When I asked Anna Funder, the author of Stasiland and of All That I Am, what she thought about proposed changes to copyright in Australia, she was much more eloquent than me. Obviously.

She said: "Writers will have their incomes taken away ... and what does that do to society to have no independent voices?"

If Australia adopts fair use, authors would make no money from their work. Funder explains it this way.

"My 'superannuation' which is my royalties, [would be] stolen in one legislative action.

"In the long run, to forcibly expropriate writers' property and give it to Google for free reduces the value of human thought and creative production to clickbait for Google et al, because independent sources of income are legislated away."

As Peter Martin wrote last week, five major inquiries have recommended "Australia future-proofs its law by moving to the US system of fair use". He predicts that the final report of the Productivity Commission's inquiry into intellectual property will do the same. And of course there is much to be said for that argument if you are looking at the benefits to big technology companies. Which already have the benefits of paying next-to-no tax and still receiving government subsidies.

But Australia has an intense and productive band of writers, authors, journalists, creators of all kinds, who rely on the payments they receive for the copyright of their work. The work most of us do is badly paid. Unless you are paid a zillion dollars for the movie rights to 50 Shades, most of us do piecework. We are contracted to companies that aren't Google or Facebook and whose profit margins aren't vast.

But these smaller businesses provide a financial scaffold to the economy of creation, to the political economy of ideas. And to authors like Anna Funder.

Funder spoke at the Australian Booksellers Association conference earlier this year to an onside audience who I hope took her message to the rest of the world. In it she said: "It feels like our leaders do not want people to see themselves or their country in the variety of ways that literature allows."

And that's what really worries me here. That we might structure our industry in such a way that only those working within big profitable companies will ever be paid more than a pittance for creative work. That people can take my work – or the work of those much more profound than me – and change the original purpose, use it whatever way they like, profit from it.

I understand that the federal government was annoyed that the draft Productivity Commission report on intellectual property was published just a few weeks out from the election. Apparently, it detracted from the message of jobs and growth. But this government claims it's all about innovation, about agility, about a new economy and entrepreneurship, yet these proposed changes to copyright punish creators, who innovate and are entrepreneurial every day of their lives. They have to be, otherwise they would never get a single thing published or broadcast. Writers and broadcasters were already part of the gig economy well before we were provided with a phrase that covers up exploitation of creative workers.

Last Friday, thousands of creators received a payment, from small to substantial. It lobbed into my account, very welcome in the days before Christmas; a copyright payment for work I'd done over the past few months and used in other places than the original publication. I'm used to my work being taken out of context, particularly by News Ltd columnists, but in each of these cases, my work was used as a whole and paid for in this small way.

Jackie French, whose books I read to my own kids when they were growing up; and who, among other creations, is also the author of Diary of A Wombat, fears for what will happen to her own work if Australia decides to go down the fair use route. And never mind fair use changes, what happens if the term of copyright moves from 70 years after the death of the author to 15 years after creation.

"Diary of a Wombat could be used to sell soap powder or toilet paper," she says. As she puts it, she is very happy to share some of her income with the team who helped her send her work out into the world, the publishing house, but what if it is used in a way that is different from her initial purpose.

"When people create with their hands, they own that work; but not what they create with their minds."

In the US, those who want to sue for a portion of the funds from fair use have to go to court. That would preclude most of us from ever having access to the profits from our own work. We couldn't afford to take those companies to court.

As Funder puts it: "My books take five years to write. I borrow money and back myself as an innovator and create."

She is right. This is innovation and creation.

Stasiland and All That I Am and Diary of A Wombat are worth more than clickbait and fake news. They are worth paying for.