AFR home page runs big on Willox
In the kind of double-speak that would make George Orwell proud, Australian Industry Group CEO Innes Willox has made the most of Albo’s Jobs and Skills Summit.
With zealous media assistance, Willox has been whipping the fear of tax and IR reform at every turn, postulating that every extra cent makes businesses unviable, threatening jobs. In a rebuttal to the ACTU’s excess profit tax proposal, the AIG group says:
Such measures would trap profits in companies regardless of the business’s options for reinvestment and they would dampen the efficient allocation of capital in the broader economy
Trapped profits is, of course, a curse nobody wants, just as the mere thought of dampening capital allocation – i.e. reduced dividends to shareholders – must be avoided at all costs. Pity Jim Chalmers has just ruled out a windfall tax.
The ACTU has also had the temerity to suggest the government scrap the ”stage three” tax cuts. They’ll have Buckley’s hope of getting any support for that at a summit where most of the delegates will reap $9000 a year when it goes into effect in two years. Anthony Albanese has also made it clear that the government won’t change it.
So far, though, the Jobs Summit has been held in a spirit of co-operation. Progress has been made. ACTU secretary Sally McManus and Business Council chair Jennifer Westacott set the tone on ABC’s Insiders on Sunday morning in a debate about industrial relations. The debate was respectful and they were both keen to emphasise what they did agree on. The gist of it was a willingness to review the employment bargaining systems which are partly to blame for stagnating wages while business profits are soaring and unemployment is at record lows.
Willox, of course, won’t have a bar of it – despite his own lobby group AI’s enormous government contracts, its failure to pay tax while running a for-profit consulting company, or pay back a cent of JobKeeper:
We are not convinced of the need for radical or risky reform
When you are on a corporate welfare wicket like that, of course not! But the Australian Willox Review, sorry Australian Financial Review, has been splashing is entire Home Page on the words of Willox.
Meanwhile, Grattan’s Danielle Wood pointed out in her keynote address to the summit that business lobbyists were part of the problem, not the solution.
AI Unveiled: a propaganda service for Defence, big business and the Coalition
