From the SMH:
The Graincorp decision by the federal government “raises questions about the extent to which Australia is really ‘open for business’ in the way that the Prime Minister said on election night”, chief Australian economist for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Saul Eslake, says.
Eslake says that the decision has been a litmus test for how the new federal Coalition government would respond.
“The impact is fairly clear – that this is a government in which the National Party’s influence is greater than its numbers would suggest,” Eslake says.
“It underscores the concerns I expressed in our public research before and immediately after the election about the likely malign influence of the National Party on economic decisions under this government, and the possibility that this government could turn out to be less like the Howard government in its first two terms and more like the Fraser government, another government in which the Country Party as it was then called exercised a malign influence than would be good for Australia.
“The risk as I’ve identified for a long time with this government is that while there are some genuine economic liberals in it, like Hockey, Turnbull, Robb and Sinodinos, that the risk always was that they would be outweigh when it came to key decisions by the National Party and Tony Abbott and other economic conservatives in the present government.”
