This article is published in the Penthouse AU…
It makes running a business seem like a huge risk and incomprehensible folly and perhaps it is. Small business owners are the schools of tiny fish, darting around Australia’s corporate receiving none of the perks of wealth but all of the suspicion…
By ellymelly – If you enjoy my work, consider shouting me a coffee over on Ko-Fi
Australian citizens are people, not pets.
Our civil liberty is not hinged on adherence to big tech stalking apps or gifted by our elected representatives as a reward for good behaviour, it is a birthright. We are entitled to its possession in the same way that the government dips into our pockets and rustles around for loose change. They are allowed to rule at our expense and in return, the citizenry are permitted to run businesses, create capital and live out their lives with as little interference as physically possible to maintain the order of a functional civilisation.
At least, that was the original plan.
The tenuous agreement that a democracy has between the people and their government is the work of thousands of years of meticulous fine print; some of it written in ink while the rest comes in the form of scars cut into the national psyche. If we forget these lessons, they will be re-learned the hard way. I cannot be the only one growing tired of being treated like a criminal and offered various good behaviour bonds so long as I allow the government to strap on an ankle bracelet. Or worse, the school yard language used to drip-feed the public hope. Tonight’s headline? ‘Australia given an early mark’ – spare me.
It is impossible to believe that a student of Menzies or Mill would suggest inviting Big Brother to follow us around or keep tabs on who we meet. Censorship and surveillance are so dangerous that no government in history has passed the test of temptation. We call these, ‘slippery slopes’ and they are forbidden for good reason. When problem solving, the Prime Minister must look to answers that do not include playing around in areas where he was not invited.
Yes, everyone knows social media giants harvest information but much of what they do should leave them standing in front of a court answering difficult questions, not rewarded with a government contract. What’s the difference? Private companies, like individuals, are governed under the whip of law. Government writes law. This position of power is why they have special separation and boundaries. When the envoys of giant tech lobbyists came knocking at the door, a sensible leader would have taken a quick glance at their appalling history regarding consumer privacy and data collection and told them, ‘thanks but no thanks, this is not an Orwellian parody’.
Thousands of lives could be saved if we banned cars but we recognise that there are lines that cannot be crossed and infringements on freedom which are never justifiable. It is the paradox of the bird in the cage – or are we a canary in democracy’s mine? Trust does not outweigh principle. When the common people see negligence like the Ruby Princess fiasco or flights continuing to zoom in, they seriously question the basic common sense of those who are chasing them through the park with sirens.
The CovidSafe app is a poor solution to the problem presented. Governments are in the habit of tossing taxpayer money at technology to show that they have ‘done something’ while managing to avoid doing really difficult things with a proven track record – such as strict quarantine on external borders (which hurts China’s feelings) and focusing on testing and releasing all high risk individuals (which highlights their lack of resources).
In exchange for the app, the government is now in a position to divert blame for the economic shutdown onto those who’d rather not have the government nesting in their phones. When borders re-open, instead of shonky quarantine the next outbreak will be the fault of non-subscribers to overreach. It is an elegant answer to bad political headlines and the inevitable backlash that will follow as a new Great Depression starts – we might not starve, but we’ll definitely be deprived and looking for a scape goat. Advisors understand that there is a political reckoning coming and that revenge is likely to be exacted at the ballot box. Better that the people are set upon each other, rather than those who caused the carnage.
Let us have a look at why the app is a poor choice of blackmail that will not stand up to the scrutiny of time.
For one, there was never any need to collect private data if your interest was in creating a notification system for individuals. A simple unique and private code issued upon download, hosted by the app is more than sufficient to match and notify. Instead of storing phone numbers and names, the app could build a list of these unique numbers and alert users directly without any need for a public servant call centre in the middle of the system. Not only are you anonymous and the government cut out of the deal, but the data hosted on Amazon’s servers also becomes meaningless. CovidSafe has phone numbers, age ranges, and post codes – all of which are collected for the purpose of statistical review, whether politicians are prepared to admit to it or not.
Every programmer knows that you only collect what you intend to use. With Apple and Google developing their own apps, one wonders if they envision sharing this data amongst themselves in the interest of ‘public health’.
