If Australia’s business community was casting around for a passionate, articulate and effective advocate for opening borders sooner than the government’s mid-2022-if-you’re-lucky deadline in the budget, look no further than Virgin CEO Jayne Hrdlicka.
Yesterday she strode to the podium of a Queensland University of Technology “Business Leaders’ Forum” and declared: “We need to get the borders open for our health and for the economy … Some people may die but it will be way smaller than with the flu … We’ve got to learn how to live with this.”
Putting aside that Hrdlicka thinks COVID-19 is less lethal than the flu when its mortality is multiples of that of influenza, or that somehow only the virus, not flu, will circulate if the economy is completely reopened, her line “some people may die” is now the poster slogan for a business community that throughout the pandemic has demanded that business profitability (they prefer to emphasise jobs) be elevated to a higher priority than it has been when governments make decisions about public health.
It’s hard to think of a better way to convey an image of uncaring business eager to boost profits at the expense of lives than to offer “some people may die” in your case for reopening.
Sections of the business community have pushed for the reopening of borders pretty much all the way through the pandemic, backed by News Corp and The Australian Financial Review. At no stage have they made headway in the public debate. Despite News Corp whining about the “populism” of Labor premiers, border closures have proven a massive electoral winner.
Indeed, so attractive a political model is border closures that Scott Morrison — once happy to attack state premiers for slamming borders shut at the first cough — has joined their ranks, pushing back the reopening of Australia’s international borders into the middle of next year, criminalising Indian-Australians seeking to return, and suggesting that even a fully completed vaccination rollout might not be enough to allow a return to normal international travel.
It’s the borders equivalent of Morrison and Josh Frydenberg’s fiscal reversal. Just as the Coalition’s commitment to fiscal discipline and small government has been completely junked, so its business-friendly commitment to free trade, globalism and open borders (for business people and workers, not refugees) has been flipped to a long-term commitment to being a hermit kingdom.
Just as the “debt bomb” headlines have disappeared, you don’t see too much lamentation from News Corp about border populism now, funnily enough.
The lamentation from business will persist, and the complaint that the party of business is making the lives of business harder. But Labor isn’t offering any easier options.
The hospitality sector, which includes some of the biggest victims of border closures, is a major source of donations to both sides of politics, but the Liberals’ biggest donors — resources companies, banks and the big four consulting firms — have been coining it during the pandemic, so there’ll be no financial squeeze to accommodate the likes of Hrdlicka and her Qantas counterpart, Alan Joyce.
Last August we noted that business would have to convince Australians they would benefit from opening borders — even though the benefits would primarily flow to corporations and shareholders. Not merely have they failed to achieve that, they’ve gone backwards and lost the federal government. Hrdlicka’s “some people may die” is hardly going to help matters.
It seems that for all the millions lavished on business peak bodies, for all their lobbying and public campaigning, big business doesn’t know how to actually influence public sentiment. They’ve tried for decades to convince Australians that we need to overhaul our industrial relations system in the name of “flexibility” — and failed. They lobbied desperately for a massive corporate tax cut — and failed. And they’ve pushed hard for the economy to reopen — and gone backwards.
In each case, the product has been rotten. But so has the lobbying and marketing.
To repeat the point: it’s only by getting Australians to think about how they would benefit — not corporations or “jobs” — from reopening borders that business will make any headway.
At some point, ordinary Australians will indeed start chafing at border restrictions that prevent them from holidaying overseas, or seeing loved ones they could only reach through a screen since March last year. It will be a slow burn, but it will grow more heated as more and more people are vaccinated, herd immunity nears, and Australians wonder why they still face communist bloc-style prohibitions.
In the meantime, the challenge for business is to avoid alienating people too much over the issue.
Jayne Hrdlicka, take note.
Either her spinners don’t know how to spin or she ignored them. Ignorance or arrogance, take your pick. To be charitable the flu reference was probably in relation to a COVID vaxxed population where the mortality rate might fall below that of flu.
