A Sydney author – I’ll call her Rebecca – vowed never to write another book after the deranging experience of publishing her first. She’s using a pseudonym because one day she might change her mind; the notoriously small Australian publishing industry does not tend to look with favour on authors who complain.

When Rebecca was proofing her debut – a work of nonfiction published by one of the big five – she discovered that a pivotal chapter had been cut. “I thought it was a mistake, that it had somehow been left out of the papers they’d sent,” she says. “Turns out they’d deliberately excised it and thought I wouldn’t notice.”

The proposed cover art for the book, which was set in one country, featured an animal native to another – and when the book went to a copy editor, the questions Rebecca got back were “absolutely out of touch”. References to hunting were queried on the basis they might offend vegetarians. Big mistakes slipped through the first print run and needed to be corrected in the second, including the name of a major character, which changed suddenly halfway through. “I’d assumed the publisher would take care of these things,” Rebecca says. “It felt like they were trying to shove me out the door and get the book out.”

Her story is alarming but not uncommon in Australia’s publishing industry, which on the whole seems hellbent on getting books to market as quickly as possible. Some authors, like Rebecca, get stuck in a production schedule that makes no sense to them. “There was always the next deadline looming,” she says. “I felt like they were trying to pressure me to just roll with it.”

Other books get on the fast track to take advantage of Christmas sales or the news cycle – but not many go to market faster than The Mushroom Tapes did last year. Erin Patterson was found guilty of murder in July – the same month it was announced that Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein were working on a book about the trial. Just four months later, The Mushroom Tapes was published. As with many nonfiction books that are chasing a news cycle, the authors probably spent more time touring the book than they did writing it.

Media attention was lavished on The Mushroom Tapes, which remained on prominent display in bookshops months after release – but most authors aren’t so lucky, struggling to make their books visible in a crowded market.

Alan Sheardown of Perth’s New Edition Books acknowledges that the problem of an overcrowded market is not a new one. “If anything, I’m being shown slightly fewer books than I used to … but I’m always shown more books than I could possibly stock. I have to make decisions about what I want to support, and what I think can sell.”

Prize listings, BookTok and reviews help him sort through the boxes that arrive, and he and his staff read as many as they can but it’s impossible to keep up with them all. His impression is that it’s harder for “new and unusual voices” to break through because of the enormous economic pressures bearing not just on Australian writers but everyone working in the local book industry.

Those pressures are multifaceted. While the establishment of Writing Australia offered overdue support to a chronically underfunded industry, printing costs continue to rise even as book prices remain largely the same; it’s no wonder we’ve lost so many independent publishers. We’ve lost a lot of independent bookshops too, which can’t compete with the prices of Amazon and big-box discount stores. Prominent figures in the industry, including Richard Flanagan, have been calling for government intervention in the form of the price-fixing measures that are common in Europe.

In an industry under strain, product tends to be prioritised over process. I’ve been working as a critic and editor in Australia for more than 20 years and the story I hear from people who work in the industry is that they are being asked to do more with less, and to do it more quickly.

NielsenIQ BookData provided to the Guardian in December recorded more than 9,400 Australian print books scheduled for publication in 2024 – that number includes spiral bound-books, self-published books, textbooks and foreign imports rereleased with an Australian ISBN. What it doesn’t include are self-published ebooks, an area of huge growth. According to Nielsen, that 2024 number was actually down 7% on the average over the last 10 years – but there’s something close to consensus in the industry that we are still publishing more books than we should, and pushing them out so quickly that the quality of Australian literature is being eroded.

Talk to authors, talk to prize judges, talk to critics and to editors and you hear versions of the same story: wonderful books are being written and published in Australia but many more go to market too early. What might have been excellent books are marred by shoddy copy editing, flat-out errors, cursory proofreading – and, in some cases, an obvious lack of revision.

“I felt sorry for my editor,” Rebecca says. “She was clearly stressed out and dealing with the expectations of her managers.”

Alice Grundy, the managing editor of the Australia Institute Press and scholar of Australian publishing, says the experience of Rebecca and her editor is not unusual. She has tuned into complaints about publishing timelines over the past two decades and observes that the desire for rapid turnaround of books results in a “collapsed timeframe” for every aspect of production. Grundy’s research also found that complaints about pressured timing and shoddy production standards are perennial features of Australian publishing.

Publishers and underpaid editorial staff are under pressure to have books ready to go on a tight schedule – and often publicists are tasked with promoting several titles a month. They can’t give the same amount of attention to every book, which means many authors have the disappointing experience of spending years working on a book that, once published, almost immediately slides out of view. Grundy says it doesn’t make sense “to squash book publishing into the same timelines as other media”. She questions why publishers are rushing print deadlines when “arguably the point of a book is that it takes time to make and to read”.

