Sopt on. Thoroughly enjoyable read. Turkeys voting for an early Christmas - I must remember that one.

Thank goodness, a well written article that does not revolve around a CIA conspiracy theory or an anti-American rant! Big Business is like any other interest group, be they environmentalists or the welfare lobby in that they have interests that do not necessarily coincide with the broader interests of government. There is nothing wrong with that only it is the responsibility of politicians to be aware of this. We should be very concerned about the ongoing concentration of power with any central government as ultimately individuals and communities have a better idea of what they need than government in Canberra.

Talking of business absolutes out of order. It is well to remember an old bush saying. It is not only business, the whole f-'in lot's out of order.

It is all following GWB's quick-draw Texan-style doctrinal. Even before we had Georgie Boy and his amigos trying to run the world, we got the message out in the bush - get big or get out - with Maggie Thatcher and Ronnie Reagan riding high calling the tune of the global diploma.

Even with Pope John II and Nelson Mandela giving warning about a crueler capitalist coming world, there was some understanding especially with Mandela, but the smart-arse elitism kept on, with world consumers happy enough, big shops loaded with cheap Chinese products - everything from clothing and dishpans to everything electro.

More lately being hid by the media about GWB's roughneck doughboys having to get out of Iraq, with piles of questions to be asked whether Dick Cheyney's still got the oil? When the Iraqi's get given freedom can they go back to the Euro as they were before the Yank's arrived?

Let's hope a worried Murdoch might energise the media to let us have some truth at last. Wouldn't take a bet on it, however?

Nice article, Greg. Business may be too short sighted to think what a streamlined, efficient, effective BAD central government could do to it (and the rest of us). And some of the Commonwealth’s forays into states’ traditional activities (education, water) look scarily political and incompetent.

A bit of inter-jurisdictional competition on taxes, service delivery and infrastructure provision doesn’t go amiss, either.

Interesting points here, most around commonwealth versus state rights.

Personally, I would rather see the devolution of less power to the local level. By that I emphasise “LESS”.

The Authority of the state needs to be concentrated where “policy” is delivered and not where “policy” is invented. That translated means a devolved structure, not a central monolith.

That authority needs to be, overall, less and not more. It is strange that in Australia we do not have debate on “big” versus “small” government, it is strange especially when USA seems almost obsessed by it and the reason folk vote republican is because they perceive the democrats not has having inferior policies but as having more policies and representing the push for more government and was a central part of Reagan’s platform in the 1980’s.

The pendulum in corporate world tends toward centralist thinking, large corporations becoming larger and swallowing up smaller organizations. Darn it, reality is large corporations collapse and implode and then get sold off as small organization, leaving the idiots who built the monolith out in the cold and out of a job.

Oh bushbred – not altogether sure what you are saying you are rambling on a bit and the world is a changing place, only loons, luddites, lefties and maybe the Pope believe things will never and should never change.

Oh and Reagan was for smaller government and Maggie dismantled all the English nationalized industries she could – making the UK business/government oligarch “smaller”.

As for cheap goods from China – well, hate to tell you this but that trend has been going on for years. I doubt you have ever worn one but if you had, you would remember when people dropping off in Hong Kong cashed in on the cheap suites made by Chinese tailors or when all the goodies marked “Empire Made” came out of Hong Kong or Singapore.

Bushbred, I suggest take a couple of prozac and the rest of the day off.

Maybe big business is trying to get involved in the formation of a centrist big government but labor has been there for decades. And witness just how well they have done in providing the people with what they need (I did not say what they want).

Interesting article with some good points. Canberra having near full control over the states would no dbout see business granted a big juicy wish list, to the detriment of a lot of ordinary people. So long as the conservatives are in power that is. It could also go against them if another government suddenly decided that a change of course was necessary.

Of course they are like brain surgeons trying to plumb a bathroom. What they are unable to accept and factor into their worldveiw is that we do not live in an economy. We live in a society. Economics is only a part of the story.

Col Rouge, In my Post, sincere apologies, but was trying to get all my annoyances out at once. They are:

1. Do not like a world dominated by Big Biz, as us cockies called corporate style business during the Great Depression. It was Big Biz that helped bring on the depression with Dreyfus and Bunge dominating the grain trade. Australian cockies beat them by turning agrarian socialistic, holding their produce back and living off the land. Won’t work now because the world is again dominated by Big Biz - Corporatism, with Dreyfus and Bunge and the like all back again.

