Vikki Campion: ‘My baby son’s generation will be paying off our debts’
The economic shock of COVID-19 has not put us in depression — yet — but things aren’t getting better, and nobody is talking about the dramatic action we need. The economy we have created is mired in a bog of bureaucracy and that has to change, Vikki Campion writes.
Opinion
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Often my baby son Tom helps his grandfather Jim light the fire, offering twigs and other scavenged bits, disappointed when a toy sheep doesn’t make it in the flames.
Despite their 95-year-age difference, the two are “sparring partners” (country for best mates). I hope they will have very different lives.
Jim lived through the Great Depression in New Zealand. He vividly remembers kids from school, barefoot in frost, eating crusts from a bin. He remembers his father, a soldier, being sent to Wellington as food rioters smashed shop fronts. He remembers his mother inviting in hungry children and feeding them from her own table.
He remembers top government bureaucrats going to work dressed in suit and tie to cover the humiliation of how they were now shovelling dirt.
There are few 96-year-olds with recollections as sharp as Jim’s. We should listen to them. If we don’t change how we do business now, Tom’s generation may grow old to bitterly recall similar memories.
The economic shock of COVID-19 has not put us in depression yet. But things aren’t getting better, and nobody is talking about the dramatic action we need.
The only way we can recover from lockdowns, draconian curfews and strangling hospitality, manufacturing and retail is by slashing red tape to encourage entrepreneurs to make — and then spend — their own money.
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The Institute of Public Affairs estimates the burden of government regulation at $176 billion every year.
With Victoria’s lockdown alone costing us $100 million a day, we can no longer afford naive belief in the benevolence of red tape.
Emblematic of over-regulation is the move to ban vaping. The only way you can inhale nicotine legally is the way it’s certain to kill you — and it’s available at every Caltex and Coles.
Smoking kills far more people than coronavirus but people who want to quit can only quit the way bureaucrats want them to.
Former Senator David Leyonhjelm’s excellent Red Tape Committee found monumental barriers to big projects, such as the EPBC Act, where green groups don’t have to prove skin in the game to go to court and get a project held up.
Tony Abbott dedicated two sitting days a year to repealing red tape – what happened to that?
The attitude of people who lived through the Great Depression is one of resilience and entrepreneurship. The economy we have created is mired in a bog of bureaucracy.
There are 32 major mining projects in NSW stuck in the planning pipeline, stalling millions in royalties and 15,000 jobs. Even the CFMEU and AWU want us to get moving.
With no tourists, no immigrants, limited access to markets and no international students, our only destination is a gargantuan debt that my baby son will pay off.
It’s not just miners and farmers who will save us, it’s the entrepreneurial video game developers.
Export-focused game developers bring home bigger tax receipts than any other creatives, but they are excluded from funding and tax offsets that we offer to similar sectors like movies, video effects and tech – some of them 100 per cent foreign-owned.
Virtual reality is one of the fastest growing industries in the world; even nursing homes like Hammondcare use VR to help relieve chronic pain in dementia sufferers. We need more Australian Atlassians to take the place of US Googles; more Australian jobs paying Australian tax.
Josh Frydenberg says he loves the example of Margaret Thatcher — but she knew the best way to reduce regulation is to reduce the size of government.
If we don’t change the culture now, by the time the election comes we will be eating a bad-smelling sandwich that the Coalition and Labor states buttered for the electorate.
If their best predictions are right, Tom will be a middle-aged man by the time we have paid off the debt.
Don’t worry about resilience, they’ll have to have that — but you must untie their hands if they’re to inherit the spirit of entrepreneurialism created by Jim’s generation.