Instead of a fast, instantaneous app notification system – we have a clunky product with public service oversight making decisions about who to notify and under what priority. That choice should be yours, the person best suited to know if you’re in a high risk situation. Another problem comes with gatekeeping data – that is, the point at which crucial information is put in. Certifying a particular person is Covid19 positive should include an input screen from a medical professional to link back to a test batch to confirm its authenticity. In addition, if it is possible to lie at a data collection point, the data set is worthless. I cannot stress how important this is if the government intends to make sweeping policy on the back of it.
The cracks in its design left open for manipulation, misuse or incitement of panic are frighteningly huge.
This is before we get into the eccentricities of the virus. Renowned for its extremely long layover period and over 97% asymptomatic presentation, this newbie out of China lives on surfaces for weeks and spreads like the Spanish Flu. With a 15 minute proximity alert on bluetooth, its first instance of collection is missing the most common points of transmission (including those that cough on you as they pass by) and then does not store enough child-tree iterations to be meaningful. Indeed, the app was meant to collect data from a 1.5m distance but programmers testing the source code have reported that it collects all phones within bluetooth range – which is about 30 feet.
Imagine you are a city worker. Consider your normal day of public transport, work, shopping and social life. You do this for two weeks while infected. For the app to work as intended, it would have to notify every person you come into contact for that period of time and the people they contact and the people they contact and the people they contact etc.
When was the last time it took you 15 minutes to get a cup of coffee? CovidSafe is blind to the majority of business interactions it is designed to facilitate while logging phones lingering 30 feet from you, beyond the virus’ reach creating a pool of bad data.
There are only two natural outcomes. Either the system pushes way too many people toward testing centres by notifying them of potential contact (where they also increase their chances of coming into contact with the virus) or people are lulled into a false sense of security thinking the app is a definitive protective blanket. To use this shaky app as an excuse to hold the foot down on our economy’s throat is deranged.
In reality, with or without the app, the better approach is for people presenting symptoms to take themselves to medical facilities for testing and to make sure that we have quarantine hospitals. That last part is the most important going forward – separating out our medical system so that infectious diseases are no longer hosted in our regular hospitals. That is hard and expensive so instead we’re thrown an app. We should have done this a long time ago but the investment required mucks up the treasurer’s spreadsheet.
If we really want to collect data on the virus and work to understanding its spread, we would be better off throwing money at a computer system for those diagnosing Covid19 cases in which medical professionals enter a test batch, the positive ID, a patient’s age, underlying condition and medications without their name. This anonymous data contains what is required to build a picture of confirmed (rather than assumed) cases and if people die, we may begin to learn why as patterns in the data emerge. There must also be a crackdown on death certificates incorrectly listing the cause of death. Again, private data is not required to complete the task but it is desired.
The CovidSafe app does have a function – though it is not what its marketing suggests. When the borders open, as they must, it will track the rate of outbreak. This is different to saving lives and presents itself in the form of valuable information to big pharmaceuticals. Expect it to be sold. These are the same people who hope to make a fortune on vaccines that may or may not be made mandatory. Now, I am all for vaccines but never ones that are rushed through or come with the hashtags #Gates, #WHO or #MadeInChina.
While we are berated with this app, political leaders are giving up on the soul of Australia’s lifestyle. The short term may present choppy waters but there is too much insistence that our laid back society is lost forever. You know what I want to hear the government say? ‘Yes OF COURSE we are going to return Australia to the way of life you are used to. Your freedoms WILL be restored as quickly as possible. We have NO PLANS to keep draconian control of you.’ We have survived worse pandemics than this. Those dark times were seen as tasks to survive, not a watershed on liberty.
The virus is here. While ever it runs rampant across the globe Australia only really has two choices – stay in a cage or deal with the death rate. There are better solutions for data gathering. There are better ways to structure our health response. There is no need to crack open the door to big tech, already guilty of helping China construct a smartphone surveillance system. Do not tell us that we have to submit, without question or complaint, to half-baked ideas cooked up by the same group of politicians that have made a hash out of our economic response and spent the last decade moving to greater censorship and control.
The rule of law is a fragile thing. There are only two ways to convince a country to adhere – threat or trust and there is not a lot of trust left after watching grandmothers fined for sitting on park benches. We live in a time where those who could least afford it have had their ability to survive taken off them by order of the government. Wealthy personalities wonder what’s so bad about sitting on the couch for 8 weeks but others see their jobs, homes and futures set on fire.
