We have been searching our minds to try to figure out why John Howard and Peter Costello refuse to criminalise cartels and send their perpetrators to jail. Here are 10 possible reasons for their inaction:
1) They believe in old-style capitalism, not the warm and fuzzy kind
2) They don’t want to offend Richard Pratt, one of Australia’s richest men and a large financial contributor to the Liberal Party
3) They believe that large, unequal oligopolies are good for the modern Australian economy
4) They don’t want to offend Richard Pratt, one of Australia’s richest men and a large financial contributor to the Liberal Party
5) They believe such an action would offend big L Liberals
6) They don’t want to offend Richard Pratt, one of Australia’s richest men and a large financial contributor to the Liberal Party
7) They believe such an action would unsettle the Big End of Town
8) They don’t want to offend Richard Pratt, one of Australia’s richest men and a large financial contributor to the Liberal Party
9) They believe such an action would alienate big Liberal Party donors
10) They don’t want to offend Richard Pratt, one of Australia’s richest men and a large financial contributor to the Liberal Party.
All perfectly valid reasons if you want to secure your high-end funding base, not upset a powerful billionaire, provide favoured treatment to people who commit grotesque white-collar crimes and not empower the ACCC with the penalties it needs to do its job properly.
Quite sensible, really, in a modern $1 trillion economy.
Thank goodness the young people must be saying – all these rich or powerful men will soon (comparatively) be dead. The Indigenous people have a similar way of overcoming dreaded events – they look back to a long past and know that in the future, their successors will outlast any situation. So how long can we continue to put up with Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee and their top of the town friends! We have promises which when not kept are lies and only core promises can be trusted or ? Then there is; Tampa, Wheat scandal, Dr Haneef & immigration episodes x many, troops to Iraq more lies. Noone believes that FAIRNESS can come out of anything that Howard and Costello touch! Are they scared because the truth will be revealed when they lose?