Culture

Tony Abbott Gives Authors Prize Money; Authors Give Money To Causes The Government’s Cutting

He can't catch a break these days.

by Alex McKinnon  9 December 2014

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Man, Tony Abbott can’t catch a break these days; everywhere he goes, there’s some unlikely character lying in wait to ambush him and take him to task over this whole “being a dreadful Prime Minister” thing. Morning TV’s no longer safe. Neither are funerals. Radio interviews are out, too.

Now it seems the PM can’t even rock up to a literary award where he’s the guest of honour without someone going out of their way to make him look bad. The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards ceremony was held at the National Gallery of Victoria last night, highlighting some of the best works in Australian literature from the past year and giving out a cool $600,000 in prize money, which if you’re a fiction writer is enough to live off for approximately 80,000 years.

Unfortunately for Abbott, a bunch of the selected winners decided to make a point by giving their prize money to charities that kind of conflict with the government’s agenda. Richard Flanagan shared the fiction gong for The Narrow Road To The Deep North, and while he didn’t use the opportunity to berate the government on climate change like he did when he won the Man Booker Prize in October, he did announce that he was donating his $40,000 cash prize to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.

The ILF is a privately funded charity, which is a good way for an Aboriginal organisation to operate these days given that the government’s ripping a cool $534 million out of Indigenous programs over the next five years, including $9.5 million slated for Indigenous language support.

That wasn’t all. Children’s Fiction award winner Bob Graham, who won for Silver Buttons, announced that he was giving $10,000 of his prize money to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, an organisation that’s a tad miffed with the government at the moment over its new migration laws.

“The measure of any civilised society was its willingness to look after its weakest,” Flanagan said upon receiving the prize. “Money is like shit, my father used to say. Pile it up and it stinks. Spread it around and you can grow things”. Not bad advice.