In a true free market, capitalist systems can adapt their way out of a mess but when a blanket ban is put on innovation, the market starves to death. Most agree that health emergencies warrant such measures temporarily (though I fear we may have cried wolf on this one) but that is no excuse for the ensuing economic carnage and confusion.
The moment the government took control of the market they became financially responsible for its survival.
They have been skipping school on this one by playing around with convoluted rules, feedback loops and inconsistent advice leaving businesses in danger of accidentally breaking Fairwork regulation. While they dig themselves deeper into debt they soon discover that the government has found a way to avoid coughing up the promised help. Those who tried to do the right thing are treated to a chorus of Union shills accusing them of rorting the system and press outlets demanding that they keep their employees on the payroll. How – and with what money? These people are turning off.
JobSeeker and JobKeeper have been failures of concept put together by public servants with no personal risk to their inadequacies. Entire industries cut down to their knees haven’t even made it onto the sketch pad while economists wander in on government purse strings and mull over tax reform with half an eyebrow cocked in the direction of raising the GST.
The last thing Australia needs is the government open in the background, draining our battery.
By ellymelly – If you enjoy my work, consider shouting me a coffee over on Ko-Fi
It is with great expectation and a heavy groan that journalists, politicians, enemies and the odd punter (who has picked up the book by mistake) open the cover on a nightmare.
Don’t panic: I read it so that you don’t have to.
Mind you, Turnbull’s memoirs aren’t really a poorly written, badly punctuated, never-ending ramble interspersed with the alarmingly regressive diary entries of a sociopath. No. They have mutated into a virus, working their way through the political database at 5G speeds. This isn’t your average infection but rather one of those malware infestations that do little more than cause your computer to emit snoring noises.
If you’re here for dramatic revelations, don’t bother – there weren’t any. If you came for trashy gossip, wait for the news headline. If you were hoping for an insight into the sacred machinations of our political system … I guess you’ll get that but I can’t promise you’ll like what you read.
We all know why a bored millionaire staring down a future of irrelevance and historical footnotes chose to squander a few years in reflection with a keyboard. Revenge is an easy motivation to sniff out. Aside from the publication of private conversations, WhatsApp messages and disclosure of his colleagues’ political motivations, I doubt Turnbull will get much traction dragging his fingernails down the curtain. The problem is, the juiciest bits have been whispered for years and the rest has been reliably guessed at.
Meanwhile, the shadow of the China Virus Bat-Eating Apocalypse shadows the release. If Turnbull was hoping to damage Scott Morrison by releasing the world’s least interesting murder mystery and longest trash mag, he needn’t have bothered. Australian politics and the Liberal Party are already working their way through the plagues of Egypt with his book fitting somewhere between frogs and locusts. China’s red waters are swamping the stammering media bandwidth and the only reason anyone’s even bothering with this (unbelievably long) text is the forced isolation.
This might explain why he has turned the book into a Trojan horse, creating a media storm around pdf copies that may or may not have drained out of the Prime Minister’s office to bait the press into snaffling them up and CTRL+F-ing their way through to see if they warranted a mention.
The 700-odd pages amounts to a Wikipedia entry of Malcolm’s life in minute detail with the (unintentionally) hilarious internal monologue of an unreliable narrator pretending to be a victim of fate rather than an orchestrator of his own chaos. The plot skips from palace to mansion, private jet to military chopper with about as much self-awareness as Trudeau blacking up.
One of the largest criticisms of Mr Harbourside Mansion was his inability to recognise that he was out of touch with the regular Australian. It’s a lesson he hasn’t learned. I have to say, I have never seen anyone this worried about global warming rack up so many frequent flyer points then joke about sometimes taking the train or going for the odd spot of canoeing to troll members of the press. The trappings of extreme privilege drip from the pages as Marie Antoinette’s crumbs scatter over the floor.
Fine. You’re all skimming through this for the stuff about Credlin and Abbott. Are you ready? Here you go. Prepare yourselves…
“In all my life, I’ve never known a leader more dominated by another than Abbott was by Credlin. Peta has always strongly denied that she and Tony were lovers. But if they were, that would have been the most unremarkable aspect of their friendship.”