The researchers Julienne van Loon, Bronwyn Coate and Millicent Weber have tracked what they call the “life cycle” of several Australian books, trying to figure out how new releases accrue different kinds of value. On their findings, Van Loon writes that new titles usually get three months on bookshop shelves: “If the title doesn’t shift within that window, it disappears – usually returned or remaindered – in some cases never to be seen again.” And yet the research team found that nationally significant books including Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains (2018) and Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2014) took much longer to gain traction than the three allotted months. It takes time for culturally valuable books to connect with readers: “There is a lot that we don’t know yet, and may never understand, about the complex and layered ways in which local books contribute to our cultural, social, educational and individual vitality.”

Another local author – I’ll call him Lee – is still smarting from the experience of promoting his book, which was published in 2025 by an independent press. He’d been sent the publicity copy while it was still in production and vetoed it. “I thought it was written by AI,” he says. “It completely mischaracterised my novel and made it sound like it was written for an audience of children.” He rewrote the copy with the publisher but the early version was sent out, defining the reception of his book. “It totally undercut my ability to talk about the book on my own terms. It was just embarrassing.”

Jennifer Mills is the author of the Miles Franklin-longlisted novel The Airways and its follow-up, Salvage. “For me the process of writing is an investigation of ideas and it can’t be done quickly,” she says.

It takes Mills, who is also the incoming chair of the Australian Society of Authors, three to six years to write a book; she treats it as the equivalent of a part-time job.

“Writers are never paid for our labour,” Mills says. “We’re paid instead for the product, and the reality is that there are shorter publishing and publicity schedules for each book.”

She points to the important role of independent bookshops including New Edition in fostering a community of readers for Australian books. Especially as the space for reviews of new books shrinks, “authors are really reliant on community, on word of mouth recommendation and the authentic enthusiasm of independent booksellers who hand-sell books to readers”.

Research commissioned by Creative Australia in 2022 found that the average Australian author earns just $18,200 a year from their writing. Advances and royalties are an important component of that income – and yet royalties are out of reach for authors until they earn out their advances, and that’s only possible if the books sell. This in turn heightens the expectation that writers take part in promoting their books, often without payment – which not all authors are comfortable doing.

While some large publishers flood the market in the hopes that at least one title sells well enough to cover the costs of rest, small publishers, driven by different publishing values, are finding alternatives.

Emily Riches is the publisher of Aniko Press, one of many independent newcomers to the Australian scene. In 2025 it published its first book, The Slip, a collection of short stories by the Melbourne writer Miriam Webster.

“You feel a little drowned out,” Riches says, “and you want to make a mark with the book that you’ve put so much time and effort and belief into.”

Riches worked with Webster for three years on the collection, gathering the stories and editing them. “When I was doing this, I didn’t have any other books lined up,” she says. “I did it all from scratch.”

Riches doesn’t see any value in rushing the next Aniko Press book to market. Ultimately, she says, “we want to publish good books, and take care with the process. You want to see your book being read widely, but really you want to see it being read by people who will care about it.”

Margot Lloyd and Emily Hart are the founders of Pink Shorts Press, a new small publisher based in Adelaide. They take a similar approach to Aniko Press, asking readers to trust their instincts. They have republished two novels by the groundbreaking Adelaide writer Barbara Hanrahan, as well as an eclectic and short list of South Australian writers. “Publishing is not a data-rich industry,” Lloyd says. “You’d think we would have clear ideas about what books connect with which readers, but we don’t.”

If column space, sold-out events and bookshop displays are anything to go by, the authors and publishers of The Mushroom Tapes were abundantly rewarded for getting the newsworthy book out so fast. But the future of Australian literature cannot lie with books that are written and published so quickly; it’s not sustainable for authors or for publishers.

Getting books into the hands of readers who actually want to read them requires a more nuanced approach. If the price of speed is quality, the risk is that readers – overwhelmed by choice and by hype, disappointed by books hurried to market and distracted by other media – will just stop caring.

One morning early last July, Micha Bitsinnie arrived at work to an onslaught of messages from confused families.

New Mexico’s governor Michelle Lujan Grisham had just issued a directive mandating the state’s child welfare department seek custody of all newborns who had been exposed to drugs and alcohol in utero. Some parents wondered whether medications that they were taking for addiction recovery, such as methadone, would flag their cases. Healthcare providers wondered whether the fentanyl in an epidural counted as a drug exposure.

