Interesting interview with Mike Cannon-Brookes at Domainfax over the weekend:
What are some of the bad decisions you think we’re making as a country?
Immigration. I just feel very bad about the whole situation, personally.
Do you support a “Big Australia”?
I do. That’s where it gets politicised [Laughs]. Do we have the natural resources for a bigger population? Yes. Do we have a successful history of growing a bigger pie for everybody in Australia by immigration? Yes. Has it always been easy? No. It’s always been hard! It just feels like we’ve gotten more successful as a nation, so we’ve tried to sort of shut the door a bit more. In a weird way, it becomes racial. It’s not an economic or philosophical argument. The challenge there, too, is it requires forward planning. I was just in China for a few weeks, and again there are a lot of good things about China, and a lot of not so good things about China. It’s a complicated place, but one of the things that’s amazing is their ability to do long-term planning and stick to it…
Is it hypocritical for you and Scott to be weighing in on all these policy issues when Atlassian doesn’t pay company tax in Australia?It’s pretty simple. It’s the job of any citizen to say when they understand things aren’t going the way they think that they should. We certainly have some viewpoints on things like immigration and energy that I believe aren’t going in the right direction as a democracy, in our country. And I’m happy to say and share my views when I think that, and debate other people who think differently…
Would you attach a label to your political view – say, libertarian?
Nah, libertarian seems like it gets into anarchist territory. No rules, total personal survival. They want, as far as I understand it – and I’m no expert – almost no government. Self-sufficiency. I think regulation has a totally valid place and there should be regulations for a whole lot of things for consumer protection.
A lot of government policies are quite sensible. They give you a platform to build on top of. So I’m not at all suggesting they should be torn down. If you look at, you know, public schooling and public health care, public welfare, those are necessary common goods. And that can only happen by lots of people paying tax and a small group of people saying, “Hey, I’m going to take a piece of that tax revenue and put it towards this benefit for everybody.”
I don’t understand the world of, “I just work for myself and everybody else works for themselves.” It’s almost like believing you don’t need insurance.
So, Mr Cannon-Brookes wants a centrally-planned economy to deal with the public costs of his private importation of wage-demolishing and margin-boosting coolies while his $25bn firm pays no tax contribution towards any of it.
Anyone who objects to this economic Nirvana is an automatic racist.
Go long guillotines.