There you have it – the dullest attempt at a scandal you will ever read. Thank god Turnbull doesn’t write romance or it’d be printed on an IKEA instruction manual. He mentions Credlin and Abbott repeatedly but the rest is your average sulking, complaining about her interior designing skills, and low-level bitching that amounts to, ‘I wish they’d go away’.
We are treated to a ‘rise to power’ and what he perceives to be his bloody murder, all interspersed with diary entries in which he laments poorly made jokes at dinner parties or monologuing like a Shakespearean extra with a sword held against his chest taking far too long to meet his inevitable death. Most of these diary entries are offered as self-justification (which are probably the bits his editor stopped at and asked if he was still trying to identify as a sympathetic protagonist) or more commonly he paints himself as the victim of scheming playmates. An interesting ploy. Perhaps Turnbull didn’t get the memo that playing the victim doesn’t work out so well if you’re a straight, rich, white male.
Personally, and I may be reading this through an unintended lens, I find his explanations for the way policy is written a real insight into everything that is wrong and broken with modern politics. Canberra is painted as a world in a constant state of panic with feathers of murdered MPs raining down over the building while the next press conference is being prepped. It is, as the BBC political drama ‘The Thick Of It’ correctly portrayed, a world dragged around by the nose of the press gallery. The sex scandals going on in those dusty stationery cupboards are producing policies designed to sound good, look good and move a Newspoll but when they enter their teenage years it is as drug dealing car thieves.
His lengthy discussions on the validity of raising the GST to 15% – something Scott Morrison liked the sound of so look out for that – was more about how loud the public would scream rather than how badly it might damage those who were already poor. When looking for money, at no point during the 700 pages does it occur to Turnbull or his government to cut back on their champagne lifestyle or Skype-in a few of their meetings. Indeed, Turnbull’s inconsistent logic surrounding Islamic terrorism and bewildering approach to international personalities makes you wonder how Australia survived with all of its States attached.
Spare a thought for old Malcolm. While sitting through the yo-yo-ing of Julie Bishop’s fatal bid for leadership (the first time), Turnbull reflects, ‘All of these discussions were taking place under the tightest secrecy. I was keeping my intentions to myself, receiving not transmitting.’ It must have been difficult keeping zip on one of the least remarkable murder plots in history. Anyone with access to a TV could see what the pair of them were up to, with Scott Morrison cruising around the edges lacking the charisma to step in front of Turnbull.
When the deed was done and Abbott lay like Caesar, Brutus – I mean – Turnbull painted himself as the saviour of Rome – I mean – #auspol. Julie Bishop was safely settled back in the nest and those whom he deemed, ‘Right Wing Nut Jobs’ were disposed of.
Throughout this ordeal, Turnbull soothed himself with quotes from Labor figures. His heroes are either members of the historical opposition or painfully woke celebrities (which says more about his politics than he intended). My personal favourite quote reads:
“Deluded self-belief is a useful prop for leaders, especially when beleaguered. I’ve always been pretty objective about myself, tending more towards self-criticism. I recognised this surge of support was a relief rally. Cate Blanchett spoke for many when she said to me, being rid of Abbott was like having a weight taken off your chest.”
After comparing the Liberal party to terrorists, I am left to wonder if Turnbull imagines himself as the ruling Sheikh. It certainly seems that way with the irony of which he sets up the cabinet after his anointment. By being instrumental in the removal of several senior women in power (Credlin and Bronwyn Bishop) he placated his moral narrative by ensuring that he put just enough tits into the cabinet to write himself a #metoo record before adding a culture-card appointment to round off his virtue badge. The positions of real power went to his friends, not his quotas. This came at the expense of a bit of casual ageism where he admitted during another drone to promoting the young at the requirement of moving on those in their sixties. A rule, I presume, he does not apply to himself. The oxymoron reads, ‘In short, my office was chosen on merit as was policy – and delivery oriented while remaining keenly political.’ He must be a god to force merit and politics to align to his fantasy cabinet.
Look, the book is not without its humour.
‘Former ministers who stay in parliament all too often become fixated on revenge – as we were to see with Abbott. For that reason, I wanted to encourage them to move on.’
‘I’ve always assumed people have a reasonable amount of self-awareness and Dutton had never struck me as being so self-delusional and narcissistic as to imagine that he could successfully lead the Liberal Party.’