2. A corporatised unipolar world as we have now with America and its collossal armoury, could be well on the road to collapsing. According to the former Soviet leader Gorbachev the US could be beneficially replaced with a balanced bi-polar system, with America dominating one side and China, India and Russia possibly on the other.

3. These are the possibilities talked about in the Murdoch School of Humanities. Including the one about letting Iran go nuclear to match atomic Israel, creating a classic Middle East power balance.

Of course, the master of power politics, as you probably know was Bismarck, who is said to have gained more by diplomacy and less by war, than any other leader in history.

PS, Almost forgot to give reminder concerning Reagan and Thatcher that linking them with Big Biz or corporatism, was not about big government being the present problem in our world, but rather by imperfect government, as the imperfections of economic rationalism have so much shown in our world under globalisation

Bushbred, I am not a fan of big-business any more than I am of big-union.

Whilst most of the workforce are employed by small to medium sized organization and whilst individuals can still go out and develop their own enterprises and benefit from their individual success, like Bill Gates with Microsoft (as an atypical example), we will remain free of the autonomy which you seem to fear.

You claim you beat big-bus by holding back supply, as is your prerogative, all power to you.

Gorbachev would be one of the last people on earth qualified to comment on American ability to survive, considering his track record firstly in his “democratic” rise to power and then his capacity to deal with that power when he got it (Gorbie might seem a nice bloke but his skills in managing a free-market economy have yet to be tested).

As for imperfect government, well I support what Churchill had to say

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

The years have convinced me, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. With that maxim in mind, I will remain in favour and fervently support “small government” over “big government” and whilst most folk remain employed by small to medium companies (as much in USA and Europe and Japan as here), retain some sense of security that the big-corporations are a minority which can, in the long term, be managed. I was always amazed that the Coles-Myer and the Woolworth-Safeway mergers were allowed to pass the monopolies test, but since I have never voted for the flavour of government which allowed those travesties, accept no responsibility for the outcome.

Note globalisation - there is a difference between removing tariff barriers and market domination. The two debates are mutually exclusive and not co-dependent.

I do favour fewer tariffs and fewer quotas and greater free trade and hope to engage in more myself. That goal can be achieved as readily without large multinationals as it can with large multinationals.

I like this article, quite a lot. Nice to see a writer from the corporate sphere with a different take.

One thing to consider however, is our governmental system in historical terms is pretty arbitrary.

Power based on territory and a collection of loosely joined cultures meshing to create what we call a 'nation.'

Not all cultures are geared to this system as evidenced by problems in tribal Africa. Some kind of a system based along tribal allegiances rather than hastily drawn colonial settlements may have caused a little less historical strife, then again, it may have caused a lot more.

In any case, in a world of corporate powers, whose to say the nation-state in its current form will remain relevant? As core services are privatised, perhaps corporate entities will supercede the role of government.

(I don't think this'll happen anytime soon, bear with me for a hypothetical system).

Say we have a world divided along corporate lines - employees are commodities first, citizens second, core services are provided by corporations paid for by citizens - tax is bypassed direct to service providers.

Social security for the aged and disabled is provided for via a kind of body corporate collective agreement - as an employee of a particular company, you've the right to be cared for in a particular institution, probably through a sub-contractor.

Ownership of resources is on a rotational basis through a series of established firms who agree to provide services in return for resource entitlement, which is administered by the vestiges of government -now more of a shareholder entity themselves, as they derive profit via clients.

Law and order is via security firms, largely through enclave situations as evidenced by the growing popularity of gated and planned communities. Life is more difficult for the marginalised, but in the demand for growth there is always room within the corporate ranks for hard or intelligent workers.

In this vision - a dream or nightmare depending on your political affiliation - the state is no longer the chief arbiter of power. Is this such an unrealistic system of governance?

Guess you are still rather young, Col Rouge. Still haven't lived enough. Even a bit like our grand-kids still running the farm. Give them the credit for being able to use minimum ag', etc, with the help of chemicals. Trouble is they have joined Barry Court's Farmers and Graziers, the same Big Biz backed crowd but with a different name we knocked out during the Great Depression.

So they have never learnt to really rough it, and never learnt how to get together to knock out Big Biz in order to make a profit. The French still know all about it, though one wonders because they are all now protected with subsidisation.

Similar to the Yankee cockies, whom GW Bush guaranteed 80 billion dollars in sub's when he first got in - over more than his next 8 years to make sure the Republicans get elected again.

