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November 16, 2013
Big Business continually talks about Australia facing a productivity crisis or challenge. In calling for a more business-friendly environment in Australia their standard solution is to call for reduced wages to make Australia more intentionally competitive compared to other countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.
Their rhetoric all about the labour market in that our workplaces need more flexibility because more flexibility equals more productivity. The implication is that those on lower incomes are to bear the brunt of the changes---they need to take a pay cut.
Alan Moir
The second bow of the Big Business lobbyists, such as The Business Council of Australia (BCA), is usually deregulation and their third is tax reform, by which they usually mean a reduction in the corporate tax rate via extending the GST to cover food, health and education.
Productivity after the mining boom is a pressing issue in the context of an aging population and a high exchange rate that has resulted in the the loss of manufacturing jobs and requires major structural adjustments. This is not being discussed in parliament.
The key is the high exchange rate given the need to find different drives of economic growth, but you really hear Big Business talking about the productivity crisis in terms of increased skills, better knowledge and working smarter now that the mining boom has come to an end. The political culture of corporate power is one that assumes that Australians will have to accept lower growth, productivity and standard of living.
The Abbott Government reckons that reversing Labor's policies will enable a return to the prosperity of the Howard era, even though the world economy has changed and Australia faces completely different economic conditions. Their lack of a positive agenda means they have they have no commitment to make Australia the most digitally skilled nation in the world.
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Thanks for the Guardian link. And, yes, it's the dear old neocon agenda: privatise, deregulate, bash the unions and lower wages, ignore the environment, cut taxes for the rich and for corporations. Same old, same old.