Australia: the vassal state?

BERNARD SALT
AUGUST 25, 2018
The Australian
Contrary to popular opinion, I am not a corporate high flyer. It is true that I spent much of my career hanging around corporate types, but I never actually ran anything – well, nothing substantial. My later career as a corporate speaker earned me admission into the management suites of this nation’s biggest businesses but I was always (and I remain) little more than the hired help.
This is relevant because I think there has been a shift in public perception of the corporate sector. And this shift has been coming for quite some time.
Soon after the global financial crisis, I was participating in a public discussion about the future of Australian business. I made what I thought was a reasonable point: that we need to support local businesses and develop a national culture of entrepreneurship. At this point I was asked by a fellow panellist to account for the errant behaviour of corporate America at that time. Why should the average person in Australia support business when (American) businesses behave like this?
Apparently because I came from the corporate sector I should be held to account. Guilt by association it is called, although The Castle’s Dennis Denuto put it more succinctly as “the vibe, your honour”. I was to blame for the GFC because I was part of the whole corporate vibe. I pointed out that I had no connection with events that had unfolded on the other side of the planet. “Yeah, but you’re all connected” was the response. At this stage the audience railed against my interrogator: I was hardly to blame for the GFC.
A decade and a number of big-business revelations later, I’m not so sure the audience would be on my side. I think that deep down Australians are suspicious if not contemptuous of big business. And yet our future prosperity depends upon our ability to create businesses that generate jobs, wealth and taxation.
Consider our corporate strengths. Four banks established more than a century ago; a local telco tied to the fortunes of the nation; a global mining company founded in Broken Hill in the late 19th century; and a couple of retailers that largely operate within the confines of the Australian continent. We do not operate any globally significant agribusinesses of scale. We happily sell the value-added bits of the agribusiness supply chain to overseas interests if the price is right.
What would be the impact on corporate Australia if a Google or similar moved into banking or insurance, or if such an entity managed to snaffle a good proportion of the most profitable bits of our retail industry? We’d still be a rich country by virtue of our being able to sell agribusiness products as well as coal, iron ore and natural gas. But in reality, we’d be relegated to the status of a vassal state: there to supply and to serve a foreign-based corporation so long as they paid us handsomely for the asset.
I am concerned by what I see as an incremental loss of economic sovereignty. We need to support locally based businesses, big and small. I don’t want the next generation of Australians to take their cue from corporate entities based overseas. The greatest gift we can give members of the next generation is control of their own destiny.
You can rail against global business and regulate against mergers and sell-outs. But I think it’s far more effective to create a sense of pride in our own business entities. It means being mature enough to see the role business plays in creating a stronger and more independent Australia.