‘The general consensus was that I’d handled myself capably on the international stage. I’d even been described as striking up bromances with my old mate from New Zealand and with the handsome new PM of Canada, Justin Trudeau.’
‘I’d developed an exaggerated reputation for being ‘tech savvy’ – Tony Abbott, on one occasion, credited me with having invented the internet; of course, that was all Al Gore, I hastened to add, tongue in cheek.’
‘This morning did my first interview with Alan Jones in two years – went well, he is a weirdo but we need to keep him relatively sweet for the next five weeks.’
This is practically stand-up by Canberra standards.
There’s plenty of foul-mouthed swearing too – not that this is anything to write home about in politics. The only incident of any enjoyment comes from ex-PM Kevin Rudd scratching around the Earth’s bureaucracies for an excuse to wander out in front of cameras. He eventually decided that he wanted to be Secretary General of the United Nations (I should have put this up in the comedy section).
In a moment of self-preservation, Turnbull turned Rudd down. It went well.
‘You little fucking rat, you piece of shit! I’m going to get you for this. I’m going to come down to Australia and campaign against you in every part of the country. I will remind them of Godwin fucking Grech, you…’
Tail between legs, Rudd went begging at Botswana’s door (I promise I’m not making this up). The revelation that Julie was all-for nominating Rudd for the position will go down looking more like a pair of Crocs rather than red heels in her footwear-based political epilogue.
There are some more serious errors in Turnbull’s judgement that he cannot hide under his nauseous diary entries. When it comes to the birth of Christopher Pyne’s disastrous diesel submarines – a mistake that just keeps on giving – he made the bizarre observation that Australia possessing nuclear subs might scare China. One would have thought that was rather the point. What does Turnbull think our defence fleet is for? At this point I’m amazed he didn’t ask the French to build them with fluffy dice strung around the snorkel.
Turnbull’s assessment of China is all the more disturbing. Like so many wined-and-dined businessmen who made their fortunes on China’s easy money, they are unable to see through the gloss into the stone cold heart of a dictator-led nation on a mission to conquer.
‘After all,’ the governor of Liaoning remarked thoughtfully one evening, ‘just because the majority of the people want to do something doesn’t mean it’s right.’
‘They were fascinated by my leadership of the Australian Republican Movement, and amazed that the Queen of England was still Australia’s head of state. One of our friends, in Shandong as I recall, joked, ‘In 1949 Mao said, ‘The Chinese people have stood up.’ So you should say, ‘The Australian people stand up!’’
Firstly, the governor general is Australia’s head of state – something Turnbull would know if he wasn’t so keen on being king. Secondly, the day we start taking advice on our democracy from Mao will be the day Turnbull’s book becomes a classic. By praising up the violent revolution it’s pretty clear this portion of the text is designed to ingratiate Turnbull with his future Chinese business ventures.
‘And indeed,’ goes the accompanying diary entry, ‘it is important to note China’s growth in power, both economic and military, has not been matched by any expansionist tendencies beyond reuniting Taiwan.’
Conquering. The word you’re looking for is conquering. All I can say is Turnbull must have been upgrading his software during the Hong Kong riots and terror of Tibet. I hate to bring Wuhan into this, but Turnbull is as blind as a bat when it comes to China’s long game. At least he later admits that China’s reef-building fancy is probably not a legitimate way to re-draw sovereign boundaries.
One thing is clear, Scott Morrison is and always was, Turnbull’s man. He has a wealth of bad ideas lurking around in the corners of his mind and if we take anything of note from this pile of trumped up gossip it should be the make of our current leader. His plots for leadership are naturally of no interest – pay more attention to the economic chapters.
At the end of the day, Turnbull has sacrificed a small forest to carve himself out a discounted plot in Australia’s history. To our allies worried about the publication of private conversations – don’t stress, Turnbull is a rare species bred in captivity on the verge of extinction. That aside, I definitely could have lived without Dutton’s imagery of Julie Bishop being ‘Turnbull in a skirt’.
As we draw to the end of all this nonsense, what we are left with is a bigger picture of a smaller man.
