Oligarchs barking at the moon

The Telstra CEO has called for an end to the leadership ructions in Canberra saying the business community needs certainty to plan for the next decade.

Ask yourself, why?

It’s because our large oligarchies are so inbred that they can’t grow market opportunities in genuinely competitive foreign markets. They do not have the skills or the guts.

Hence they are stuck with their share of the Australian market and their profitability is largely dependent upon government policies with respect to corporate tax rates and continued barriers to foreign incursions into our protected markets.

In addition it is argued that inconsistent politics impacts consumer confidence which reduces the local market size as people stop spending.

The real problem is that so many of our large corporations are fully dependent on the local service sector, which represents a frighteningly high 68% of our GDP.

If our corporations had high value exports and/or significant foreign revenues, for example, they would be far less sensitive to local consumer sentiment and political shenanigans.

The sooner we act on this the less the ultimate  shock is going to be.

But I am afraid it’s already way gone; the correction when it comes is going to be much larger than that which followed Hawke and Keating’s efforts to open our old-school protected economy of the time.

It’s ironic that the oligarchies (minus the manufacturers who went the way of the Tassie Tiger) have managed to reinvent their domestic market positions despite this former market deregulation. But it makes sense; it’s the only skill-set that they had.

And the correction will come – technology is making sure of that.