Bitsinnie supports families as a policy manager at the non-profit organization Bold Futures, which advocates for policies that keep families together. Research shows that children prenatally exposed to substances do best when they can remain in their families and receive supportive services to treat any withdrawal symptoms they experience.

Bitsinnie is also a member of the Navajo nation, and she immediately noticed that the new directive appeared to be in tension with laws protecting the sovereignty of New Mexico’s Native tribes. Those laws stipulate that tribes must be immediately notified about a child welfare case involving a Native child so that they can take jurisdiction of cases involving their citizens.

“How are we notifying families, tribes, nations, pueblos?” she wondered

“The directive erodes important procedural safeguards for Indian families,” the ACLU wrote in an emergency petition it filed with New Mexico’s supreme court last month, noting that it “makes no reference to specific procedures and safeguards for Indian children and families established in state and federal law”. Nine tribes signed on to the lawsuit. Although the state supreme court declined to pause the governor’s mandate in early June, it will allow arguments on the case to proceed.

The new directive also directly contradicted a law the state legislature had passed only months prior, directing the state’s healthcare authority – rather than its child welfare agency – to develop new rules for treating drug use during pregnancy.

As states across the country have navigated the fallout of the opioid epidemic, they have struggled with how best to serve babies exposed to drugs during pregnancy. Medical professionals advocate keeping families together to prevent the stress of a traumatic separation and encourage parents to seek care rather than fearing punishment. Lawmakers, on the other hand, motivated by stories of kids being harmed, have moved to take children into state custody.

This dilemma is particularly acute when it comes to Native families, given the complicated history of Indigenous children being removed from their homes.

The federal Indian Child Welfare Act requires states make efforts to keep Native children in Native communities. A growing number of states, including New Mexico, have adopted state laws to strengthen their compliance with ICWA.

But in New Mexico, at least 25 Native children have been flagged by child welfare since the governor’s directive went into effect – with tribes taking jurisdiction in only 10 of those cases.

New Mexico is navigating a new policy that has brought the issue back into the spotlight, but advocates say states across the country have long implemented the law haphazardly.

“I don’t think there’s any state that is in what I would call really substantive compliance with the Indian Child Welfare Act. And New Mexico’s no different,” said David Simmons, director of government affairs and advocacy at the National Indian Child Welfare Association.

‘There were no resources’

Tribes are still fighting to fund culturally grounded child welfare programs a decade after Congress passed the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, the leading federal response to the opioid epidemic, which included guidelines for supporting families whose children had been exposed to drugs during pregnancy. Under Cara, state child welfare agencies were directed to support families by developing voluntary “plans of safe care” connecting parents to resources to support newborns exposed to substances.

The law also required states to abide by the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, passed in the aftermath of the mass separation of Native American families in the 19th and 20th centuries, which gives tribal governments jurisdiction over child welfare cases involving Native children.

But Cara is approaching its 10th anniversary in July and addiction and overdose rates across the country remain high. Although overdose deaths have fallen from their 2022 peak of more than 100,000, they remained high at nearly 80,000 in 2024 – the most recent year for which data is available. And Native Americans continue to be disproportionately affected – recording the highest overdose rate by race at 51.6 per 100,000 in 2024, more than double the overdose rate of all other races combined. Across the country, tribes have won millions in opioid settlements, alleging that the drug manufacturers targeted their communities with especially aggressive advertising.

New Mexico has consistently reported among the highest rates of substance-exposed newborns in the nation – more than one-third of infants born in the state between 2016 and 2019 were found to be exposed to drugs, alcohol or tobacco. Yet advocates say Cara has never been properly implemented to address the problem. When New Mexico implemented a state version of the federal law that year, it did not allocate any state funds to the policy change, and remains grossly understaffed on public mental health services.

“Even if families were accepting plans of care, there were no resources,” said Bitsinnie.

Ten years later, it’s difficult to quantify how successful Cara was – in no small part due to the surge in opioid overdose deaths spurred by the Covid pandemic and the continuing nationwide shortage of mental health providers.

After two young children in New Mexico died after substance exposure, political pressure mounted, ultimately prompting Lujan Grisham’s July 2025 directive, which disposed of the voluntary protocol. (Newborn deaths related to substance exposure are rare. In a review of its child welfare case registry, Delaware found that 0.82% of children given a plan of safe care sustained a serious or fatal injury.)

As of last month, 137 newborns had been taken into state custody under the governor’s directive, according to New Mexico CYFD spokesperson Jake Thompson.