By ellymelly – If you enjoy my work, consider shouting me a coffee over on Ko-Fi
Australia’s retail industry is dying. It is standing on the stage, hands tied behind its back wearing a hood as it listens to the baying crowd. The executioner’s footsteps circle behind. Right when the show is about to start, the government sends the crowds home. Silence swells through empty streets. There is a whistle of metal. A sickening ‘thud’ as the first head drops down into a waiting basket. Without witness, the blade falls again and again and again as businesses line up. Their misery snakes around the block.
Fashion retail is my life. Our family began writing software and payroll systems for the shoe industry in the early 70s when computers were barely lifting themselves out of the evolutionary swamp. Over the decades we have been stolen from by names you’d recognise, seen companies rise and fall, lost it all with Keating and resurrected in time to watch the whole ecosystem shudder and convulse as it attempted to negotiate the influx of foreign competitors. These retail businesses are not emotionless monoliths devoid of soul – they are collections of families with bosses that sleep on packing room floors forced to beg and borrow to get off the ground while working long hours without pay because that’s what it takes to own a company.
I was being folded into the life’s work of ghosts, growing up surrounded by the innards of computers and warehouses full of shoes. Through my twenties, I worked from the ground up, crossing the business from invoicing to stock management before delving into the world programme design where I built pick-pack webstores from scratch and automated the nightmare of Australia’s Award-based payroll. I’ve spent years in online fraud, helped to crack international credit card scams originating in China and survived the hell of the NBN’s messy birth all while integrating systems with the biggest boys in town. I know what makes a margin work and which stresses were being placed on the retail industry before the Corona-crisis.
One of these is the ongoing battle between shops and corporate lease holders, particularly Westfield.
So far, none of the commentators on TV or MPs drafting rescue packages guessed that unaffiliated retail chains would team up and move as a group against Westfield, defying expectation. Anyone in the industry could have told those pretending to be in charge that this would happen considering the exact same thing transpired when the idea of closing Boxing Day trade in Pitt Street was floated or the numerous times Westfield tried to enforce unworkable compulsory sale events.
In emergencies, retailers pick up the phone to each other and, despite being market competitors, school together like fish to pressure their collective foe – and so they should. The government has done nothing but tear pieces off Australian retail for years, opening the gates to foreign competitors with cash hand outs, tax breaks and relaxed regulations that infuriated local business. Have no doubt, when facing off against the retail industry, politicians are starting from a position of resentment and distrust.
When retailers hear Fairwork tell them that ‘a downturn in trade is not an excuse to stand down staff’ they calmly try to explain that all their customers were ordered to stay at home by the Prime Minister. So, although they were not ‘technically’ forced to shut down trade – they bloody well were.
When the government hosts smug press conferences explaining that, ‘landlords and tenants will just have to work something out’ and that ‘medium sized businesses should have enough capital in reserve to wear the cost’ they throw up their hands in fury.
For the MPs and commentators who do not yet understand, here is how the three second discussion between retailers and their landlords goes: “I have no money. Me neither. Right. So…? Glad we sorted that out.”
Allow me to put this in perspective with an average retail business.
A 500 shop retail company has closed every shop except for a webstore which is suffering a 70% downturn in trade. Webstores notoriously make the worst margin in a retail business (for a variety of reasons) and operate as little more than glorified marketing exercises. The company still has a full payroll of staff that Fairwork requires them to roster onto their normal contracted hours for empty shops or sack them and pay out their entitlements. The latter presents a major expense that dramatically shortens a business’s survival time during this ‘hibernation’. Regardless of what they do with their staff, those 500 leases, which were so expensive shops used to rely on Easter and Christmas periods to afford, are not bringing in any money. In addition, all the usual phone/internet/terminal/licence bills are piling up.
How does the government expect this to work?
The inevitable happens – retailers refuse to pay their rents to avoid immediate liquidation.
Hilarious ideas of deferring these missing payments to a later date are never going to materialise because even at trading peaks, no one made enough extra money to fork out for four missing months of revenue (seriously, what were the government thinking?) and that leaves places like Westfield with no prospect of recovering that income. Landlords now have two choices; take legal action against their retailers or lean on the banks. The banks have not got very far to give because they are tied to foreign markets and if Westfield goes after the retailers for bankruptcy there will be no one left to fill the empty shops. Remember, this is not just about a group of rebellious retailers – it is the entire retail market.
