Talking of avoiding responsibility

Another ripper story in Friday’s Crikey daily email, with Bernard Keane calling bullsh*t on business people pathetic present ruse of blaming every bit of their own incompetence on THAT DIABOLICAL GUBMINT!

We need a name for this — we’re calling it Whinger Whack-A-Mole. Business leader after business leader sticks their head up to blame Julia Gillard for all their own failings and says that investors were turning away from Australia. We at Crikey whack them with facts. Rinse, repeat. Well, someone has to do it, because the rest of the media don’t appear interested in doing it.

Today it’s Myer’s Bernie Brookes lamenting that Everything Is The Gummint’s Fault, dutifully reported verbatim by Fairfax’s Eli Greenblat, that dedicated diarist of the woes of the traditional retail sector. Brookes also got plenty of air time at Business Spectator, where he was more circumspect about the Prime Minister’s personal culpability for everything wrong with Myer, but still managed to fit in a few complaints about taxes, uncertainty and that old favourite, the lack of GST on the evil internet.

To rehearse the tiresome facts all over again: the Fair Work industrial relations framework sees industrial disputes and wage pressures at or near historic lows. The government presides over a low inflation, low unemployment, low-interest economy of the kind only dreamed of for most of the past 30 years. The tax take from business has fallen as a proportion of gross operating surplus to the lowest level since the mid-1990s; overall tax receipts as a proportion of GDP are at their lowest level since the mid-1990s. It’s hard to work out, bar removing all protections for workers, how much more this government could have delivered for business.

That’s presumably one of the reasons we’re almost choking on investment. Brookes’ comments were particularly poorly timed given yesterday’s release of new resources investment data by the Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics, which shows there’s a mining investment pipeline of half a trillion dollars, with “advanced projects” accounting for over a quarter of a trillion dollars. If there’s a capital strike on by foreign investors, god help us if they ever get enthusiastic.

Fortunately for Tony Abbott, that kind of actual analysis and balloon-pricking doesn’t appear much in the news media consumed by most Australians.

It’s either amusing or galling (depending on whether you can forget for long enough to avoid an ulcer that the consequences of this shameless whinging will ultimately negatively affect the vast majority of us) watching business blame every one of their problems on everyone else whilst claiming to be advocates for “personal responsibility”.