By Max Lane
Last week's Business Review Weekly came with a deep purple cover, thick gold lettering and a super-glossy sales insert advertising Florsheim shoes (up to $200 a pair). This is truly an issue the editors and owners were proud of.
Indeed, the magazine's most recognised personality and commentator, Robert "Isn't Making Money Exciting" Gottliebsen, declared in his weekly comment: "And so we are proud to produce the BRW Rich 200 at a difficult time ..."
Difficult, that is, for people like you and me, not for the disgustingly rich and their sycophants.
Australia's richest 200 people, to Gottliebsen, are "the strong heart of Australia". He claims they are no longer just speculators but real business people. This we can see from the slogan on the front cover: "Fabulous new fortunes — from a burger flipper to the one-armed-bandit king".
This slogan more accurately sums up the real activities of the rich than Gottliebsen's pretentious mouthings about the contributions of big business to the country. While the number of people unemployed increases; while standards of living fall as real wages are cut, as the services provided by state governments go up in cost or are handed over to private industry — the rich get richer overcoming an imaginary shortage of fast food outlets or ripping off more people through gambling, speculation and takeovers.
Even Gottliebsen must know this. He doesn't really talk about businesses producing things useful to society and to people, but about producing a "cash-flow". This distinguishes them from the entrepreneurs of the '80s, who produced debt.
Along with cash-flow, the rich are alleged to produce "savings". "The only way a country can help those who are less well off is to generate wealth
and savings", says Gottliebsen. If you tax this away from those who have it, those who don't — somehow — end up not having it either!
This, says Gottliebsen, is a "simple truth".
But there are other "simple truths". BRW has been producing the list of the richest 200 for 12 years. The rich have been getting richer for the last 12 years, and long before that as well. This year they are up 10.9%, to $21.3 billion. "Wealth and savings" have been generated for all this time. Yet unemployment has gotten worse every year the rich got richer. Every year the rich got richer, ordinary wage earners have been able to buy less. Every year, as Murdoch's and Packer's billions multiplied, the cost of a bus or train ride, a drink of water, heating in the house has become more, not less, expensive.
That is the simple truth.
Not only does Gottliebsen peddle a falsehood as the "simple truth" but he smoothly inserts into his argument — such as it is — a quite simple lie. He says that these people, these "top 200" generate wealth. What a load of rubbish! How can 200 people generate $21.3 billion of wealth? How many hours a day do they work — 1000, 10,000?
It is the people they exploit, who get wages from them, who create the wealth: the people behind the production lines, behind the counters, at the desks, in the field with tools in hand.
But I can hear Gottliebsen now. Yes, that's it, these people, "the heart of the country", they employ people. That's the private sector's real contribution: to "provide employment". But they are "providing" less and less employment almost precisely in proportion to the rich getting richer. In fact, the rich don't "provide" any jobs. What they do — by monopolising control of factories, offices and so on — is prevent people from working whenever that would get in the way of the rich becoming still richer.
The Keating government, as Gottliebsen puts it, is giving "acknowledgment of the need for wealth
generation in businesses" — by which he means cutting taxes on business. What it should be doing is raising taxes on profits and excess wealth, increasing expenditure on the infrastructure and services the country needs, reducing the prices of those services.
Yes, there would be a political cost. The rich would have to put up with getting less. They would kick up a fuss and make a noise in their newspapers and television stations. But in the end there are more of us than of them. The only real reason that Keating and his kind have for not taking this path is that they feel more a part of them, than they do of us.