“While the Navajo nation supports the intent of the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act to provide supportive, family-centered services, we have significant concerns that the proposed rule does not align with federal and state protections, including the Indian Child Welfare Act and the New Mexico Indian Family Protection Act,” Navajo nation president Buu Nygren wrote in an April letter. “Additionally, the rule raises serious issues related to tribal sovereignty, jurisdiction, and the potential for unnecessary child welfare system involvement.”

Donalyn Lorenzo – who is from Acoma Pueblo and previously directed the office of tribal affairs at the state’s children, youth and families department – worries the policy was written without consulting tribal nations.

“Child welfare would do well to learn from the values of our tribes,” said Lorenzo, who noted the wide community of state, tribal and child welfare advocates who joined consultations on drafting the state’s ICWA law, passed in 2022. “Safe children are created within safe communities.”

Cynthia Chavers, a member of the Lumbee tribe, previously served as the field deputy director for New Mexico’s Protective Services Division and the tribal liaison for CYFD. She says the governor’s directive harkens back to a time before ICWA, when Native children were separated from their families en masse.

Between 1860 and the mid-1970s, hundreds of thousands of Native American children were sent to residential boarding schools, intended to assimilate them, where at least 1,000 children died. In the 1950s and 60s, the US government implemented a second program called the Indian Adoption Project, which placed hundreds of Indigenous children in white families.

“I feel very strongly about stopping the genocide of our people by the continuous stealing of our children,” said Chavers. “Native children belong in Native communities.”

Coal companies could receive an extra $6.2bn in taxpayer refunds for the diesel they use if the Albanese government greenlights just half the mine developments up for approval.

The finding, in an analysis released by activist group Lock the Gate, comes as the government faces an internal campaign before next month’s Labor party national conference to commit to winding back a fuel tax credit scheme for multinational miners.

More than 300 Labor branches have joined unions, climate campaigners and mining billionaire Andrew Forrest in calling on the government to cap the scheme, which refunds miners, farmers and other industries the 52.6c a litre excise applied to petrol and diesel.

Treasury last month forecast the scheme would cost the budget $47bn over the next four years, rising from $10.7bn in 2026-27 to $12.8bn in 2029-2030. More than $1bn a year goes to coalmine operators.

Energy & Resource Insights, a consultancy created by the Sunrise Project, a climate advocacy organisation, said another 45 coal mining developments were proposed in New South Wales and Queensland. Of these, 22 had environmental impact statements that outlined expected diesel consumption.

Based on that data, the consultancy estimated coal companies could receive $6.2bn in rebates on 11.6bn litres of diesel used over their operational lives. It found one expansion alone – Glencore and Yancoal’s Hunter Valley operations expansion, the largest coal project ever proposed in New South Wales – could reap $1.7bn.

Lock the Gate’s acting national coordinator, Georgina Woods, said the fuel tax credits scheme was rewarding coal companies with billions of dollars for using diesel, reducing the incentive to shift to clean vehicles to cut emissions. She said it meant companies were “effectively claiming a public subsidy to expand coal mining” and the money would be “much better spent on easing the costs of climate change”.

“Households are struggling with rising energy bills and insurance costs, and that will worsen as the climate crisis escalates,” Woods said. “Pollution from mining and burning coal is fuelling rising disaster costs across each state and territory and the annual damage bills from increased flood, bushfire, storm, cyclone and hailstorms could reach over $40bn in the next 25 years.”

Mining vehicles consume about 35% of the diesel used in Australia, mostly to run trucks. About 15% of diesel is used at coalmines.

The fuel tax credit scheme is available to companies that use fuel in vehicles on private roads or in machinery. Households and most businesses usually pay the full excise, though it has been temporarily reduced for four months due to the war in the Middle East causing a jump in fuel prices.

The scheme’s supporters argue the fuel excise is collected to fund public roads and should not be paid on diesel and petrol used elsewhere. The Minerals Council of Australia says the scheme stops businesses “from paying a tax they don’t owe” and is “critical to the competitiveness of a diverse range of regional businesses reliant on diesel including Australia’s minerals industry, agriculture and tourism”.

Those calling for a change say the overwhelming majority of fuel excise revenue is collected as general budget revenue and not explicitly linked to road building and maintenance, and that the refunds encourage fossil fuel use. They say it undermines another policy – the safeguard mechanism – meant to encourage big industry to use cleaner technology to cut emissions.

