Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers has a degree in communications and a PhD in political ‘science’. He’s never held a job outside politics. His boss, Anthony Albanese, did study economics – at Sydney University in the early ’80s, which is somewhat akin to study agricultural science under Lysenko in the 1930s. The only job Albo ever had outside politics was a year in the back office at the Commonwealth Bank.
It all shows.
Especially in the disdain the Albanese government clearly holds for business, big and small.
Small, family owned businesses have long been an economic powerhouse. They’re under relentless attack.
Most Australian commentators, community analysts and governments have missed what arguably is the biggest social change in our society – the relentless decline in highly productive family business, which is being replaced by government-supported activities and to a lesser extent larger corporations […]
The extent of the decline has been documented for the first time by Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman Bruce Billson.
Back in 2006, small family businesses contributed 40 per cent of GDP and employed 53 per cent of those with a private sector job. Today, smaller family business accounts for only 33 per cent of our nation’s GDP and provides only 42 per cent of the private sector workforce with a job.
And only 8 per cent of small business owners are under the age of 30 – half what it was in the 1970s.
And the fall is set to accelerate because new figures from the tax office reveal that a staggering 46 per cent of small family businesses did not make a profit in the most recent year of available accounts.
Back when Julia Gillard was PM, she spruiked her economic vision for Australia. It was dominated by healthcare and education – both sectors dominated by government employees (and women – though those were gender disparities that the feminist Gillard somehow never noticed). To hammers who’ve spent their entire lives in politics, more government and more taxpayers’ money are the only nails in the box.
Heaven forbid that these clowns should ever risk their own money by plunging it into a small business. As Thomas Sowell said, putting decision making in the hands of people who bear no consequences for their failures is insanity.
As a result, we are turning ourselves into a low-productivity society where government and big corporate power can set prices and are often insulated from the activities of the RBA.
In previous generations, family business kept a lid on prices when the RBA squeezed the economy. Australia’s family business decline is a hidden force behind the failure of the RBA’s higher interest rates to have the expected impact on the consumer price index […]
The squeeze on family business and Australian productivity goes much further than simple rises in interest rates.
Mindless government regulators appear to regard small enterprises and productivity as “the enemy”. Armies of bureaucrats set families mountains of regulatory tasks that they often perform late at night.
It’s got immeasurably worse, as the Albanese government pays off its union puppet masters.
The anti-productive measures that have been inserted into the family business community rules go even further than the 700 pages of the industrial relations act.
Around the world, large corporations face environmental and other compliance obligations. They meet them using large teams of people. But family enterprises dealing with large corporates are now being forced to provide the same sort of information, and they don’t have teams of people to assemble that data.
Environmentalism – specifically, Climate Cultism – is the other great obsession of the left. Consequently, the Albanese and other Labor governments are snubbing some of the biggest contributors to the Australian economy. They’ll take their taxes, but won’t dare be seen in company with heretics.
It says something about the mindset of the modern Labor Party that not a single federal Labor MP turned up at the weekend’s 70th anniversary celebration of our largest gas exporter.
Gas is our second-largest export earner, the essential feedstock for the fertiliser and chemical industries absolutely needed for modern life, and the only way to ensure that the transition to renewable energy doesn’t put the lights out, yet because it’s an “evil” fossil fuel, not a single federal Labor MP could attend this milestone, even though Woodside is one of the very biggest businesses headquartered in Perth.
A business which employs 5000 people and pours $5 billion a year into government’s ever-grasping hands...
Not even the federal resources minister, a Western Australian, bothered to show up – but she did go to a footy match 500 metres down the road.
And the WA Premier could not be bothered to turn up because he was attending Labor Party events in the Pilbara, even though he has his own private plane that could easily have taken him to Perth and back in a couple of hours.
And all because they live in terror that a handful of unemployable loons and nosy-nanas in fancy dress will show up to glue themselves to something.
Like so many, they’re fearful of upsetting the climate lobby, even though nothing Australia does will make any difference to climate (assuming that mankind’s CO2 emissions really are the main climate villain), given that we’re scarcely 1 per cent of global emissions and the big emitters, China and India, have not the slightest intention of cutting their emissions any time in the next half century or so.
Australia is now close to a tipping point when it comes to our future as a First World economy.
Leaving aside export education, that’s often more an immigration racket than a genuine export industry, the way we pay our way in the world is via resources and agriculture.
A Banana Republic economy, as Paul Keating rightly dubbed it. That was decades ago and still nothing’s changed.
Worse, the tinpot panjandrums in charge are actively trying to wreck even that, in subservience to a secular religion that makes the Cargo Cults look sophisticated.
