From the Herald Sun:
AUSTRALIA has old-fashioned union arrangements and needs “a dose of Margaret Thatcher,” says Mark Adamson, the British chief executive of Fletcher Building.
On a media call following the release of Fletcher’s annual profit, Mr Adamson said he had been “amazed” at both the level of salaries and inefficiencies in Australia.
He took the top job at Fletcher last October, having run the company’s laminex and panels division, based in the United States.
“I do come across unions and union arrangements the likes of which I haven’t come across since I was a child in the UK in the 1970s,” Mr Adamson said.
Australia needs “a dose of Margaret Thatcher”.
No, Australia does not need a dose on Thatcherism. It needs a roll back of some union privileges and to manage a real exchange rate adjustment bearing social equity and shared sacrifice in mind.
Moreover, when Thatcher deregulated the UK economy, and finance in particular, she forgot to liberalise land supply and in so doing created today’s UK property and finance bubble machine. We’ve enough of that already.
