OH, POOR LITTLE RICH BOYS
Sunday Agenda Sunday Telegraph 9th January 2011.
Wendy harmer.
The head of Myer, Bernie Brookes, might be surprised at the level of anger directed towards him and business tycoons Solomon Lew and Gerry Harvey in their campaign for a GST for on-line purchases, but I’m not.
Has the marsupial mouse roared at last? After decades of being bossed about by big business, hoodwinked by faceless men and bullied by bureaucracy, have we finally had enough?
Geez, I hope so.
Maybe we are finally waking up to ourselves.
And, on opening our eyes, we see that we are one of the most over-taxed, over-governed, over-regulated, over-worked and over-charged societies on Earth.
Despite Oprah’s celebrated effort to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to our image as brave, bronzed pioneers of the free world who give the two-finger salute to authority, in reality we’re anything but.
We’re treated like hapless, uncomprehending wombats as our farm land, produce and precious mineral resources are sold to foreign interests for a song; our ancient forests are cut down for toilet paper and we’re told we can’t even protect whales form illegal fleets in our own sanctuaries.
Politicians flog our utility companies for bargain-basement prices. Our manufacturing industries have disappeared, all gone off-shore to cheaper labour markets, while company executives are being rewarded with obscene salaries to extract every last dollar from the populace.
We’re fined and fleeced both coming and going. We’re nagged night and day about our health. Bombarded with advertising urging us to consume even more. We’re faced with security guards, cameras, sniffer dogs and bag snatchers whenever we gather to enjoy ourselves.
We’re angry alright.
It’s bad luck for Harvey, Lew and co, who have been just foolish enough to stick their heads above the parapet and are now copping a volley of abuse for every injustice we’ve been suffering for years.
They seem to imagine we think of them as working class heroes.
As Mr Brookes said: I get quite upset when I read some of the disparaging comments about Gerry Harvey and Solomon Lew because, whatever you think of them personally, they started with nothing and have become successful.
Trouble is, these billionaires forgot to take us with them. The gap between the rich and the poor in this country is ever-widening.
I find insulting the revelation that they’ve been working behind the scenes for two years for this new tax.
Maybe they should have stayed incognito and just got on with their usual business of attempting to influence our elected representatives to serve their own interests.
By some estimates there are more than 1000 senior lobbyists in Canberra who have thousands more staff on the payroll, many of them in public relations. Almost two billion dollars a year is spent in attempts to gain concessions from our federal and state politicians.
The so-called “faceless” men of the Labour Party are rampant exhibitionists compared to these secretive lobbyists, who are embedded in the very process of government. They have more say in national policy than we citizens and taxpayers do.
You don’t have to be a Christian to realise that Jesus was on to something when he turned the money lenders out of the temple. Ridding Parliament House of the scourge of lobbyists would be a good start.
Then every business interest would be forced to go public with their campaigns. They might all cop the abuse this mob are getting and start to work in the national interest, not just their own.
They might even remember who’s boss. It’s us!
I hope we develop an appetite for savaging business interests who want monopolies in the good times and have their hands out for government assistance in the bad.
And when the mining magnates start their public campaign to repeal the mining tax, they had better watch out – we might just bite their heads off, too.
9/1/2011.
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