Past winners of the award include legendary writers such as Tim Winton, Thomas Keneally, Alexis Wright, Thea Astley and Peter Carey.

And because it’s Australian culture, you can place a bet with a bookmaker on which title on the shortlist will win the award.

The winner of the Miles Franklin can expect prize money of $60,000.

Many will then pay around $20,000 of that back in income tax.

But if you picked the winner of the Miles Franklin with the bookies, your winnings are tax-free.

Isn’t that weird? Winning authors pay tax. Mug punters, no tax.

It gets weirder. If you win the lottery, Who wants to be a Millionaire or The Block, you don’t pay tax on your prize money.

Win the Stella Prize for writing by Australian women – pay tax.

Win the Archibald prize for painting – pay tax. How about the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards? Well in that case, “All prizes are tax-free” is in bold on the website.

This shows that whether prizes are taxed is completely arbitrary. It is a decision for Australian governments to make. And should the Australian government choose to axe the taxes on arts prizes, they would be making a sound investment in Australian culture.

The loss of revenue would be unnoticed by a government that just gave away $215 billion dollars’ worth of natural gas for free.

It would barely register given the $10 billion in subsidies the government handed over in the form of the fuel tax credit to mining companies.

By contrast, an extra few thousand dollars in the pockets of writers really makes a difference.

According to the Australian Tax Office, the median income for Australian authors is $32,760, which is below the poverty line.

Creative Australia ran a survey in 2022 finding the average writer’s annual income is $18,200.

Average or median, either way, most Australian authors have incomes below the poverty line.

For writers on a small income, a prize can mean the difference between taking a year off work to write their next book and trying to fit writing in between other jobs.

In the case of a Miles Franklin or Stella Prize win, a tax-free prize could mean the difference between $60,000 and $40,000 in their bank account.

Stella Prize winner Dr Charlotte Wood AM says, “for those few writers who win, it would mean that a year’s income could easily stretch to keep them going for an extra year or even two or three, without the extraordinary financial and attendant psychological strain most artists live beneath. Imagine if we were a society generous enough to allow this tiny gift.”

Easing the pressure on an author from finding other sources of income so they can develop their next book can mean the difference between building a career and getting stuck in short-term and poorly paid stop-gap work.

Prize money doesn’t simply affect an individual artist but, in some cases, their community as well. Miles Franklin winner and Bundjalung author Melissa Lucashenko said she paid $15,000 tax on her win in 2019. She 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.”

For an author such as Lucashenko, who is a central figure, regularly supporting those in her community, means that the effects on the increase in prize money move out through networks and benefit more than a handful of prize-winners themselves.

This measure is not just important for writers; taxing prize money applies to playwrights, painters, musicians and artists from all disciplines.

The National Association for Visual Arts has been an advocate for tax-free prizes for many years.

Making prize money tax free is not charity. It is a way to foster our best artists, the people who help Australia understand and see itself clearly.

Australia gives away extraordinary amounts of gas and offers massive subsidies in the form of fuel tax credits – why do we accept these enormous subsidies and not ask for better support of our artists?

With pressure on artists from cost of living and culture wars, and on publishers whose margins have shrunk thanks to increasing paper prices and spikes in the costs of logistics, the effects of making prizes tax free could mean we see the next Tim Winton have the time and resources to write their novel, rather than working three casual jobs to make ends meet and trying to squeeze writing in between.

It is time for governments to take a serious punt on Australian artists.