit, but what really bothers me is the origin of this bizarre practice, according Dr Allan Fels of the Productivity Commission, was to entrench the monopoly of British Colonial publishers from back in the 19^th century.

While the spin doctors would have you believe that this is about making sure Australian publishing remains vibrant – and yes, its true that many jobs would be lost were it repealed – the report reveals that the main beneficiaries of the current state of play are, again, large multinational publishing houses.

Its been widely reported that Australian are paying anywhere between 33% and 50% more for their books than our overseas counterparts. Australians buys around $2.5 billion worth of books every year (I know! Who would have thought we read so much?). According to the Productivity Commission 60c of every dollar overcharged goes directly overseas. On some rough, back-of-the-envelope style calculations that’s somewhere between $500–$750 million.

Surely, if the government really does want to make sure that Australian publishing remains a vibrant and integral part of our culture the laws could be at least adjusted so that the largesse was distributed in a way that truly does support the industry and not the dividends of News Corp shareholders?

Perhaps the government has read the writing on the wall. After all, the 8% price drop in the average cost of CD’s following a similar report didn’t really seem to help that industry much in the face of the massive structural changes that the internet brought around.

While 5% of Australian booklovers are keen enough to buy multiple books at a time from overseas and have them shipped half way around the world here to save a few bucks (make sure you offset that carbon!), owners of the new Amazon Kindle know that you can download Stieg Larsson’s recently translated The Girl who kicked the Hornet’s Nest  in just second for less than half of what you would pay in the bookstore now anyway. I wonder how it will take before the rest of us catch on.