Yet you can survive both by experience and knowledge of history, matey, which means also that neo in marketing means not only new, but now - meaning that times have not really changed, and it is all coming round again, similar to our Anglophilic bastardry in the Middle East, the danger made ten times worse by us letting the Israelis go atomic

TurnRightThenLeft,

I hope your Orwellian vision of the future never comes to be realised. You are describing a Corprateocracy- a lassiez faiere type system in which democracy is irrelevent and you get as many votes as you have currency units. No currency unit - no vote. Important decisions would be made based on human greed rather than any notion of the commen good.

Individual self interest must be balanced against collective interest, public purpose, the common good. When one trumps the other completely, we have an unbalanced society, one whose days are numbered. Karl Marx's vision of a world in which absolutley everything would be owned by the state, was as unjust and unsustainable as one in which everything is privately owned.

The idea of a fully integrated, one world economy, in which nation states are nation states in name only and are otherwise irrelivent, and where everything is privately owned is now slipping away. It was supposed to have happpened years ago. Australia is not a "world leader in privatising". We are one of the last few countries whose government is railroading it down a path already tried by many others and rejected as having been found to be a failure in delivering the promised benifets and not in the best interests of their people.

Fozz - couldn't agree more, and I'd hate to see such a system come to pass. I made the comment to indicate that while capitalism may appear to be reaching its zenith, who's to say where it will end?

Bushbred – me young?

Thankyou BB – I do feel younger than I am, but am dealing with my 6th decade as if it were my third.

The first rule is the playing field will always out last the players.

The game remains the same.

Some folk try to get and edge by getting a rules change but nature does know best and the balance eventually returns. A few individuals, sadly, might be penalized unfairly along the way but no one promised us a rose garden – except the socialists – and they would promise anything for power, even their immortal souls.

It has been the owners of GM seeds and the moment it is “big pharm”. Those players will always be there but they will always end up being challenged.

As for the Middle East, values change with generations. The point is, you and I are not responsible for the wrongs of our grandparents, only for the wrongs we do ourselves. (For some reason the Celts think differently, they still go on about the Battle of the Boyne as if it happened yesterday).

We can only do and be responsible for what we personally have done and what we will do now. Good luck with it.

Fozz

Ultimately the best we can get is a government which leaves us to make our own mistakes because, when politicians make them for us, they make bigger / worse mistakes, it takes longer to realize and change course and what we lose is not only what it costs the individual but the opportunity to have got it right for ourselves.

Some around here and come to accuse me of being a “libertarian”. Maybe that is right but at least I am not trying to deny anyone their sovereign right to err.

TurnRightThenLeft,

Sorry mate, I did realise the flavour of your comment, I didn't mean to indicate that you were in favour of such a society.

Col Rouge,

I don't totally disagree with what you say Col, but I must stress that balance is the key. If I had to call myself anything I would probably describe myself a a socialist, but that doesn't mean that I want economic and social policy dictated straight out of the communist manifesto or Mao's little red book.

The individualism you speak of is a natural part of who we are as human beings(that's where communism had it wrong), but collective interest is just as important. There is incredible power in many millions of people striving toward a set of common goals together. Elected national governments, when they put their minds to it, have the ability to shape(and finance) the common good in ways that private enterprise, motivated as it is, by individual self interest, simply cannot. While they can be and are corrupted like anything else, they can be dismissed from office. Private enterprise cannot be voted out since they were never voted in. Thus, when they comandeer vital public services and infrastructure that hold our civilization together, they pretty much end up with power without responsability.

Business for profit is not fit to have complete over things such as health, education, power generation or natural monopolies such as water supply. Indeed, it's natural winner takes all tendency to monopolize ensures that at least some public ownership and, shock horror, government regulations are needed to maintain fair prices and fair supply. Living through my area water boards(now a privately owned company) attempt to "economically rationalise" water to the tune of a 600% price increase brought this fact home to me in a big way. I wonder what would have happened if the very embarrased state government had not still been the majority shareholder?

There will never be a perfect system but public ownership must always remain a big part of that system, or we will surely degrade into a bleak Orwellian world.

I wouldn't bother Fozz, I was trying to explain this to Col in another thread. Col ducked and weaved, threw cheap insults, purposely ignored my points.

Fozz “Business for profit is not fit to have complete over things such as health, education, power generation or natural monopolies such as water supply.”

Why not?

Private Schools deliver value – why should someone not be allowed to improve their educational opportunities (or those of their children) by spending their discretionary income on it?

