AICD again attacks BCA corporate mafia

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Good stuff again today from the AICD chair Elizabeth Proust who says:

The AICD chair’s position also places her starkly at odds with Business Council of Australia boss Jennifer Westacott, who has spearheaded a campaign to “remind Australians that business generates 86 per cent of all jobs” as companies lobby the crossbench to pass the government’s tax cuts.

“I think what we’ve seen in recent weeks, the royal commission, the APRA report, tells us that trust in business, in particular in big business, is at a low point,” Ms Proust told Sky News.

“I would have thought that the events of the last few weeks have only made that worse, so the question is, is the community, is the crossbench in this case prepared to back tax cuts for large business?

“I think tax cuts are necessary. As the Finance Minister has told you we have some of the highest rates in the world.

“The problem is the single focus on large companies and tax cuts means we haven’t had a proper debate about the need for wholesale tax reform. GST, personal income tax and company tax, and a focus on this I think has been both distracting and is probably unlikely to succeed.”

Ms Proust said that while the income tax cuts for low and middle income earners flagged in Tuesday’s budget are welcome, the budget needs to be sustainable for the longer term.

It is striking how out of step these eminently sensible comments are with “business” generally. The BCA has been especially bad.

The head of the BCA is imploding. Via the AFR:

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As Labor leader Bill Shorten ramped up his campaign of using the banks as a reason not to cut company taxes, BCA chief executive Jennifer Westacott said this was just a convenient excuse to pursue what was already an entrenched anti-business agenda.

“The actions of the banks, the things that are coming out of the royal commission, they are shocking, they are unacceptable, they are unforgivable,” she said.

“The danger we’ve got though…is that we start to unleash a set of forces that have always been anti-business, wouldn’t matter what’s happening, and that we end up with terrible public policy that actually takes our country backwards.”

Right now the nation is shocked at being ripped blind by the banks. This comes on the heals of:

  • being unable get a pay rise for seven years;
  • mass immigration crush-loading lifestyles;
  • falling asset prices;
  • rising taxes, and
  • a massive energy shock.
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All of which directly benefit “business”.

The divergence is obvious in the business versus consumer confidence chart which shows the single largest split between the two in modern history:

It’s obvious that now is not the time to be mouthing off about the ill-treatment of “business”? Unless you want to make it worse.

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Indeed, the leadership at the BCA seems to have had some kind of breakdown. Grant King, one of the key architects of the east coast energy shock and high-profile reject from the BHP board, recently composed a swan song of “trickle-down” garbage at the AFR:

While the risk of uncompetitive tax rates and the benefits of the Enterprise Tax Plan seem clear, some are clearly opposed to it. But to oppose policies that create economic growth, jobs and ultimately income growth is wages theft on a grand scale.

A corporate mafia ram-raid on the Budget as the business cycle winds towards an end-of-cycle shock has nothing whatsoever to do with better outcomes for consumers, business, markets or nation.

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.