When Michael Stutchbury took over the AFR in 2011, he brought with him the Murdoch-style ideology if “businessomics”.
This is the doctrine that privately owned entities are always right.
It should never be confused with a commitment to free markets because it cannot handle over-concentration requiring regulatory intervention to address market failure.
For Stutchbury, the preeminent importance of private ownership means market failure is nonexistent.
This may strike you as absurd because it is. But it is far worse than that.
Australia’s market economy collapsed into over-concentration years before the spread of Stutchbury’s stupidity, so all he has done is consolidate oligarchy at the AFR.
This has made a mighty contribution to Australia’s collapsing growth outlook for obvious reasons to real liberals.
First, oligopolies do not do innovation.
Second, oligopolies prevent productivity reform via political influence.
Third, oligopolies demand policy formulations that create enormous imbalances.
These three outcomes are rife in Australia and have now killed the economy.
Now the AFR is casting about for answers like a blind man.
The stagnant private sector economy and deterioration in living standards exposed in the national accounts this week have been years in the making.
Labour productivity has failed to improve since 2016; business investment is languishing close to 1990s recession levels; there has been no serious economic reform; undisciplined government spending is in vogue after too much stimulus during the pandemic; and the Reserve Bank of Australia has been forced to push up interest rates to grind household and business activity to a halt and bring inflation under control.
This is businessomics motherhood statement garbage. It is designed to jerk off business, not fix the economy.
Australia’s growth challenge is much more specific and much less AFR-friendly. It boils down to three areas of private ownership that have failed.
- The East Coast gas cartel is more responsible for lingering inflation than stimulus.
- The demands by private businesses for mass immigration have destroyed productivity.
- The Dutch Disease of overgrown banks and miners has hollowed out the external economy.
Note that all of these issues are related to excessively powerful vested interests that enjoy private ownership.
They are the key pillars of AFR “journalism” under Michael Stutchbury.
How to fix it?
- The East Coast gas export cartel must be broken via domestic reservation and/or export levies.
- Mass immigration must be slashed to under 90k.
- Miners must be taxed more heavily and tax breaks passed to every non-mining business.
Which of these would the AFR support? None.
Ergo, the most important prerequisite to fixing Australia is that everybody stops reading the AFR.