But we are and have been seeing an unfiltered view of how business thinks and why corporations have been aptly identified as artificially constructed psychopaths. The public interest = our profits. Costs, including deaths are something to socialised.
But if a corporation were by some miracle to be compassionate and caring for the society in which they operate.They would be eaten alive by competitors.Th iron logic of capitalism.
That’s no excuse for corporate behaviour as it stands. It is, however, the reason we had the (pretty flimsy) regulatory framework governing corporate behaviour that was put in place to reign in the predations of corporate sociopathy and the sociopaths who run corporations. You know, the framework which so-called “neoliberal” governments around the world have been so busy dismantling, to benefit their rich mates.
Excuse? Corporations have no morals, you know.
Largely agree re the logic of capitalism but if you broke up many larger oligopolies into smaller businesses you might find they were more community minded precisely because their existence was more precarious.
The other thing about the business push is that we know damn well that it will be full steam ahead with 250 000 plus immigrants per year with the attendant joys of third world population growth.
Explaining to punters that mass immigration is the “reward” for getting the jab ain’t exactly enticing.
The lack of mass immigration has been one of the great benefits. The lack of planes flying overhead every 5 minutes a boon. The massive increase in intra-state and regional tourism has been an economic godsend.
The problem for the political and business class is that much of the population may focus on the benefits and forget whatever it was the downside is.
… the stalling economy, the restrictions on freedoms, permanent damage to the education sector. Loving the future of the hermit kingdom…
Beware the radical right libertarian trap, aided and abetted by white nativists, eco-fascists and alt/far right.
They are conflating normally very significant temporary churn over of temporary residents (ignoring since 2006 the expansion of the NOM) mostly due to international education with modest permanent immigration (< 0.5% population), but describing both groups as ‘immigrants’ which is not true, since most have no access (but this lie continues in media).
Majority of temporary residents caught in the ‘nebulous’ NOM churn over have no access to permanence (either ineligible and/or no interest) yet are ‘net financial contributors’ to budgets (via GST/PAYE if working); backgrounded by declines in permanent working age population vis a vis increasing numbers of retirees/pensioners, hence increasing need for public services.
The NOM or temporary ‘immigration’ etc. are not environmental proxies (vs. little or no action on carbon emissions and environmental constraints), though eco-fascists wish this, but merely barometers of all border movements and economic activity or health; if the economy declines, immigration declines and vice versa.
The elephants in the room are that China has probably hit peak population four years early, while Australia’s own peak baby boomer bubble is now retiring, downsizing and then popping their clogs; mother lode of coming demographic change in the permanent population, impacting asset values e.g. property; we leave following generations to clean up the mess..
Thanks for that, Drew. The subject needs a little thoughtfulness
I usually try to avoid hard liquor, but, to extrapolate :- “Not enough people die from the flu. We should open the borders and let more die. But it’s not all doom and gloom. On the bright side it will help our Virgin profits”?
Let’s give Jayne Hrdlicka some credit for saying plainly she’s ok with killing a few people if it’s profitable for her business. Honesty towards the public is a rare virtue among business leaders.
Still, it’s striking that she said this would not just be good for business, but for ‘our health’. I suppose in the business world such language refers to the health of businesses or profits, not the health of people, since she’s explicitly considering spreading a potentially deadly disease in order to bring about ‘health’.
We also have a government that consistently talks about business as its principal concern, never Australia or Australians. It all sort of makes sense.
Will this “virus” spread to the fossil fuel industry, and politicians?
“Let’s give Jayne Hrdlicka some credit for saying plainly she’s ok with killing a few people”
Sensible debate isn’t dead at Crikey!
Communist-bloc style prohibitions. Hilarious, BK, we already have suffered Murdoch’s version of Pravda, our phones are tapped, our computers are followed, CCTV watches our every move, kids randomly strip searched for the crime of wanting to listen to some music, sniffer dogs leading to personal indignities in spite of them being wrong the vast majority of times, police states a fact of life – and this was all before the pandemic.
What, a few short term border closures and suddenly we’re North Korea? I don’t think so.