Serious question: does The Australian Financial Review actually convene these ludicrous “business roundtables” or does it just get some intern to write up the same old stuff business leaders always come out with, and then get their offices to sign off on them and send in a picture to be photoshopped?

Indeed, is an intern even required? Does The AFR have bespoke software that generates “business leader talking points”? Press F5 for “need to lift productivity, IR laws too restrictive”? Press F3 for “lower taxes”. Press F9 for “support a carbon price but not the current one”?

Those were the sort of tired clichés we got from The Australian Financial Review this morning (in what was bizarrely billed as “an unprecedented roundtable discussion”) and on The Fin’s Sunday TV show on the Nine Network on tomorrow’s federal budget.

The line on budget deficits, spending and tax was set on the TV show, where the usual suspects were rounded up — James Mackenzie (chairman of Mirvac), Business Council chair Tony Shepherd (just for a change from the groupthink), Fortescue’s Nev Power, ANZ CEO Mike Smith and Richard Goyder  of Wesfarmers, who all gave us the conventional “business demands” from the budget, as though Wayne Swan might be listening and ready to do a hasty last-minute rewrite.

Perhaps the most ridiculous comment came from the about-to-depart Minerals Council mouthpiece and undisupted heavyweight champion of rentseekers Mitch Hooke, who said: “I’m looking not so much for a plan to get back into surplus. I’m looking for a plan. This is just chaotic. I’ve never seen anything quite so chaotic … They’re out there on a discretionary spending spree that has no structure to it.”

” … Business [is] using the budget to spruik measures that benefit business alone, rather than serve the national interest and the welfare of all Australians.”

Odd coming from the bloke whose members not only sabotaged the mining tax and oppose the carbon tax but wasted tens of billions of dollars on overly costly, rushed expansion plans in iron ore, coal, gold, aluminium, oil and gas.

For his part, Shepherd wants a more short-term focus (although he constantly rails against the short-term focus of investors and governments). “We see the next six months as critical in our history,” said Shepherd, repeating his National Press Club speech from April. Decisions in the next six months would, he insisted, lock governments in for several years — although he didn’t explain why that would be the case.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s Peter Anderson said “the nation had become complacent after surviving the global financial crisis relatively unscathed, suggesting the economy had emerged from the crisis with a structurally higher dollar that was making local industry less competitive on global markets and forcing the Reserve Bank to lower interest rates”.

“The currency has had the impact on our competitiveness that we’ve just discussed and what did we do? We just put a carbon tax on our production [and] we re-regulated the labour market. We shouldn’t be fiddling with the exchange rate and we shouldn’t expect monetary policy to bear the full burden of adjustment either,” Anderson said.

Fair dinkum, you could play a drinking game with this stuff.

Anderson didn’t explain who was “fiddling with the exchange rate” given both the government and the RBA have declined to intervene to lower the value of the dollar. Nor did he explain how industrial relations had failed to adjust, given labour productivity has lifted significantly under the Fair Work Act.

The real problem Australian business has is that the government, the RBA and Australians via their vast superannuation savings pool managed to prevent the economy from recession during the GFC, and since then the government and the RBA have managed the economy successfully to maintain employment, low inflation, low interest rates and low debt (and increase labour productivity) despite the challenges of a mining boom, slow global growth and a strong dollar.

Yet business insists we must lower taxes, reduce the size of government and deregulate the labour market to forestall a looming crisis (remember, the next six months are crucial!).

The AFR’s business coverage these days is by business, not about business, but at some point cutting and pasting the same talking points must get boring even for The Fin’s business readers.

In contrast, Ross Gittins was spot on this morning when he suggested the budget was “Canberra’s con job’. “Why does everyone in Canberra have an interest in misleading us about the budget’s macro-economic significance? Because, as the ACT’s principal export to the rest of Australia, the budget is how they make their living,” Gittins concluded.

To that we can add that the con job of business using the budget to spruik measures that benefit business alone, rather than serve the national interest and the welfare of all Australians. And they’re the same measures we’ve been told about time and time again.