Democracy, an abuser’s guide, from the Business Council of Australia

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?