Private Hospitals deliver value – and having suffered the rigours of the UK Nationalised Health system, I can assure you nationalised health monopolies offer poor service to a captive client base, they have all the worst attributers of a monopoly resulting in no accountability and no performance standards.

Power generation and telecommunications are services which can be readily privatised and should be accountable for their performance.

Telecom’s being an example of the consumer benefits of private ownership. The politicians do not get to decide “commercial viability” based on “political expediency”. Because when they do it ends up costing the consumer / user more and denies consumers access to other competitive options.

Water, because of its particular qualities and necessity for life, is the only resource which should be and remain in public ownership.

As for “government regulations are needed to maintain fair prices and fair supply”

I have no criticism of the ACCC. I am a fervent supporter of such institutions. I was appalled that the socialists allowed the Coles–Myer and the Woolworth-Safeway mergers to proceed, such a concentration of purchasing power significantly distorted and destroyed the balance in the retail supply chain to the detriment of both producers and consumers.

Orwell wrote his prophetic tragedy as one where the government owned and controlled everything and decided what we would learn, through controlled schooling, how we would live through nationalised services, such as health and what we would think, through such socialist apparatchiki such as the Stasis.
The great advantage with the free-enterprise model is, no one has sufficient power and control to instigate an organisation such as the Stasis, only governments can possibly do that and only governments have ever sustained such horrors over time.

Boo hoo bobalot

ColRouge,

As usual, you are half right about a lot of things.

Private schools do indeed deliver value - to those who can afford to pay. Most people are in favour of quality public education.

Private hospitals deliver value, again to those with the dollars in their pockets. My experience with our local public hospital is that for years the standard of care was lacking, in some cases apalling, but after voter anger reached boiling point, the standard has much improved although it still has some way to go.

Power generation: what makes privately owned power stations accountable for their prices? The Queensland governments refusal to allow the power transmission lines to be sold. The ability to restrict access to the grid for those who misbehave through public ownership of the lines is a fairly effective form of regulation, though I'm sure there are other kinds in use.

Telecom: it's purpose was never to provide attractive share options but to provide affordable, reliable communications for twenty million people across a vast continent. With the three amigos in charge, pocketing huge sums of our money and slshing 12 000 jobs, it could well be argued that it's net value to Australia as a whole has actually diminished.

And once everthing else is privatised, what's to stop water suffering the same fate? Just ask the Bolivians about Bechtel purchasing their water supply and immediatly driving prices through the roof, then after being booted from the country, attempting to sue 8 million of the worlds poorest people for damages. No wonder they put the socialists right back in power.

An on socialists col, explain to me how the allowed this supermarket chain merger. I'm sure you're just dying to.

As for free enterprise, a multi-national company owning millions of peoples drinking water suggests rather a lot of abused power to me.

Fozz. Public schools and public health both have vast budgets thrown at them. Have you every wondered why it is that they just cannot deliver and is the problem due in some ways to an attitude of “expectation” on behalf of the staff rather than an attitude of “customer service and performance”.

Maybe the problem with public services is, they lack the necessity to perform and just bleat about how tough it is, whilst their private peers are dealing with the realities of working in an environment where they have to perform to stay in business?

Telecom – forgive me, I thought Telstra, even when under the auspice of the PMG was a commercial service created to supply a “fee for use” telephone service.
Building a telephone company was never about merely employing people, otherwise we could just add a few more thousand staff to sit around, slug the customer a few bucks more a week, let them suffer dial up internet, not need to invest in broadband.

Well everything privatized, that means when these commercial companies need to extend their borrowing to finance commercially viable expansion, they can go directly to the share market and experience the due diligence and competitive nature of expert risk assessment, rather than fudging a few memos through a couple of bored public servants who simply slug the tax payer for millions of dollars to have funds made available from the public purse.

I have expressed my view on water, however, Bolivia,
“Bolivia… history has consisted of a series of nearly 200 coups and countercoups. Democratic civilian rule was established in 1982, but leaders have faced difficult problems of deep-seated poverty, social unrest, and illegal drug production.”

Anything to do with Bolivia is tainted by its history of political opportunism and corruption. Any Australian comparisons are likewise tainted.

Whatever Bechtel does or did, is likely to be irrelevant in comparison to the cesspool which is Bolivia’s governmental history.