Now, if the market had been left to run as normal then it would be a scene of violent evolution with opportunity to capitalise or face extinction but the moment the government waded in and took supreme control of the market they turned the entire mess into their responsibility because they have robbed individuals of their ability to adapt.
To put it very simply, if the government does not fund retail for their employees and rent there will be an unimaginably huge die-off of Australian business. Only the largest mega-corporates and international players will survive which is a cultural catastrophe, not to mention a political reckoning once the debt settles with the dust. We are casually discussing the annihilation of an industry that employs hundreds of thousands of Australians and supports pilot businesses (like mine). Software. Banking. Suppliers. Shop fitters. Fixtures. Marketing. Designers. Cafes. Hardware. Drivers. These are all immediate casualties.
Now let’s talk about the convoluted mess-of-an-idea that Christian Porter and others have drafted to deal with employers holding onto staff.
This frustrates me the most because its solution is easy. If the idea is to put business into a form of hibernation then you have to maintain as much normalcy as possible with an even hand. The very last thing you do is pick winners and losers and risk adding jealousy into the mix. We know two crucial things. The first is that saving both lives and the economy will be expensive and second, we are starting with an economy on the edge. It goes without saying that government systems are a total mess so the best course of action is to use as many existing Award structures and interactions as possible.
The government never writes in sentences, they do things by the page so the less they try to do, the better.
A clean solution is to offer a six week Corona Virus Leave entitlement, at the discretion of the employer, to be paid at the base Award rate as per an employee’s contract. If a person is still working, they do not use this leave. If a person cannot work, they start deducting from this leave as if it were Annual Leave except the company back-bills it to the government like Maternity Leave. This works for salary, full time and permanent part timers who are already set up to use normal leave.
Easy to keep track of. Easy to audit against timesheets. Easy to work into existing pay systems and crucially, people are getting close to a normal wage.
Why does that matter? Well, if people are receiving a regular cash flow they can keep their commitments to leases and mortgages, completely avoiding the major private banking problem now facing the government. This has the added benefit of taking stress off banks from saving the private sector so they have more flexibility to assist the government in bailing out corporate. Ah, but what about casuals? The fairest thing to do with a casual is average their last month of employment and deduct those hours from the Corona Virus Leave at their base rate – not the casual rate.
If a solution similar to this had been in partnership with the corporate leasing bailout there would have been almost no added pressure on Centrelink, reducing queues forming inside the heart of a pandemic. By in large, those left at Centrelink would be people already in unsecured work who are more likely to be re-employed in a stable job market at the end of the lockdown instead of high paid, difficult to re-employ breadwinners whose jobs have been rubbished.
Yes, this sort of thing might cost more up front but not compared with destroying swathes of Australian business setting millions of workers onto a decade of unemployment benefits not to mention the cut to tax revenue that the government will suffer if those businesses and employees are now on the public purse. This is before we touch on the loss of trust between individuals and their government. Who would risk being a private business owner knowing that the government could kill your life’s work overnight? Those crazy enough to try have all been wiped out and are gun-shy. Many will never work again.
Economies are chaos systems underpinned by humans who act on risk and emotion. I am unconvinced that you can hibernate an economy without killing it but if you want to attempt the impossible and send Australia into a holding pattern we must treat it like a complex machine. Revenue has to be fed in through natural points where business acts as our fuel tank. By focusing on paying the two biggest expenses of business, money flows down to their employees and up through to landlords and banks. With this in place, negotiations on stock sitting unsold in warehouses and shelves can be reached.
Don’t misunderstand me, the businesses are badly wounded and bleeding but they haven’t been lopped off at the neck. Instead of multiplying problems, you have reduced their complexity to a single point that is easier to track and cost while preserving the rest of the economy which will drag itself along the ground bloody but not broken. Instead, we are watching MPs hurl ill-conceived junk at the whirring blades of industry which are getting stuck and causing vital components to catch fire. Very soon, it’ll explode.
When we desperately need even-handed simplicity, we are being offered favouritism and complexity. The result is inevitable. All you need to do is listen to those standing on the scaffold but the government doesn’t ask the opinion of small business owners. It tells them to ‘sort out’ what they cannot change, like a victim of injustice pleading for their life to an empty square.
Of course, we must not forget that China is the executioner but the sword was sharpened by the Australian government and we sat there in silence and watched.
ellymelly 