Former Treasurer and Prime Minister Paul Keating is about to pocket a $40 million windfall for being good at business. It’s clearly time he started giving lessons to his current day Labor colleagues as it might boost their flagging popularity.

As he told the AFR’s Jenny Wiggins: “I’ve got a chunk of a successful business which I co-founded and funded myself,” the former Prime Minister said. “I’m reasonable at my own ventures.”

This particular business is Boost Mobile, which he kicked off in 2000 and now owns 29% of the company. His marketer Peter Adderton has 32% and the operation has been swallowed up by no less than Telstra for a cool $140 million.

The company’s competitive advantage was specialising in pre-paid phone plans. This is how the company explains itself: “With Boost, you'll get awesome data inclusions, unlimited national calls and text and international calls from Australia on selected recharges. All our plans are prepaid with no lock-in contracts, and you can bring your number.”

This is why Boost has a million users and why Telstra was happy to add it to it arsenal of different communication offerings.

Other big shareholders include skateboarder Peter Hill and his brothers Stephen and Matthew, who all founded Globe, the now listed shoe, clothing and skateboard brand.

This is just another Australian small business made good story, and accolades to Paul Keating for being an entrepreneur. It’s a pity his beloved Labor Party doesn’t cater to the interests of his fellow small operators.

This isn’t just me whinging, look at this in the AFR on September 17: “Former ACTU secretary Bill Kelty, for example, is savagely pointed in his demands — as reported in The Australian Financial Review this week – that the Albanese government must urgently reshape an economic agenda ‘mired in mediocrity’ to revive a near-stagnant economy.

A few months ago, business outlined what gripes they have with the Albanese Government. Here they are:

1. Not tying pay rises to productivity.
2. Both Keating and Kelty have criticised the Government’s policies on housing, which is crucial to a thriving economy, and taxes.
3. The last economic growth reading was 0.2% in the June quarter, which as the AFR’s Jennnifer Hewett reminded us was crawling “at its slowest rate since the early 1990s recession”.
4. Business failures have hit their highest level since October 2020, with the hospitality and construction sectors seeing the most insolvencies, according to CreditorWatch.
5. Higher prices and interest rates are keeping spending subdued, while businesses are juggling rising rent, electricity prices and increases to the minimum wage.
6. The Australian Taxation Office is playing hardball torecover $34 billion of debt, much of it was Covid-related.
7. Industrial relations has become old world ignoring the better practices seen under the Hawke and Keating governments.
8. The Minerals Council chief executive Tania Constable warned the Prime Minister that his industrial relations laws are already bringing conflict “to every workplace in every industry”.
9. At the annual Parliamentary dinner Constable also told the PM that "Each new regulation, each new tax, additional layer of complexity, and arbitrary decision makes it harder for us to compete against competitors with no such constraints”.

Ultimately, the government of the day cops the blame if the RBA can’t get inflation down along with interest rates. And it’s fair to say that the Treasurer didn’t help by giving away tax cuts to lower income Australians, who are more likely to spend them, which then feeds inflation.

The abc.net.au website yesterday reported this intriguing take on what we’re thinking: “New research shows dissatisfaction with the direction of the country is at the same level as it was just before the Morrison government lost the election, in an ominous sign for the government”.

This was an ANU study involving 3,500 voters but there was some good news for the government.

“And while it shows dissatisfaction is at the level it was at when Scott Morrison was given the boot, it also shows that we are in much better shape when it comes to people's trust in the direction of our country than people in the UK or America,” the report found.

That’s good news for Labor but it’s not really a big plus being better than the US and UK. I think the less -than-subtle Paul Keating would agree with me.