As for “supermarket chain merger” I do not know, it was Hawke and Keating who allowed it to happen. More of their socialist incompetence I guess

col,

I have worked at a public school for ten years. I eat lunch every day with people who have worked in public education for twenty five. It is as simple as not being able to make a silk purse from a sow's ear. Each year, the government (both labour and conservative if you go back) unfailingly provide less and less money and yet expect more and more to be achieved. Over twenty years ago they began on a quest to trim all the fat. When the fat was all gone, they began cutting away the meat. Now in many areas, the meat is all gone, but they insist on sawing through the bone.

To insist that an institution will inevitably break down simply because it is publicly, not privately run is patently untrue. The school registrars(accountants) do a very good job, but they are hamstrung by a long entrenched policy of choking off funding to the public sector. Yes, there was wastage and duplication, but this could have been addressed without going to the lengths we see today.

The inevitable result of strangling the public sector (at a time when there has never been so much money) has allowed Howard and his cronies to jump on the bandwagon shouting "See! We told you publicly run institutions don't work. We need to gradually phase them out in favour of private ownership" If they don't work at all, it's for the simple reason that they have been purposely bled out of existence.

And col, regardless of how many coups and uprisings a country may have had, please forward a relevent argument as to just how a multinational company gaining and then excercising the power to deny people drinking water can possibly be called "irrelevent"

Fozz “I have worked at a public school for ten years.”

So I take it, whatever you say about “education” is most likely subject to your declared vested interest.

“but they insist on sawing through the bone”
I must admit, if it were me, I would find someone who appreciated my efforts more.
Nothing embitters the soul more than not being appreciated or getting plain frustrated.
I am sure it is not a good attitude which you present for the education of the impressionable young minds of your clients.

Strange how you decry people having the right to access private education and then come here to criticize the public system, which from your insider knowledge you admit is failing on all fronts.

Which would you choose for your children, private education which you pay for or (what you claim) is inadequate public education which we all pay for, regardless of if we use it or not?

Bolivia – well I know nothing about the arrangements which resulted in Bechtel supposedly owning the water rights of Bolivia, except to say,
1 They would have only acquired such rights by paying one of those “Bolivian governments” a fair bit for them.

2 Whilst the capitalist system works well in many instances, when it is in bed with corrupt government, things will go from bad to worse.

The problem is not capitalism, it is the corrupt government and when we look at almost every South American country, what those ex Spanish and Portuguese colonies inherited from their historic colonial masters has been, without exception, far less beneficial to their colonial stewardship than that Australia inherited from the British.

I urge anyone with an ounce of common sense to vote consistently to restrict the authority of governments of all persuasions to a minimum, rather than be sucked in to empowering them to do everything for us and getting seriously disappointed.

Give any politician authority and it is always at risk of abuse. Better the user pays and has the right to not pay when he thinks the service is cr*p.

col,

Please refer back to my last post, the key points seem to have escaped you.

Since we seem to have reached the stage where all we are going to do is attempt to have the last word, why don't we start our own little forum where we can happily trade cheap insults back and forth.

I admire your desperation to be right. It's just that you are wrong. Are you related to John Laws by any chance?

Yawn.

Fozz “I admire your desperation to be right. It's just that you are wrong”

I support a system which respects individual choice.

I support a system which empowers individuals, yourself included, to make personal choices and be wrong, instead of being fed the dross which anonymous bureaucrats deem sufficient for our needs, a bland and tasteless concoction of mediocrity and utilitarianism.

I support a system which allows everyone to rise like an eagle or remain a turkey, based on our
ability to make good choices
personal energy
commitment to achievement
and most of all
personal vision.

I am sorry that you lack the ability, energy, commitment and vision to believe in yourself and think that I am wrong.

I have been told all my life how wrong I am.

I will at least have the satisfaction of knowing that if I am wrong, I still lead my life my way.
The problem with following the course you suggest, one where our choices are made by the bureaucrats and faceless freaks who control socialism, is I would not live at all, I would merely exist (oh 1984).

Cattle and sheep “exist”, man was born to be more. We can only be more by making the right decisions and exercising personal freewill.

That you think that is wrong indicates lack of vision.

So go off and be “right” and I will go and be "wrong".
It is just, by being "wrong" I will not be coming after you for extra taxes or telling you to curb your lifestyle or life choices to pander to my notions of fairness or equality.

I will be happy to see you go and to never hear from you again. Whilst you are doing that, I will continue to build my businesses, employ people to help me earn more, enjoy my sea view, indulge my philanthropy, drive the Bentley up to town and recall how it was when I was a kid, wearing my brothers hand me downs because my Dad was a railway worker and that is all we could afford.