Over in literature land, the Miles Franklin winner will be announced tonight. On the shortlist are Brian Castro, Winnie Dunn, Michelle de Kretser, Fiona McFarlane, Siang Lu and Julie Janson. If one of those authors bet they would win and received the prize, they wouldn’t pay tax on the windfall – but they would pay tax on the prize itself. Unlike the winner of The Block or a TV game show, a literary prize  is taxed by the ATO.

And this doesn’t just affect writers. If you win the Archibald or the Wynne prize for painting, if you win a prize for a play or for music, you pay tax.

The Federal Government seems to see this problem with this state of affairs: The only literary prize in Australia that is tax free is the Prime Minister’s Literary Award.

Artists around Australia are having a rough time. Funding bodies are policing artists’ speech, living standards are falling and the median income for an Australian writer is below the poverty line.

As 2019 Miles Franklin winner, Melissa Lucashenko says,

“I’m very happy to pay tax – to contribute to a decent society – but at the same time, I belong to an extremely impoverished community. I am regularly called on to give money to people who buy their food on credit. Who can’t bury their dead, or who need petrol to get to funerals, or who can’t get out of jail to attend the funeral of a parent because that means paying the prison system the astronomical cost of guards to accompany them. $15,000 fills a lot of grocery carts, and a lot of petrol tanks.”

Meanwhile Australia continues to provide fossil fuel subsidies, the latest calculation from the Australia Institute is this amounts to $14.9 billion. Basic economics holds that you subsidise things you want more of and tax things you want less of. So, we’re making the choice to have less art and more fossil fuels in Australia.

There is an easy fix. The Federal Government can choose to make art prizes tax free, and that would mean artists can spend more time making the work we love.