We’ve written before about the ritualism of what passes for economic debate here — how a business lobby group will drag out the same rotting neoliberal ideas about cutting company tax, removing regulation and taking away workers’ rights, and in response the corporate media’s economic correspondents will marvel as if they’ve only heard such eternal truths for the very first time, before both wait a couple of years and then repeat the whole process.
Kudos, then, to the new president of the Business Council of Australia (BCA), Geoff Culbert, who at least presented the usual reeking offal a little differently at the “AFR Business Summit”, where business leaders and commentators gather to tell each other first-hand the same drivel they can read every day in the op-ed columns of that august journal.
Culbert, previously at Sydney Airport, is new to the BCA gig and this was his first major outing. He portrayed himself as prepared to tell truths no-one else was prepared to utter. “What I’m about to say is not a criticism of the government, the opposition, the media, or the business community,” he reassured his audience. As it turned out, he only criticised Labor, for its industrial relations changes, but quelle surprise.
Culbert lamented that politicians won’t do big-picture economic reform any more because “we’re caught in an incessant cycle of short-term thinking where governments are forced to live from Newspoll to Newspoll … The opposition [is] incentivised to oppose everything the government of the day says … Our three-year term limits are too short, which means we’re permanently in election mode and governments are in a constant fight for survival … It makes it impossible for either side of politics to go after a long-term reform agenda that will drive the success and prosperity of the nation”.
Not like the glory days of Hawke, Keating and Howard, he added.
The trope of lamenting that the current crop of politicians is not a patch on previous generations when it comes to reform is into its second decade of healthy life. It’s been a cliché of media commentary and business community complaint since the Howard government was booted out.
Culbert at least offered a solution. He wants an independent body put in charge of the climate transition. “We need an independent expert body to work with all stakeholders on a multi-year target that is realistic and achievable.” He also wants “an independent expert, working with all stakeholders, to design a tax system that will meet the needs of generations to come”. And he wants the Productivity Commission given the responsibility of cutting regulation for business.
Peculiarly, Culbert was silent on a couple of matters that are germane to his solution. Who was one of the biggest saboteurs of climate policy in the past decade? Why, the Business Council, which insisted it supported climate action but attacked every policy put up by “economy-wrecking” Labor — including “welcoming” Tony Abbott’s abolition of the carbon price. Would the BCA set to sabotaging the work of the “independent body” Culbert wants?
And why did Culbert have nothing to say about the biggest problem in the Australian economy, the lack of competition? After all, he knows first-hand all about it, having dealt with the anti-competitive hoarding of landing slots at Sydney Airport by Qantas. But Qantas is now one of his members, so any reflection on the anti-competitive behaviour of the airline, or any of his other giant corporate members, might be politically incorrect.
But how about his broader point? Putting aside that the Hawke and Keating governments managed to undertake plenty of reform in three-year terms, it seems that Culbert thinks we have too much democracy. People vote too often. And politicians are too scared of voters to do the right thing, so we should empower unelected bureaucrats to do it instead.
Let’s take our cue from Professor Angus Deaton, whose almighty spray at the economics profession we wrote about yesterday. You can’t understand much about capitalism without analysing power, he correctly observed — especially the ability of business to influence the rules of the game.
What Culbert is complaining about is the degraded ability of business to influence the rules of the games because of community opposition — opposition to cutting wages, opposition to climate inaction, opposition to company tax cuts and a higher GST, opposition to a whole slate of “reforms” championed by the BCA that transfer wealth and certainty from workers and households to his members.
So, Culbert says, let’s put someone else in charge who can ignore community opposition. Rather like the Reserve Bank — with its board appointed from the ranks of big business — can ignore the havoc it is wreaking on the economy with its ideological and unnecessary interest rate rises. Let’s change the game entirely because our capacity to keep tilting the playing field in our own favour has been curbed — though, sadly, not ended altogether. Democracy’s hell, ain’t it?
Yep, the direction we are going in is just getting worse. Little USA is what the neoliberal have been after from Howard’s day, and the power and lobbying ability of the corporate shills knows no end – tax minimisation so they don’t pay their share, pushing down tax rates for high income earners, it just goes on and on. Any concept of the “commonwealth” or the greater good. his totally ignored and overrun in the pursuit of self interest.
The Corporations Union.
We don’t hear from the Workers’ Unions because they don’t own news outlets.
Lots of sarcasm in this article, which is the lowest form of wit – but I like it.
Sounds like this Culbert fellow prefers the government model of one General Augusto Pinochet where GDP growth from 1973-1990, when he ceded power to “democratic” government after a referendum which wanted him gone, reached the dizzying heights of an average 2.9% per annum! Since 1990, when Chile successfully voted out their fascist government, Chile has achieved GDP growth rates of 7-9% per annum on average.
This Culbert is another rent seeker of a business lobbyist who wants workers to lose rights and pay to be given to employers, who wants environmental green tape and civil red tape to be loosened to allow business developments to build and do whatever they want regardless of environmental and social consequences. Gridlock traffic here we come.
Time to call him for what he is and pick his arguments apart.
“Have you considered the economic benefits of slavery?”
You’ve hit the nail on the head, MAC089!
All these rabid Unionists should be grateful they’ve got jobs..!
”The executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Marx, The Communist Manifesto. Not surprisingly the Business Council would prefer us to move a bit closer to that ideal. Though perhaps substituting the words “members of the Business Council” rather than the bourgeoisie. Some bourgeois interests might be inclined to competition after all…
‘The whole bourgeoisie’! The BCA would not be interested in that – they represent a much smaller group, more like the 1%.
These days even politicians don’t bother trying to represent ‘the whole bourgeoisie’. You would have to go back to the Menzies government in the 1950s to get close to that.
What I love about Menzies is he gave Australia two things:
1. Normalised lying and deceit by calling the conservatives, “Liberal”, which, according to any dictionary, are antonyms; and
2. Gough Whitlam, who gave us the end of Australia’s involvement in the American war in Vietnam, free tertiary education and more progress than any other PM ever.
He also gave us the 19 year rule. No government in Australia has lasted more than 19 years. That’s the amount of time it takes for the electorate to wake up to the overt corruption and incompetence of the sitting government, usually conservative.