It is appalling that employee entitlements are not protected in a business insolvency

I still find it hard to believe that a developed country like Australia has no protection in place for money owed to employees when a company goes broke.  In most of the rest of the developed world, employee entititlements are paid out in priority to almost everyone else.  When business's are short of cash the first thing they do is tap into any money put aside for holiday pay, long service leave and sick leave.  Then they stop paying super contributions and any other deductions that they take from their employees pay packet.   The money that is taken from their entitlements then goes to - you guessed it, the banks! 

There is also a strong argument that  very small business should also have some priority.  Many businesses now pay their workers as sub contractors rather than employees.  So often you see very small businesses going to the wall  through little fault of their own, when big companies go broke.  That doesn't sound fair to me.

How dumb are some of our corporate leaders?

It does amaze me how dumb so many of the highly educated and highly remunerated leaders of the corporate world are.  Too many just cannot see beyond the end of their quarterly forecast.   US carmakers continuing to churn out gas guzzlers and kyboshing their electric car projects in a world that’s running out of oil.  Aussie car makers dropping small car manufacture and instead putting millions into developing yet more ‘Big 6s’ and V8s- just as oil hits $150 a barrel.  Banks not seeing the pyramid schemes underlying their derivatives trading.   Retailers not seeing the threat from on line sales.  Coal industry blindly assuming we can continue pumping out greenhouse gases for ever despite 150 years of science to draw on.  Now we have bookshops who could not see the threat from Amazon and ebooks.

Come on guys!  Get your heads out of your MBAs and get your egos out of your big salary packages.  Get out of your high rise offices, get onto the street.  Throw away your Financial Times and stop going to corporate love ins where you all reinforce your belief in your own propaganda.  The world is changing.  Adopt and adapt and stop clinging to a marketing and production mindset that has hardly changed since the 19^th Century.

You have the brains.  You have the education.  You are just lacking a touch of humility and a dose of common sense.

Tax rates are a minimal factor for business when it comes to location.

Every week commentators whinge about business taxes.  How payroll taxes are stopping investment in NSW.  How windfall taxes on miners will drive them overseas.  How a 2% drop in corporation tax will transform overseas investment in Australia.  But what is the reality?

The reality, my fellow Green-Capitalists, is that business taxes have minimal impact on investment decisions.  There are dozens of criteria that any business will take into consideration when deciding where to open a factory, base a head office or open a call centre. 

The key ones are logistic.  Where are the customers, where are their key suppliers, where are the transport links, is their a good pool of labour to draw on,  how reliable is the key infrastructure - water, power, telecommunications.  Second comes total investment cost.  How much are land and construction costs.  What will the equipment cost.  How much to link into the rest of the business operating systems.  Then they look at running costs. What are salary levels, what about energy costs, how high are rents.  Then external factors.  Will the location attract good staff.  What is the security like.  How strong are government institutions.  How corrupt is the country or state. 

Finally, right at the very end, they will plug in a company tax figure and whether that tax rate is 20% or 40% really makes very little difference compared to all the other criteria.   Total business taxes are a minor input in the overall decision making process.  There are occasional exceptions.  Ireland gave tax free holidays to attract business to their economy in the nineties - but every eligible business in the world did not suddenly uproot and move to Dublin, which is what you would expect if you listen to the propaganda.

Why the best public transport in the world was NOT developed by private companies.

Is it any coincidence that most of the best public transport systems in the world have been developed by the state and not by private enterprise?  The New York subway, the London Underground, Melbourne trams, Paris Metro, French railway network, Japanese bullet trains and anything that moves in Switzerland.

The reason is simple.  So many of the benefits from a world class public transport system accrue to those who do not use it.  Clean air, less traffic congestion, greater productivity for business, etc.  How could a corporation accrue those benefits to their bottom line?  They cannot.  Therefore the traditional Return on Investment calculation will never stack up.  That is why public transport should always be state owned.

Let’s stop looking to the USA as our economic role model.

I mean, who wants to live in an economy with almost 10%  unemployment and another 10% underemployed.  Where 8% of ‘home’ owners live in trailer parks.  Where over half of personal bankruptcies are caused by medical bills. Where public education is primarily funded by local government so that the best education is in the most expensive suburbs and where the gap between the have-mores and the have-nots gets bigger every year.

None of that is right, so why do we focus so much on their model?    One can understand the coalition, with their Darwinist philosophy of the strong triumphing over the weak, still clinging to the coat tails of Ronald Reagan, but Labor?

What happened to fairness and equality?  For protection of workers rights?  For income redistribution?  For quality social services from cradle to grave?

Instead, two decades of LibLab governments have pushed us closer and closer to the American model.  We have unaffordable housing and run down public health and education forcing people into the profit driven motives of the private sector.  And we have an every widening gap between our  own have-mores and our own have-nots. 

The only area where we score over the USA is in our employment figures, but that has come about from being the ‘lucky country’ where we can just bend down, scoop up a handful of dirt and sell it overseas.  If it wasn’t for our natural resources and our constantly increasing population we would have been in recession for the last decade or more.

Some sanity needs to return to our economic model.  Sadly, both Labor and the coalition seem to prefer the insanity of short term, back pocket politics with no vision and no guts to talk substantive change.

The Great Coal Mining Swindle

Are you sick of the constant claims by the coal industry that the NSW economy would collapse without them?

Let’s put those claims into perspective:

1. Very few people are employed in the coal industry – in fact, less than 0.2% of the working population of Australia are employed in all coal mining.
2. The coal industry (like all corporations, world wide) are experts at NOT paying tax. For example, Centennial Coal (which accounts for almost half the coal supplies to NSW power stations) paid total tax of $4.1 Million in 2010.  This was on sales of $800 million and a profit of $71 Million. – ref http://www.centennialcoal.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=468&Itemid=149
3. The coal industry also pay royalties, (3% of the NSW Government income comes from all royalties)  which are far more difficult to avoid,  but their bullying of the Federal government over the Mining Super Profits Tax means that these will soon be reduced or cancelled.
4. Their benefit to our exports is greatly exaggerated – they ‘forget’ to mention that virtually all of their equipment and operating costs, apart from wages, have to be imported, directly or indirectly, from overseas which offsets most of that export income.  Finally, do not forget that most of them are foreign owned (Centennial Coal was taken over by Banpu of Thailand in October last year), so their profits are then sent overseas further offsetting their export income

What is also never taken into account is the external costs that coal mining generates from its pollution and operations.  Increased health costs, costs of monitoring and repairing their environmental damage, rail and road costs (all paid for by taxpayers) for them to transport their coal, port infrastructure, etc.  Then there is the biggest ‘externality’ of all – the contribution to global warming that all those greenhouse gases produce.

Coal – the sooner we get rid of it, the better.

The Population Problem - 6,890,646,738 and increasing at 207,000 per day

No one can deny that a global population forecast to reach 9 Billion within the next 40 years is going to place an immense strain on our planet.  Every extra body adds to our waste and pollution and requires more food, more of our precious resources and more energy.

Yet controlling that global population growth is a very difficult task.  Even China, with its dictatorial one child policy for the last 30 years, still saw a 30% increase in its population over that time.  What chance is there of achieving any substantial reduction in the developed world with our individual rights and religious philosophies?

We can make little impact on reducing population growth, but we can make substantial impact on the way our economy is structured to minimise its impact on our planet.   We have the technology today for us to have 100% renewable energy.  Everything on the planet can be recycled.  Fish stocks can be managed.  Food distribution patterns changed.  

All it needs is political pressure being applied to the key governments of the world.  Preferably from all 6,890,646,738 of us!