An investigation by the Guardian and the ABC’s Four Corners last month revealed BHP spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying diesel trucks for use at its Pilbara mines despite internal company documents acknowledging this step was “misaligned” with its decarbonisation goals and would increase climate pollution. BHP received an estimated $622m in fuel tax credits in the 2025 financial year.

Almost 320 Labor branches have backed a push by the party’s conservation arm, the Labor Environment Action Network (Lean), to cap the rebate at $50m for each company – a model that would target big miners but exclude farmers and small businesses. Lean also wants to amend Labor’s national policy platform to commit the government to remove all “disincentives for decarbonisation”.

Labor MP Jerome Laxale has publicly backed the campaign and Guardian Australia is aware of several of his colleagues who privately hold the same position.

The government is holding firm for now, with the resources minister, Madeleine King, last month insisting that the existing regime would remain in place. “We’re not considering any changes. We’re simply not,” King told Sky News.

The Albanese government has approved 15 coal developments, mostly mine expansions, since its election in 2022.

Pet ferrets kept as therapy animals at the UK’s largest children’s prison have been co-opted by managers to kill rats, resulting in a bloody incident and concerns over child and animal welfare.

The unorthodox method of vermin control was waved through last month at HMYOI Wetherby in West Yorkshire following a surge in rat numbers in prison offices and grounds.

According to a union complaint seen by the Guardian, the decision resulted in a boy who looks after ferrets witnessing an “inappropriate and potentially distressing” savaging of a screaming rat.

Another complaint suggests the gored rodent was then “stomped to death” by a senior staff member in front of prison officers.

The incident once again highlights the vermin-ridden conditions in which children and adults are detained within the prison estate across England and Wales.

Mark Fairhurst, the national chair of the Prison Officers Association (POA), called for a reversal of the policy, claiming that the incident happened because private contractors are failing to keep prisons vermin-free.

“This is an unacceptable working practice and should be abolished immediately. This once again proves that the unfit for purpose outsourced maintenance contract needs to be abandoned and brought back in house,” he said.

Animal assisted therapy was introduced more than a decade ago at Wetherby, a former borstal which has served “as a national resource for the most vulnerable children in prison”.

The young offender institution, built around decaying 1950s brick buildings, 1990s blocs and repurposed naval huts, can hold up to 288 boys aged 15 to 18, but at present holds about 100.

Ferrets are kept as part of a therapeutic programme for traumatised children, Prison Service sources said.

But in mid-May, staff and children complained about dozens of rats running around the grounds and inside prison buildings. A team of officers and children who are allowed to take on maintenance duties, called ‘Q Branch’, were given permission to use ferrets to kill the rats.

According to a POA complaint sent to Mark Scott, the institute’s governor, “a rat was cornered and killed within a staff office using domesticated ferrets. This raises significant concerns in relation to animal welfare, health and safety, infection control, and professional conduct.”

“It is particularly concerning that a young individual responsible for the ferrets was present and witnessed the incident. Exposure to such an event is inappropriate and potentially distressing, and warrants review.”

Rather than destroy caught rats by approved pest control methods, a manager advised “stomping on them or throwing them against walls”, the union’s complaint said.

According to a separate complaint sent to the Health and Safety Executive, the ferret “was running freely and chased the rat eventually biting it and holding it still” until a senior staff member “stomped on the rat until it died”. Several staff also witnessed the incident, it was claimed.

Permission to use ferrets to hunt rats was given by a named member of the senior management team, the HSE complaint said.

The incident will not only traumatise child inmates and prison officers but is a “contamination risk” and raises concerns under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, the Animal Welfare Act 2006 and the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984, the union said.

While ferrets are often associated with hunting rabbits, some psychologists have said they are playful and responsive animals that can help traumatised teenagers.

The National Ferret Welfare Society said ferreting should always be carried out in “a controlled manner by experienced adults”.

“While we cannot comment on the specific situation without further information, we cannot condone the stamping to death of any animal in any situation,” a spokesperson said.

Rat infestations at prisons across England and Wales are increasingly common. A recent inspection at HMP Manchester, formerly Strangeways, found wings smelling strongly of rat urine, exacerbated by exercise yards covered in litter thrown out of cell windows. At HMP Rochester, prisoners were forced to block gaps under their cell doors with cardboard in an attempt to keep rats out.

In February, a report by HM Inspectorate of Prisons into Wetherby found high levels of violence and self-harm.

Prison Service sources blamed the influx of rats at Wetherby on building work disturbing a rats’ nest. A Youth Custody Service spokesperson said: “This was an isolated incident relating to maintenance works. HMYOI Wetherby has since strengthened its pest control procedures to keep vermin out.”