Pauline Hanson and Angus Taylor aren’t the only ones lining up to take a shot at Anthony Albanese. Big business has entered the ring too but if its messaging keeps sounding like an economics lecture, don’t expect Betty and Bob from Blacktown to notice.
As One Nation’s Pauline Hanson and the Coalition’s Angus Taylor joust to be the ‘king slayer’ of PM Anthony Albanese at the 2028 election, a new adversary has hoisted its flag to defeat the country’s ruling party – big business!
In a nutshell, the Business Council of Australia (BCA) is donning its armour to fight the Albanese Government’s strategy of boosting taxes on key groups in the economy to redistribute the revenue to voters who’d be more likely to relate to its policies.
It has been a clever policy approach that explains the historic win by Labor taking 94 seats of the 150 up for grabs at the election. No party has ever won so many seats!
How did that happen? Try these influences:
- Tax cuts to middle- and low income Australians.
- Support for higher wages.
- Backing employees’ desire to work from home.
- Promises to cut HECS debt, where 3 million Australians saw a 20% cut to what they owed.
- There was the $8.5 billion to be provided to increase bulkbilling, which GPs loved!
- Re-commitment to build 1.2 million new homes.
- $572 million to improve women’s health services.
As Baldrick from the TV show Blackadder would say, it was a “cunning plan”, but unlike the character created by Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis, Albo’s cunning plan actually worked.
So, that’s the story of the ‘king’of political giveaways, with serious economic consequences that the BCA has to defeat.
The business group agrees with many economists who see the politically-driven policies of the PM and his Baldrick-like Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, as being at the core of the following economic problems:
- Persistently high inflation.
- Rising interest rates.
- Too low productivity which raises costs and prices, feeding inflation.
- Excessive and costly regulation that also adds to costs and reduces productivity, that adds to inflation and a lack of competitiveness for the goods and services Australian businesses sell.
- All the above reduces the desire of local and overseas investors to allocate money to Australia.
The BCA’s CEO, with not a great name to sell to ordinary Australians i.e. Bran Black!, wants “Betty from Blacktown” to understand that while she mightn’t comprehend the importance of the concept of productivity, “she does care about her cost of living.”
A word of warning, Bran, I’d be careful of using Betty from Blacktown without including Bob, because productivity isn’t a big debating topic at the Blacktown Workers Club!
All this BCA rethinking on how it communicates its messages to the voters of Australia, comes as the PM attends the annual BCA dinner in Sydney, which is usually a platform for the Government to tell business leaders what policies they have for the providers of economic growth, investment and jobs for Australia.
Bran has got it right and few economists would disagree with him, when he argues: “Australia cannot tax, regulate or redistribute its higher living standards. We have to grow, and we have to become more productive.”
The BCA is so worried about its lack of impact on Australians that it teamed up with 30 other business and industry groups to form the Alliance of Industry Associations, to better spread its message.
Here’s Black’s message on what’s needed, as reported by the AFR‘s Phil Coorey: “If we want Australians to support the economic reform needed to become a top 10 investment destination, they need to be able to see and understand why it helps them and, conversely, why its absence hinders their prosperity. Simply put, business cannot ask government to be ambitious for Australia if we’re not prepared to help build that support ourselves.”
Personally, while I agree with Bran Black’s identification of what’s wrong with Australia, how he and the BCA explain this to Australians will be important.
In his best-selling book The Rockefeller Habits, Verne Harnish has said when it comes to children “a handful of rules, repeated often” is an effective way of influencing.
Linking the Albanese Government to low productivity and the cost of living and high interest rates, should be the repeated message.
However, the BCA needs unemployment to rise, because two thirds of the country doesn’t have a mortgage, though as rents rise, blaming Jim Chalmers’ Budget for that will help the cause of business.
However, until Betty and Bob see how their lives are actually hurt by poor policies from Canberra, talking about “economic reform” and “investment destination”, the average Aussie will be deaf to that messaging.
Until their messaging is as simple and as effective as John Symond when he slayed the big banks in the early 1990s with, “At Aussie we’ll save you”, the BCA will be largely ignored, regrettably.
Pauline Hanson has got her messaging right, but she needs to make the quality of her message better for wider voter appeal. Meanwhile, Angus Taylor needs to go to messaging school.
